Hizbawinet is global mindset
By
Aesop
02-17-20
There is one thing that’s important to underline at this stage: Tigrai is Ethiopian! Tigreans are Ethiopians! The current stability and progress in Tigrai are well and good! But it is not enough. Tigreans are part of Ethiopia too. I know some are trying to push us out of our beloved country (Ethiopia) for short term gains. But nobody has the right to do that! Tigrai must contribute to the stability and advancement of Ethiopia.
The idea and practice of stability and development in Tigrai must spread to Ethiopia and to Africa!! Only then will we be able to balance the continental marginalization and global bias that we see today! The challenge is beyond ‘ Biltsigina’ party. All mankind suffering injustice should be our brethren. It doesn’t matter who they are: they could be victims of mass incarceration in America, Rohingya minorities, Sikhs of India, albinos of Tanzania, Anglophone Cameroonians, enslaved black people of Mauritania, Uyghurs of China, Chechens of Russia, drug cartel targets in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, or Island dwellers facing climate change drowning. Tigrai must stand in solidarity with every downtrodden Homo Sapien !
If the powerful don’t care, somebody must, right? Tigreans have died of starvation for lack of aid. They have been bombed, arbitrarily killed, tortured, jailed, and embarassed. They know what it is like to be overlooked as a human being. Tigreans know what it feels like to be discounted as a person. So, they must, above anyone, know what its like to be forgotten. That is why Tigrai must care about the desperate people in Ethiopia and do whatever it can to help them! The abducted (hopefully, still alive) university students are not Tigreans. But they are our sisters! So, we must care about them. Our brethren in Oromia getting bombed may not speak our language. But we should stand for them. Our brothers in Gedeo, in Amhara, in all zones of our beloved Ethiopia may not have said something when we got persecuted. Yet, in light of the long game, in light of the African struggle, they’re still our brothers in Arms. We should stand in solidarity with them. This is not to embarrass our sick brothers wielding power in Addis today. It is for the long game facing our people worldwide. This world needs to be fixed and we should stay united.
This brings me to the early 20 th Century! This was a period where the world was divided across racial line. It was a period where Darwinism was debauched to social Darwinism. People really thought the color of the skin explained cognitive ability and one’s place in the hierarchy of the animal kingdom. If one is born black, brown, or yellow- one was hopeless. The best the colored person could do was retain his supremacy over the Orangutan, the chimpanzee and the monkey.
Respected scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists thought the length and width of one’s skull, nose, lips, etc. predicted if you were a human or a subhuman (i.e., a slave fitted for work or entertainment). This was an era that forged Mussolini that even Ethiopia could never defeat. Fortunately, this was also the Century that forged W.E.B. Du Bois to become the first black person to graduate from Harvard. Du Bois predicted the 20 th Century would be the clash of colors (not civilizations). So, he abandoned all the privileges his extraordinary intellect would have guaranteed and stood for the oppressed. Du Bois wrote a seminal book about African Americans called ‘The Souls of Black Folks!’ But most people don’t know he wrote a seminal book on African history.
But it was not just Du Bois who thought beyond his immediate folks. Just about every black person who stood against oppression wrote about the people. All of them thought beyond the so called nations colonialist fabricated (drew on maps). Chiekh Anta Diop was from Senegal. He had nothing to do with post-10 th Century Egypt (When Arabs and, later on, Ottomans and English occupied it). Yet, he invested all of his intellectual energy excavating the African origin on Pharaohs in his book: The African Origin of Civilization. That book explains the African foundation of the so called ‘Greek’ civilization inherited by the Romans, by the British, and today. There are great Yoruba Pan Africanists in the West who wrote about African civilizations. Nkrumah’s Neocolonialism: the last stage of imperialism! is a classic that rival’s (if not exceeds Lenin’s Imperialism ).
Forget Africa (of course, after reading Fanon’s Wretched of the earth!) and let’s travel across the Atlantic. Nobody ever wrote a treatise about Africa as our Caribbean brother: Walter Rodney. Rodney is the embodiment of why it’s the people, not the land that matters. Nobody, to date, has ever explained why and how our people (black people) declined as he did. This guy was in his 30s when he got killed in a car bomb. He could have contributed so much. But still his ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa!’ is a must for all truth seeking people to read. Then we cross over to mainland America (Du Bois’ land) to encounter worldwide thinkers and fighters like Clarke, Malacolm X, M.L.King. Anybody ever read Stride Towards Freedom? I read it in Mekelle by the way! Do we know Malcolm X’s autobiography is one of the best books of all time? Exploring the intellectual contributions of our brothers and sisters (like Dambisa Mayo) to our people, we think globally. After we witness how our sister queens like Nzingha, Muhmuza, and Harriet Tubman (not need to mention Saba, Mintwab, Taitu, etc.)- we think clearly: that all women earned, hence, deserve respect.
