Alienating Africans from Their Lands Is to Condemn Them to Death

Beginning of article

Akyaaba Addai-Sebo reacts to our June cover story on the thorny issue of land redistribution in Southern Africa. "We must listen to and support the rallying call for 'African lands in African hands' in South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe and elsewhere," he writes. "Alienating Africans from their lands is to condemn them to death through calculated disempowerment."

In the early 1980s, in my reflections with C.L.R. James, one of the first generation pan-African giants from the Caribbean, on solutions to Africa's problems in relation to the imperatives of total liberation and unification, I could not help getting heated over conditions of blacks in Northern Africa, particularly over Arab racism and continued enslavement of blacks.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

C.L.R. James would caution me to focus on the matter at hand--the destruction and prevention of the development of the apartheid order in Southern Africa. James argued that it was the defeat of the apartheid regime and the accelerated consolidation of pan-African "thought and action" that would generate a period of self-examination in Northern Africa. He believed that …