Soweto, 31 years after the children rebelled.

Don’t You Call Me Brother was the title of a searing O’Jays vinyl cut from the 1970s.

It was “The Joint,” if you know what I mean.

The tune reminds me of some folks I don’t want any association with, Africans on the Continent who have learned how to be big pawns of capitalism.

In today’s world of internet podcasts, I can hear the the crooning trio famously produced by Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff in early ’70s Philadelphia on the US East Coast. Travelling back in time in my mind, I recall the social meltdown–and related soul music offerings the O’Jays splendidly–and sadly portrayed.

For sure, the insistent, sometimes roaring fireplace love tracks were indelibly printed on my youthful heart. But in these difficult days for global Africa, it is the warning songs the singers voiced which give me the shivers.

Backstabbers.

For The Love of Money.

Give The People What They Want.

Because I grew up in the strange decade of the 1970s racial backlash in America I got to experience firsthand capital lethally lavished upon Africans who had made freedom moves. Denied just ten years earlier the ability to drink from fountains Whites drank from, we could now go to universities with them. “Hogs” were available, Cadillacs, that is, to ever more of our parents and adults we knew could actually get one. A ‘deuce and a quarter’, a Buick Electra 225, a cruise ship on rubber tires, was the choice of those who couldn’t afford the Caddy. Miracle of miracles, loans for Black folks for cars, homes and opening small business was becoming the new flow. What was that flash? Black folks could get credit cards by ’74.

Lawyers, professionals of all kinds of brown skin tones were getting prominent airplay in corporate media, which a few dozen months ago had only seen us as tap dancers. Louis Armstrong’s grin was replaced by John Shaft’s scowl. Women besides the thinnest and and the ivory toned appeared in movies thrilling we who loved representation of all African women. Thousands and thousands of Black elected officials promised to Washington DC to do it’s bidding. Nina Simone’s afro hairstyle, an enigma in 1967 was by 1970 on almost every Sister’s head.

Across the waters and exploding into our livingroom televisions (people who didn’t have a tv in ’65 had color tv in ’75) was Soweto.

It caused a few of us to reflect on the children and youth of our own group going to prisons in Alabama and Mississippi in the ’60s, rejecting the economic and social degradation of American oppression. Burnt out commercial zones in 200 cities after Martin Luther King’s 4 April 1968 assassination showed American government and corporate bosses that a money waterfall was in order. Troublemaker? Can’t sit in a classroom, hold a job? The Asian opium Viet Nam was partly fought for made street sales associates out of the Sister or Brother in Cleveland’s Hough area or the Bronx. One future day, crack cocaine, a laboratory manufactured ‘fast food drug’ sold coast to coast in African areas-with guns dropped in–revolutionized the genocide.

And this load that ‘doped’ the masses faster than a million preachers stifled any growth of a Black Movement that remained after the FBI slaughter. Betrayal and selling out to terror plagued whole cities and states. Prison or exile was where determined resisters ended up. Celebrating those who got rich materially at the expense of any humanity towards one another replaced the historical unity code in the face of American racism and domination.

In the 21st century, the politicians and salesmen and saleswomen for big business have made big business out of African peoples’ destruction in America–and in Africa’s 53 nations.

Thabo Mbeki and the ANC, African National Congress, a onetime leftist in exile in England has enforced a political bait and switch on the people. 48 million mainly Africans who believed in the party of Nelson Mandela have little fresh clean water to bathe in and drink. The plan had been to liberate the Continent, hadn’t it?

Treatment for HIV AIDS is nowhere near as universal as is the profit margins in business boardrooms: diamonds and platinum continue to be processed for the European and American elite. Their ring fingers, airplane parts, auto bodies and drill bits for more oil are more important than human lives. At least this is what the ruling ANC, in power from the moment The Elder walked out of Robben Island, has proven. Now, the well guarded homes of the people ‘making it’ protect Africans with their BMW, De Beers jewels and other brand items from others outside, also Africans.

Corporate media dictate that South Africa is a leading nation.

Like an old trick; laying the good fruit on top of a whole basket full of rotten ones, South Africa has an illusion of great progress.

It does to the fat and happy in South Africa. Or those in The South of France, Park Avenue, NYC or The Strand, London or Ipanema, Brazil. And add almost every other African country’s upper class to that cash addicted crew of that few hundred thousand people. As in the USA, the thin strata get the cream.

But when I see that ordinary people can’t get a break–and are blamed the way the people are in post-rebellion America are for their plight–I’m angered. Co-opted so called leadership does more hollering than active countering the system in the USA and anywhere else. Getting heavy rear ends off of the money and sharing the wealth means crossing capitalist red lines but it better be done soon or there will be absolute African obliteration. Opposition to the West and it’s ways and African corruption and it’s forces is not a walk in the park.

Still, it is the one clear route to actual liberation.

Until that is done, blood or not, Don’t You Call Me Brother.

5 December 2007

From Exile,
Bankole
www.geocities.com/exiledone2002