25/05/2023
“The Gods are not to Blame.”
Speech delivered at the Launching of the Liberian Vanguard
By: H. Boima Fahnbulleh, Jr.
Friday, May 19, 2023 via Zoom.
Brothers and sisters,
Comrades and friends:
It is always good to interact with young cadres and patriots from Liberia. This is one aspect of existence I have missed because of my health challenges. However, the few times that I have encountered such courageous and enlightened cadres away from home have been satisfying and very encouraging. It is obvious that you brothers and sisters have done well and because you are fighting a just cause, victory will be yours tomorrow!
Today, we can see the outline of your victory after going through the baptism of fire from those who still cannot understand why you are not for sale and cannot be bought! They do not understand that you have disciplined yourselves and fashioned your lifestyles in such a way that adjustment with little is acceptable to the patriot who believes in noble ideals in the interest of the people and the Republic. In a nation of mounting hardship, it is easy to compromise when you have no principle or conviction! Many have taken this shortcut and want us to believe that they are confrontational in silence over the interests of the broad masses of our people. We know that it is difficult and at times foolhardy to resist all temptations to compromise and abandon principles in the face of horrible suffering and hardship but this is the challenge that confronts the patriot in the forging of that character which is absolutely necessary for the transformation of society and man. The building of a strong character in order to transform society for the betterment of the masses of the people is where we start on the journey of enlightenment, consciousness building and progress.
As a young man in undergraduate college at Fourah Bay College, the University of Sierra Leone, I watched a play put out by the Department of Languages and Comparative Literature entitled: “The Gods are not to Blame,” by the brilliant Nigerian playwright Ola Rotimi. The play is an African adaptation of the Greek classic “Oedipus Rex” and deals with the complex struggle of man against fate. I was fascinated not so much by the marvelous acting skills of students of that Department but by the theme of the play which sets man against his raw desires and how that struggle shapes and forms the character of the one who triumphs as well as the one who fails! It says in essence that those who triumph in the struggle for noble deeds are not the weaklings who desire instant rewards but those who accept that fate cannot lead them to the abandonment of noble causes and thus destruction—for in this paralysis are sown the seeds of greed, haughtiness and ambition which stomp on the battered bodies of suffering humanity.
This play has stuck in my consciousness since my youthful dalliance with ideas, creeds and principles. What does it take to be true to oneself and to aim for noble ideals? What is the price that one must pay in order not to sell his/her conscience and the loyalty of those who strive beside you and with you for the victory which will belong to all because it was fought for by all? In the maelstrom of life’s struggle, we make choices that define our character and highlight our commitment to what we believe. Thus, in finding our niche, we must confront the reality of Africa and her people and build for ourselves the framework that defines our encounter with human history. The writer, Scott Kennedy, in his musing on the African situation posits the stark choices facing the African man. He writes poetically: “Africa is a woman…She is truly Mother Africa. Mother of us all. Yet to some people, she appears as a phantom in the night. As a spirit haunting their existence. As conscience forever standing over you. But to others, she is their w***e.” Those who see Africa “as their w***e” take pleasure in ravishing her, squandering her resources and brutalizing her people through neglect, dehumanizing poverty and callous elimination of her most brilliant sons and daughters. As you all are aware, a w***e is a cheap commodity, an object of fun, of fleeting pleasure for the one who buys cheap and unrequited love! The question is then posed: how did we get here? What are the historical circumstances that have led us down the dark ally of brazen theft, reckless murders and unmitigated follies that have turned most of our countries into perennial circuses with commercial traders masquerading as national leaders and validating the whorish characterization of Mother Africa!
It is the human conscience that separates us into mere mortals attracted by the bright lights of today from the heroic souls of destiny who are bound to build decent and progressive societies because they understand the challenges of society, having tasked themselves to reflect on the life of man as he struggles against nature and the vices of a dying society. These ones are the “philosopher-kings, who having experienced the thralldom of the people and observing the frivolities of reckless ruling elites, take a stand to alter the trajectory of a dull and brutish existence and push the people to the forefront of a history which is dynamic, elevating and progressive because it is made by the people for themselves and their children!
In the midst of the catastrophe confronting contemporary Africa, how do we build that consciousness which is dedicated to national service and not to the mindless looting of the commonwealth? How do we transcend the misguided notion that the Gods are responsible for our destiny and therefore we must genuflect before rascals and quacks who have turned politics and religion into the o***m of lazy and unenlightened minds? Why is it necessary to understand that other people have built modern and progressive societies by hard work, sweat, blood and strength while the African people are escaping the wreckages made of their countries and making the perilous journeys across the oceans of the world in search of menial jobs to sustain themselves? The horrifying spectacles of human beings from the Global South drowning in the waters around Europe with their children are testimonies to a colossal failure of vision, leadership, historical awareness and serious engagement with destiny! It is against this background that we have borrowed Ola Rotimi’s assertion that “the Gods are not to Blame” for our failure, shortsightedness and reckless destruction of our countries and the progress of our children!
We have allowed ourselves to be entrapped by quacks, religious con artists, sorcerers, political shysters and the dregs of society who want to acquire wealth without working and studying! We are sailing on a polluted river infested with duplicity, outright lies, trickery, hollow releases scripted by charlatans and sycophants! We are watching unserious high school and college dropouts scrambling for wealth and power by means of drug trafficking, outright plunder akin to armed robbery and the backward belief in ritual and mystification! From East to West Africa, traffickers in human organs masquerade as “men of God” and philanthropists, luring the gullible masses into destruction and hopelessness. In the absence of enlightenment and with mounting hardship, the masses will look for palliatives through drugs, alcohol and the spiritual mumbo-jumbo that we see pervasive throughout Africa! This is where the challenge lies and must be broken by the youth and cadres if they are to change the direction of their continent for progressive growth and development.
The coming into being of dehumanizing trends that have stifled progressive development was not the consequence of leadership deficit at the dawn of independence. There were men of vision and courage at the start of the journey of nationhood. Afterwards, the African continent witnessed a rapid stasis from the end of the era of the founding fathers to the emergence of a new breed of political office holders who were more interested in state capture for the purpose of personal aggrandizement. The founding fathers of the new states in Africa had emerged out of the Second World War with an understanding of the concept of the nation state and how these states could be wielded into national unions against the background of multiple ethnic social formations. These were powerful tribal entities in most cases and the task was to find harmony for collective development. A new surge of nationalism blossomed, focusing on a popular national destiny instead of the promotion of tribal loyalties and irredentism. This nationalism settled on the unity of the polity and the combination of the various ethnicities into a combined force for the frontal assault on poverty and backwardness. From West Africa we had Positive Action and the erosion of retrograde tribalism that could undermine the unity of the new states. In East Africa, there arose the concept of Ujamaa as the basis of political and economic emancipation. In North Africa, the struggle was anti-feudal and took on the coloration of a vibrant nationalism fused with Arab culture and modernity. In Southern Africa, it was progressive Black nationalism coupled with a radical brand of national cohesion because of the peculiar nature of racist colonialism. This was where Africa stood at the formation of the Organization of African Unity in 1963!
In the international system, there were forces at work that regarded these emerging African states not as independent units searching for their own peculiar paths to national unity and progressive development but as mere appendages, tied to one of the great powers in the cold war geopolitical struggle for domination and influence. Against this background, visionary and enlightened African leaders were overthrown, assassinated and their countries ravished by political hoodlums installed to do the bidding of their masters and overlords! In some cases, the African people watched, shell-shocked and disappointed. In other areas, the masses were corralled into dancing brigades, floating on the tides brought in by the overseers and their domestic managers! In countries where progressive nationalists were overthrown or assassinated, historic statues and monuments were effortlessly destroyed, thereby obliterating symbols of the struggle of resistance waged by the heroic people. This was the trashing of Africa’s history, meant to eviscerate the authentic history of the African people. Where there were legendary heroes of resistance, the overseers and their local managers sought to substitute nonentities as freedom fighters; where there were people-centered resistance, the substitution was brought in of strong men who could keep order not with the people but against them. Here was the tragic denouement of state capture which was to manifest itself in varying negative forms later on.
The problem of nation building of the new states came from the struggle for economic emancipation. This was understood fully by the progressive nationalists who had emerged as leaders of their respective countries. This economic emancipation was difficult because of the integration of the new states in the colonial hierarchical order where they played the role of peripheral social formations without the domestic capacity for capital generation and industrialization. They became secured arenas for the importation of manufactured goods and the export of raw materials. Many of these new states before long became rental enclaves with prices for their commodities fixed by overseas markets with their cyclical process of growth, recession and stagflation. In the industrialized countries, the process could be mitigated with interest rates manipulation and credit facilities allowing for regeneration and development on a national scale. In the developing world, the retraction of growth in commodity export was devastating. From a weak base of economic stagnation, poverty augmentation and social dislocation, there emerged a critical political abscess on the body polity.
This abscess carried within its sordid growth the contradictions of a moribund society: a tiny westernized elite with a predominantly rural peasant base; elementary manufacturing without a conscious working class that understood its place in the sphere of commodity production; students learning by rote in a post industrialized age with high levels of technological advancement; the clergy and laity pontificating on a mythical reincarnation after two thousand years of waiting and hoping while the elite doused itself with corruption and debauchery; enlightened and conscious students toying with scientific and philosophical ideas in the midst of large scale superstition and obscurantism; and the ever increasing lumpen proletariat, uprooted too quickly from the rural areas and urbanized rapidly not in decent human habitat that breeds community solidarity but in ghettos and slums where dehumanization and the struggle for survival develop in them criminal proclivities.
It is against this background that we have witnessed the emergence of that phenomenon of gangster-politicians—men and women for whom state capture has become an urgent necessity in order to control, loot and expropriate the commonwealth! They have the mindset of ghetto youths in the Western World who live by the mantra “get rich quick or die trying!” They are the contemptible wreckers of society with their bling culture and vulgar lifestyle! They do not have any ideological sieve through which to filter and comprehend the dynamic geopolitical trajectories of the modern world. In some places, they are known as money bags, godfathers, political racketeers, unscrupulous wheeler-dealers and nation wreckers! In other areas, they are classified as robber barons, bloated nonentities, high on pleasure and trivialities but chronically short on vision and commitment to national ideals. Many of such individuals are good at empty rhetoric and the mouthing of insipid slogans. What they pick up from street corners and bars become their instruments to deceive and hoodwink the gullible masses into believing that messiahs and strong men make history and not the heroic people with their strength and sweat. These political leftovers from dying societies have no blueprint for development and transformation. They are very good at fattening themselves on the scare resources of a neglected people! They dance and party in their drug induced stupor while the masses of the people, willing and ready to work and build, stare in bewilderment and disappointment.
The leadership deficit that follows from this emptiness and saturated idiocy explains the paralysis and immobilization of the people in most African countries. Under these conditions, the people see their efforts as worthless. Some of them become a reflection of the parasites who misgovern their patrimony, living for the moment in stultifying hedonism. The nation becomes a wreckage with this mindset and the sour fruits of national spoliation become visible to all. In this context, one can understand the growth of armed robbery where the brutish existence of parasites in leadership positions signal the lawlessness and national insecurity under which banditry flourishes. This is the stage where the ideologically barren men of arms who should protect and defend the national patrimony become only too aware of the rotten cadaver that is the whorish state and decide to have their share of the corrupt fruits of national decay. This explains the emergence of the soldier con artist who preaches law and order but is only interested in satisfying certain gluttonous appetites. In this context, the only losers are the people, weary and dejected. They then turn their backs on this circus of cynical thieves, both civilians and military. Against this background, the people are wont to hail messiahs and strong men, mortgaging their future to those for whom power is the instrument of plunder and theft.
Some of you are old enough to have experienced this trajectory in our nation’s history. It is painful and you may point fingers, but this is never the solution. It is the enlightenment of the people and their organizing around noble principles that will lay the foundation for meaningful development around people centered interests! The ship of state must first and foremost be taken by the people through their representation on key decision-making bodies. Much of the structures of representation are outmoded and stagnant. The selection of money bags and godfathers has led to the emergence of criminals and con artists in the body politic. These political rascals, being unprepared for leadership are the key promotors of tribalism and regionalism. They lack national focus and any sense of nationalism and thus dovetail into the barren wilderness of setting the people against each other. This is the carriage in which they ride to power, wealth and influence. They are misers at national mobilization but perfectionists at tribal amplification. It is not the nation they desire to build but the tribe they seek to utilize for narrow self-interests!
Our country, being the citadel of Pan-Africanism, with its politics of Black inclusion and economic egalitarianism, has today splintered into ethnic enclaves where the tribe is the battering ram for the promotion of individuals with shady antecedents and questionable patriotism! After almost eighty decades of existence, we are still fumbling with the direction for our nationalism when the intellectual stalwarts of Pan-Africanism and Black dignity in the persons of E.W. Blyden and Edwin James Barclay have spelt it all out for us! We have become like the mythical Sisyphus destined to trawl in hopelessness and boredom. But all is not lost. This launching of the Liberian Vanguard could be the beginning of a new trajectory. Why the necessity for the Liberian vanguard? In the battle for political space, one cannot leave the narratives to those who are diametrically opposed to your national and world views. Th objective must be to train minds, highlight a new vision, and build a nationalism that will embrace the most farsighted, patriotic and committed of our citizens—students, teachers, nurses, doctors, professionals, ordinary working people, small scale business men and women and conscious entrepreneurs and bankers!
The Liberian Vanguard cannot be the conveyor of misinformation and propaganda no matter from which source. It has to practice objective and honest journalism that deals with the interests of the Republic and its people. It must not and should never hide the truth in order to promote mediocrities and national swindlers because of “under the table” largesse that comes from corruption. The Liberian Vanguard must build on the tradition of the patriot, Edward Wilmot Blyden, who as far back as the nineteenth century shoved us in the direction of unity and an Afro-centric perspective. The Liberian Vanguard must follow the clarion call of that fearless nationalist, Edwin James Barclay, who in his battle hymn of the Republic instructed us with the command: “Then forward sons of freedom march, defend the sacred heritage. The nation’s call from age to age, wherever it falls ‘neath Heaven’s arch, wherever foes assail. Be ever ready to obey, ‘gainst treason and rebellious front, ‘gainst foul aggression in the brunt. Of battle lay the hero’s way, All hail Lone Star, All hail!”
You must not tarry but be like the noble Juah Nimley who boldly asserted in the face of adversity: “You did not bring us here to shout at us.” And then there was that passionate nationalist Albert Porte, who, when told to vacate the presidential office on April 14 because it was alleged that his nephew, a student of the University of Liberia and a cadre in SUP had held meetings at his house in Crozierville responded defiantly: “I am angry and will not go as this allegation is false. Furthermore, this office belongs to the people of Liberia!” What nobility of mind! What courageous posture that could have come only from one steeped in the ideals of positive nationalism. And then there was Ambassador Du Fahnbulleh, crucified on the altar of fear and apprehension of a moribund oligarchy, stating audaciously: “I do not yield to threats no matter from which quarters!” Also, remember in your duty that man of uprightness and dignity, S. Raymond Horace, who languished in the dungeon of a frightened tyrant and refused to beg for mercy because he was not guilty! These are the patriots in whose footsteps you are being asked to walk. These are the men who with death flashing before their eyes on different occasions could look the cringing tyrant in the eyes and say: “I will not bow to injustice and terror!!”. These were legendary men, great sons of a proud people, defenders of the most noble heritage of the Republic!
Your responsibility as editors, writers and promoters of the Liberian Vanguard is huge. You brothers and sisters must not waver in the face of bullying and repression. Try by all means to imitate the great and fearless Amos Sawyer and be ready to say when confronted by those who bully and repress the people: “If this is the end, then one of us must be alive to tell our story for the generations of tomorrow. Who will volunteer to leave if they storm our headquarters?” Out of respect and patriotic defiance, nobody moved on that day and then the command came in a voice calm but authoritative: “Bo, you go,” the man commanded. Why me? And then the serious facial expression that we all knew so well radiated passion, concern and honesty at that moment: “Because I say so.” Here was a voice of authority, from a leader of men--a bison for the people to ride! A man so imbued with patriotism that the words of Jose Marti when describing the Bronze Titan, General Antonio Maceo, hero of the Cuban war of independence, suit him aptly: “He loves the country so much that when he speaks, alone with his oath, of its reality, of the fire within it, joy illuminates his eyes, and forms a knot in his throat.”
And then there was Wiwi Debbah, a man child, bold and uncompromising with his defiance: “If I fall it will not be empty handed. I intend to fight until the end!” And then there was Oscar Jayee Quiah, reconciled to whatever fate had in store for him in the dungeon of South Beach Prison: “Is this the end? We only hope and pray that the people will triumph in the end.” No, this is not the end came the reply; this is the end of the beginning. “But they have guns,” Jayee quipped. We have the people, the reply came back. And then there was the first victim of the onslaught on our people on April 14, the only son of his mother at the age of 19, little Robert Zeah, bold and defiant: “I will be in the streets tomorrow because the people will be there!” He fell at noon without having reached manhood. These are few of our Martyrs, taken away early by the historical flood which has drenched our landscape. Eternal glory to all the Martyrs!
As you cadres and patriots launch the Liberian Vanguard, do not be swayed by those unrepentant bigots on both sides of the divide. They are little people with small minds, dancing to the beats of reaction and parochialism. Your cavalcade must include all conscious men and women, as we are aware that nationalists and patriots come from all areas. Progressive brothers and sisters must see the Liberian Vanguard as their instrument in the fight for enlightenment and direction. In this context, they must include all who believe, like that great Latin American patriot that: “The homeland is sacred, and those who love it disinterestedly, tirelessly, owe it the whole truth.”
I salute your efforts and wish you brothers and sisters the best in all your endeavors!
I thank you.
