|
President
Omar al-Beshir
Do
You Know This Man?
Is
He Africa's Saddam Hussein?
By Rudolph Lewis Abu Gereis was a friend of mine. I met him
while attending LSU in Baton Rouge. He was part of a group of
Sudanese Muslims. I was in my forties then, and he in his early
twenties. Abu was studying to be a pharmacist, but more
adventurous, than scholarly; more humorous and fun-loving than
prayerful and droll. He quit Louisiana at the time I returned to
Virginia. We partied in Atlanta and Charlotte.
He drove up from Carolina to southern
Virginia and my family home at Jerusalem. I showed him our piney
woods and small farm fields and our country church (outside and
in), introduced him to my grandmothers and drove my VW bug up to
Baltimore for him to see and get to know the rest of my family
and friends. And a bit of Baltimore downtown.
I lost track of Abu. The last I heard of him
he was in Iowa having fun with white girls.
I still have a photo of him at my house on
State Street. He laughing with his pretty smile, a very
attractive boy. There were discoveries, as well as fun-loving
adventures, in our relationship. Abu and I talked about religion
and color and African identity. We both agreed that there had
been race mixing in northern Sudan and that accounted for the
variations among he and his Sudanese friends -- differences in
texture of hair, flare of nostrils, and complexions.
One of them had a Turkish male ancestor. Abu
was clearly a Negro boy, though not a blue black Nubian,
Ethiopian Sudanese. He could have been my cousin, though he a
Muslim and we Christian culturally. He was a rather secular
Muslim, one who did not do the five prayers, but drank and
smoked. And he did not just do it behind closed doors, hiding
from the pious.
We shared other personal ordeals. He told me
about his medical problems, a problem with his brain; he got
pains in the head and blacked out and he had been to specialists
in Egypt. But since he came to America and having women freely
he had not suffered from his condition. He had come here to
study in that the other recourse was the military and he had no
interest in religious ideology or military conquest. He just
wanted to be and he didn't want to return to Sudan.
That was twenty years ago in the mid-80s, in
the good ole days of the wellness of Ronald Reagan, Yevgeny
Yevtushenko in Satchmo Park and Mikail Gorbachev behind the
Wall. That was in the backwater days of Sudan's Pan-Arab
identity, the early beginnings of the north-south conflict of
Muslims against Christians and "animists." Trained
militarily and ideologically in Egypt Omar al-Bashir came to
power through a military coup, arresting and imprisoning and
murdering all opposition.
Under President Omar's leadership millions
have been killed and millions have been displaced, hungry,
diseased, and exposed to harsh elements both natural and human,
insidious and violent. And tens of thousands murdered by
President Omar's Janjaweed thugs on camels. Numerically and
statistically, President Omar has caused more destruction and
fatalities that Saddam's crimes pale in comparison.
Why was the harmless priest President
Aristide abducted at gunpoint from his office in Haiti and
sequestered in Central Africa? Was that some kind of voodoo
craft and design, Bush the designer and Colin Powell, his high
priest? But here we have a head of state, President Omar,
responsible for genocide and our rhetoric avoids demonizing him
as we have done to Aristide and Hussein. There is something
wrong with this picture. And it ain't in Denmark, but in Arabic
Khartoum and also Christian America.
American leadership responsibility for
ignorance and suffering cannot be escaped in our fears for
personal security. Globalization should be good for all of us,
not just 300 billionaires.
Ask any black high school kid where Africa is
he couldn't tell you nor which way to go to get there. If you
don’t won’t anybody to see you doing wrong, keep it in the
dark. And that’s the thing except for the boys on the corner
in defiance, getting jailed and killed.
Most have no idea whether Africa is a continent or a
country or whether Egypt is in the Middle East or in Africa. But
that would also be true of the average American adult kid, too,
hating gangster rap and Abu Grahib.
And I wouldn't doubt the statistic that most
black professors at well-endowed institutions could not tell you
who President Omar is. A man killing black folk left and right,
like mowing down locust. Nor Kwesi Mfume, the head of the NAACP.
For him Bush is the villain, only. And, that is what I find so
irritating, those who are most informed, fail to see the worst,
escaping victim identity.
Just the other day, a conscious black poet
defends the sterility of the Furious Flower conference in the
mountains of Virginia and its talk about the clitoris; he tells
me the problem in the world is Bush and Chaney. We all recognize
freedom of speech and that people are free to do whatever turns
you on in a democracy. No doubt. But should not the black
intelligentsia be intellectually aware of black suffering and
respond fully? Women and children are not only losing clitoris,
but losing the entire body and soul. Being personal and
political is not sufficient, a little substance, please.
Know about President Omar, killing millions,
displacing millions. Don’t that count for something? Let us
allow that Iraq is a tragedy and that tens of thousands of
Americans and Iraqis have sacrificed their lives for corporate
oil and greed.
Has Afrocentricity silenced us? Has our
romantic obsession with the past blinded us with that which is
before our very present eyes? Do we know anymore with our hearts
and souls what racial oppression is? Do we feel how class
attitudes have hardened hearts, darkened souls, made us timid?
But here is a black man in President Omar who
sees the world through Pan Arab eyes in the largest African
nation and our best writers and artists are not outraged in the
telling fact that his murderous genocide by the millions
continues and not one diplomat to the United Nations is asking
for this genocidal maniac to step down from his office.
Why? Simply, President Omar is willing to
allow non-Africans nations and corporations to loot the wealth
of 40 million Sudanese, for the glory of Islam and Arabism.
It is projected that by 2005 500 thousand
barrels a day will be exported out of Sudan. At over $50 a
barrel on the open market, we are talking about $25 billion a
day, while millions go hungry, and the country of Sudan is
portrayed as a beggar nation depending on American and European
subsidies to feed the displaced people of Darfur. How can we not
know who President Omar is?
Folks, this man does not love black people.
Aren’t you appalled, disgusted, fighting 1960s mad and you
don’t want to take this kind of evil no more? If not, why not?
Can you say "neocolonialism"?
Black People SCREAM!!! This man is no Abu
Gereis. . . No Mandela, Nkrumah, nor Mbeki. We need an
all-tribes conference, call for it today in Sudan. Call for a
secular state where all religions, cultures, languages, and
traditions are defended and protected. Let’s look upon
President Omar as what he is a SUPER SADDAM.
We must demand that he step down or pay the
penalty of being condemned like Charles Taylor and Hitler as war
criminal and satanic. Our changing American presidents will not
make Africa safer or more prosperous as long as corporate power
and greed hold sway and African politicians become Western or
Arab and vacation in Florida, Italy or Paris, or Saudi Arabia.
Here’s indeed globalization as its most selfish and
destructive.
Today’s African American politics must remove
the racial blinkers and seek higher ethical ground in defense of
black liberation. *
* * * *
updated 11 October 2007 |
