Behold the sacred kings of nonviolence: Let’s from our ancestors’ mistakes. Dr. King is still my hero. Martin Luther King Jr.’s misguided rhetoric to the African American community and America in general as described by Mumia Abu-Jamal ‘Dr. King’s message of Christian forbearance and turn-the-other cheek doctrine was calming to the white psyche. To Americans bred for comfort, Dr. King was, above all, safe.’
But we’re told that he and his team, Southern Council Leadership Conference, fought for civil rights and won singlehandedly. The civil rights movement was not a victory at all, save the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He was wrong on many things—nonviolence, in particular.
When Dr. King failed to desegregated Georgia, it demonstrated the powerlessness of nonviolence. It is impossible to stop an enemy bent on your destruction using nonviolent tactics.
As long as Dr. King and other integration seekers were gatekeepers and ‘spoke truth to power.’ They enjoyed ‘star’ treatment. Malcolm X lamented the fact that Martin Luther King was working for the establishment, when he said ‘White America chooses to listen to the Negro civil rights leaders, the Big Six. Six puppets who have been trained by the whites in white institutions and then placed over our people by these same whites as "spokesmen" for our people. These handpicked "spokesmen" do nothing but parrot for the whites exactly what they know the whites want to hear.’
He later continues ‘modern Negro magicians are hired by the American government to oppose The Honorable Elijah Muhammad today. They pose as Negro "leaders." They have been hired by this white government (white so-called liberals) to make our people her think that integration into this doomed white society will soon solve our problem... .’
Martin Luther King Jr. preached nonviolence because it was ineffective and the ‘Negro revolt’, artificial token-integrated flames launched by SCLC didn’t threaten the power relationship between black and white people.
That’s why Nelson Mandela also preached reconciliation without justice. After all the mass murders, land theft and enslavement Africans went through, Mandela was just concerned with the white minority. In 1994, he officiated the wedding between the oppressors (Europeans ) oppressed (Africans) and viola! He called it the ‘Rainbow Nation.’
Simply put, nonviolence is not only monstrously unjust, but a dangerous philosophy to teach an oppressed people. Be it the Africans who land-less (African lands are kept in the hands colonial descendants) or the people in Middle East who are battling European/American imperialism.
What makes nonviolence seem to be ‘virtuous’ or ‘noble’, it presumes that the source of the violence is in the victims themselves. Peter Gelderloss writes: ‘The Holocaust is one of the few phenomena where victim blaming is seen as support or sympathy for the oppressor, so the occasional oppositional uprisings cannot be used to justify the repression and genocide, as it happens elsewhere when pacifists blame the authoritarian violence on the audacity of the oppressed to take direct militant direct action against that authority.’
Non-violence just makes it an easy task for our enemies to kill us. In South Africa in 1969, a peaceful crowd of Africans who were protesting against the vicious and inhumane ‘Dompas’ system ever imposed on Africans. They were met with police dogs and soulless, cold-hearted police thugs who were armed to teeth; as the result, the death toll rose to
69 and the number of injuries to 180. The attack on Africans infamously became known as the Sharpeville Massacre.
In the Soweto uprisings, an estimated 170 peaceful protesters were gunned down for simply refusing to use the reformed Dutch-Boer colonial language, Afrikaans. The examples are numerous. Everywhere one goes in this dog-eat-dog world, it’s rare to find political victories made from nonviolent resistance.
Africans (and other oppressed people) don’t have to justify their pain and misery to colonial terrorists/police thugs. Instead of running around and appealing to the morality of people who clearly don’t care, Africans should liberate themselves—economically, socially, culturally and politically. To ensure the survival of the next generations of unborn Africans. It’s worth quoting Frantz Fanon ‘For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.’
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