On April 14, World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus chided the world for treating crises differently based on race. “I need to be upfront and honest that the world is not treating the human race in the same way,” he said. “Some are more equal than others. And when I say this, it hurts.”
Tedros’ heartfelt plea embodied deep concern about inadequate responses to health and social crises beyond Russia’s brutal and illegal invasion of Ukraine. The UN, for example, is scrambling to bring aid to Ethiopia’s conflict-stricken Tigray region, a crisis the WHO chief previously described as “forgotten” that is simply “out of sight and out of mind.” “.
That said, Tedros should not have claimed that the “world” is perpetrating systemic racism and ignoring the “ongoing emergencies in Ethiopia, Yemen, Afghanistan and Syria.” It is the West that is, in fact, so indifferent to the many urgent crises involving Blacks and Latinos.
Tedros had a front row seat at the unapologetic spectacle of the West’s medical colonialism during the COVID-19 pandemic. The United States, for example, purchased enough vaccines for three times its adult population of 250 million at a time when 130 countries had not administered a single dose. To be precise, the West collectively treated millions of desperate and high-risk people, including Africans, as undeserving and seemingly expendable second-rate citizens of the world. Furthermore, Tedros is a former Ethiopian Foreign Minister and should understand the utter futility of simply appealing to Western moral sentiments.
In fact, Western leaders rarely make and implement decisions that affect Africa or the African Diaspora for humanitarian reasons alone. Many decisions, such as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s controversial plan to “prosecute” possibly “tens of thousands” of asylum seekers, more than 6,000 km (4,000 miles) away in Rwanda, are immoral and clearly lacking in compassion. and common sense. They are designed to pander to racist biases and please voters at all costs.
This explains why the head of the WHO, no less, has to beg “world leaders” to show strong and inclusive leadership as Tigray suffers a catastrophic disaster. As this “third world” crisis is pushed aside and millions suffer unfathomable, endless hardship, only an organized and comprehensive pan-African response can help combat endemic racism and whiteness.
The demise of Pan-Africanism is lamentable
Global anti-colonialist and anti-apartheid movements of the past fought hard to get Western leaders to act against colonialism and apartheid in Africa. They did it in a hostile climate. The United States, for example, had deep economic ties to apartheid South Africa.
However, the lobby groups, mostly British and American, persevered because they demonstrated a strong commitment to promoting progressive ideals and pan-Africanism. In the United States, for example, the Council on African Affairs, the American Committee on Africa, and TransAfrica were established to promote the independence of African and Caribbean countries and all groups of the African diaspora.
Today, however, Pan-Africanism is stagnant. In June 2020, the death of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer triggered a revival of classic pan-Africanist actions around the world. Demonstrations against the police killing of Floyd have been held in Ghana, Kenya, Brazil, France, Jamaica and South Africa, amid claims that “a black man is hated everywhere.” Crucially, the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States inspired protest groups, like #EndSARS in Nigeria and #ZimbabweanLivesMatter, across Africa.
However, global solidarity did not last and did not lead to the establishment of permanent support mechanisms or organizations similar to the traditional pan-African movements of yesteryear.
In the 1950s and 1960s, for example, American civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had cultivated a constructive relationship with Ghana’s founding president, Kwame Nkrumah.
In March 1957, King and his wife Coretta Scott King traveled to West Africa to attend Ghana’s independence ceremony. Returning home, King lamented the devastating effect of slavery and the 1884 Berlin Conference that established European colonies in Africa. He described Africa as the continent that had “suffered all the pain and sorrow that other nations could muster.”
King was inspired by Nkrumah’s arduous journey towards emancipation and drew parallels between the resistance against European colonialism in Africa and the fight against racism in the United States. And he hoped to expand the civil rights movement from the United States to Africa. And so did Malcolm X, the widely lauded African-American Muslim minister and human rights activist. During the 1960s, Malcolm visited various African countries to meet with African leaders and give speeches.
Today, however, African-Americans do not exhibit the pan-African spirit that Malcolm and King espoused. An explosive 2021 report from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights detailed systemic violations of international human rights law against Africans and people of African descent. However, African Americans supposedly believe that “Africans” around the world do not share common struggles.
According to Alden Young, assistant professor of African American studies at UCLA, contemporary Afro-pessimist intellectuals do not see a shared identity that can serve as a basis for solidarity between Africans and African Americans. This, he argues, is because “Afro-pessimists insist on the particularity of slavery in the Americas and reject the equating of permanent minority struggles with anti-colonial nationalism in Africa and Asia.”
the fight is not over
The Biden administration (and others) may deliberately “ignore” the crises in Africa, in part because African-American lobbies are largely silent and insensitive to our fights against white supremacy. Unfortunately, they are not empathetic enough to the challenges in Africa and stick too closely to the official line.
“US foreign policy pundits relegate African issues to a position of secondary importance, only significant relative to US-China competition or the specter of terrorism,” Young says. Similarly, US domestic politics has long relegated African-American issues to a position of minor importance, only significant when it comes to municipal, legislative or presidential elections.
The same dubious modus operandi that protects white privilege in the United States is being implemented abroad. However, Africans have not forgotten the African-American fight for equality and social justice. In September 2021, President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa suggested that the UN should discuss reparations for the African diaspora.
He said: “Millions of the descendants of Africans who were sold into slavery remain trapped in lives of underdevelopment, disadvantage, discrimination and poverty. South Africa calls on the United Nations to include the issue of reparations for victims of the slave trade on its agenda.”
And mindful that a prolonged and deeply regrettable prevalence of whiteness is fostering overtly exclusionary practices, as Tedros so thoroughly lamented, Ramaphosa added: “Let us allow humanism to be our guide and solidarity to be our most powerful force.”
King would definitely condemn unbalanced global responses to human crises and lobby for change, because he believed in equality for all, regardless of race. And he would not exclude Africans from the African-American agenda. It is clear that the fight is not over and the star of Africa is rising.
In the future, Africa can contribute a lot to the African-American agenda and vice versa. It is time for African Americans to rekindle their passion for Africa and direct it toward building a just and inclusive world. African Americans must work to ensure that America’s foreign policy truly demonstrates that Black and Latino lives matter, too.
