Thank you for extending an invitation to us in GAPP to be part of the (COP)-pupation on the theme of climate migrants.

We had hoped to be there in person to deliver this solidarity message but are not able to make the allocated time so thought we would do the next best thing, which is to pen this message.

It is our GAPP perspective that all these resource wars are displacing people and dispossessing us and our communities in Afrika and other parts of the Global South of our resources causing impoverishment which is exacerbating the migration crisis from these lands. We as Afrikans and other indigenous peoples of Global South are affected the worst by these resource wars and conflicts.

We in GAPP, and the constituencies we advocate with, sees this as genocide against us as people/s and ecocide against Mother Earth. We have as one of our main aims

“To connect Afrikan heritage communities to key campaigns that underpin our right to Afrikan self-determination. Reparations is a priority campaign, including a specific ‘We Charge Genocide/Ecocide’ campaign and petition.” https://globalafrikanpeoplesparliament.org/about/

Maangamizi is a Kiswahili term first popularised by Dr Maulana Karenga which he defined as being the Holocaust of Enslavement.

The Stop the Maangamzi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide Petition can be found here:https://www.change.org/p/stop-the-maangamizi-we-charge-genocide-ecocide

It then becomes clear that what we have to focus our attention to is stopping the Maangamizi. How? By us, first and foremost, supporting the freedom-fighting of those in resistance in many of the places from which migrants are coming in the first place.

We must also expose the migrant industrial complexes whereby NGO’s and aid agencies and even dubious pro-migrant organisations are refusing to highlight the priority need to stop the roots causes of the migrant problem which is the various crimes of the Maangamizi being committed by European powers of the Global North to destabilise countries and peoples of the Global South; rob them of their resources through resource wars by proxy and impoverish the people, thereby making life unbearable for them in their homelands.

Refusing to tackle these roots causes of the migration crisis and simply pretending to be welcoming more migrants into a Europe of increasing austerity is not a sustainable solution for the long-term. Whilst in the short-term we should address the needs of migrants who are already in Europe, we must not delude them into thinking that without continuing from Europe to participate in the resistance of their communities at home and abroad they will find the Greener pastures of capitalism that many of them are deluded into seeking. Only for some of them to be recruited to serve as neo-colonial agents of Euro-American imperialism to aid and abet and participate in the crimes of the Maangamizi that have driven them to Europe in the first place.

We urge you as students to spread the message that everything particularly in the interests of the peoples of Our Global South, and ultimately of all Humanity and Mother Earth connects into the number one priority task of stopping the Maangamizi and becoming the reparatory justice change. That is why we would like the Afrikan students amongst you to actively participate in or GAPP RJ work of Stopping the Maangamizi by starting to effect RJ for ourselves in various endeavours including educational repairs and building our AHC-NSD. We urge our genuine allies from all other communities within and beyond educational intuitions to actively support these efforts in various ways and means of true Ubuntu people to peoples’ internationalist solidarity.

We sincerely hope this occupation/protest is not a three day wonder but connects to Reparatory Justice campaigning efforts within and beyond the Afrikan Heritage Community. Accordingly, we encourage you to engage with and support our Afrikan Heritage Community’s Reparatory Justice struggles for a just world and by taking this ‘Occupation’ further.

We recognise your strategic role as students within these Institutions which see themselves as practicing virtue through the production of knowledge/s. It therefore follows that these institutions, as centres of knowledge production should be leading the way in ensuring that academic justification and or lending intellectual support  to aiding and abetting the Maangamizi through the development of knowledge and practices that are used to justify and genocide/ecocide. So much is already known about UCL’s role in developing knowledge on the genocidal pseudo-science of Eugenics.

It is our earnest view that well-intentioned and conscientious students should continue and do much more to expose institutions such as UCL in the production of racialized knowledge/s and epistemologies of ignorance by building up support from within to pressurise them to do the right thing.

We are keenly interested in hearing more from you as a campaign (Fossil Free UC) about what your programme from today onwards. We are interested to hear from you: to what extent are you  are organising beyond campuses and thinking about unity of action with Afrikan Heritage Community and other community based struggles of peoples from the Global South for societal transformation?

In order for your commendable efforts to be sustainable and have the most impact, a lot will depend on how prepared and successful you are as student-activists to liaise with your communities and those communities most affected by the issues that you are campaigning about and support them in emancipatory community developmental organising and building. There is empirical evidence to support the view and lived experiences of such student-activists that students, disconnected from the wider communities they are part of and seek to advocate for, will not achieve much.

For us in GAPP, one way forward that we are actively engaged in is the very building of an Afrikan Heritage Community for National Self-Determination. (AHC-NSD), and other self-repairing community building efforts, is what will make the difference.

As student-activists you have to live and be the change that you seek, the change starts with being within community and developing the alternative society, which is what GAPP is about in terms of building an alternative AHC-NSD.

The AHC-NSD is the Community Self-Repairs effectuating work-in-progress for the holistic regeneration of Afrikan communities; mindful of the fact that such Afrikan communities at present exist in the United Kingdom as a multiplicity of different and sometimes even conflicting nation-state, ethnic, racial, class, gender, age and other socio-cultural configurations brought from all over the World; therefore, this AHC-NSD regeneration of Afrikan communities is being done in such a radical Changemaking way and manner of Intersectionality so as to enable the Pan-Afrikan Reparatory Justice development, out of their multifariousness, of a one distinct new type of Afrikan Communion of people to serve as a living prototype of the component bodies of the future MAATUBUNTUMAN Pan-Afrikan Union of communities throughout the continent and diaspora of Afrika: a Black self-empowering constellation of Black Star-Communities which shall be manifesting, in full sovereignty, the true People’s Power of totally liberated, unified and self-determining Afrika in her complete emancipatory magnificence, Maatubuntu dignity and superpowerful upstanding for Global Justice throughout the World.

The AHC-NSD is one of the major subject-matters of Experiential Knowledge production and Popular Education on the Action Learning agendas of the GAPP-UK, Pan-Afrikan Community Educational Services (PACES) and the Afrikan Reparations Transnational Community of Practice.

 We close by asking you to join us in resounding louder for all to hear the wise and visionary words of Frantz Fanon from the conclusion to the ‘Wretched of the Earth’:

“So, comrades, let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions and societies which draw their inspiration from her.

Humanity is waiting for something other from us than such an imitation, which would be almost an obscene caricature.

If we want to turn Africa into a new Europe, and America into a new Europe, then let us leave the destiny of our countries to Europeans. They will know how to do it better than the most gifted among us.

But if we want humanity to advance a step farther, if we want to bring it up to a different level than that which Europe has shown it, then we must invent and we must make discoveries.

If we wish to live up to our peoples’ expectations, we must seek the response elsewhere than in Europe.

Moreover, if we wish to reply to the expectations of the people of Europe, it is no good sending them back a reflection, even an ideal reflection, of their society and their thought with which from time to time they feel immeasurably sickened.

For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man [person].”

In Service, Solidarity & Struggle

Esther Stanford-Xosei & Kofi Mawuli Klu on Behalf of the GAPP Leadership Facilitation Team

10/12/15