June 14 - The Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika, Siphiwe Baleka, joined Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua from the Departments of African American Studies, History, & Global Studies, University of Illinois on the RealTalk: History as a Weapon for Black Liberation, Black Power Media Network podcast.
The Correctness of Shifting from the European "Slave Trade" to the African "War Crimes" Narrative: Notes on José Lingna Nafafé's New Book on the 1684 Mendonça (Kongo) Reparations Case at the Vatican
Nearly five years ago, I started a campaign to teach my people the true origins of what has unfortunately become known as the “Trans Atlantic Slave Trade”. That historical phenomenon has its roots in the 12th century founding of eight new monastic orders, many of them functioning as Military Knights of the Crusades and the establishment of canon law under Pope Alexander III. This led to military action that resulted in the siege and conquest of the city of Ceuta in 1415 by Dom Henrique of Portugal, Duke of Viseu (4 March 1394 – 13 November 1460), better known as Prince Henry the Navigator, fourth child of King John I of Portugal and Philippa, sister of King Henry IV of England. It is stated in the Introduction to The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea Volume II that,
“Here, by the capture of Ceuta (area north of Fez on the African side of the Straight of Gibraltar south of Spain), Prince Henry gained a starting-point for his work; here he is said (probably with truth) to have gained his earliest knowledge of the interior of Africa; here especially he was brought in contact with those Sudan and Saharan caravans which, coming down to the Mediterranean coast, brought news, to those who sought it, of the Senegal and Niger, of the Negro kingdoms beyond the desert, and particularly of the Gold land of ‘Guinea.’ Here also, from a knowledge thus acquired, he was able to form a more correct judgment of the course needed for the rounding or circumnavigation of Africa, of the time, expense, and toil necessary for that task, and of the probable support or hindrance his mariners were to look for on their route. . . .
According to the Presentment to the Holy See in Furtherance of Reparations,
“In 1418, in response to King John I’s request for papal authority to launch a Christian crusade in parts of Africa, Pope Martin V, in his Bull Sane Charissimus, “appealed to Christian kings and princes to support the King in his fight against the Saracen Muslims from the Middle East and other enemies of Christ.” Sane Charissimus legitimized Portuguese military, political, and economic conquests of Africa and established the precedent for future Papal Bulls that would justify the continuing subjugation of Africa and African people. In Cum Charissimus, issued in 1419, Pope Martin V reaffirmed his support for King John’s mission in Africa.
King John’s son, Prince Henry the Navigator, is credited with sponsoring and supporting the expeditions that planted the seeds of European colonization in Africa and launched the trafficking and enslavement of African human beings. Henry, in turn, was sponsored and supported by the Papacy. In 1420, Pope Martin V named Henry head of the Order of Christ, which gave him authority to launch the trafficking of Black African human beings in the name of spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In 1421, Henry gave, as gifts to Pope Martin, several of the Africans captured during his early expeditions.
In 1442, Pope Eugene IV issued Bull Illius Qui which granted “full remission of sins to knights who took part in any expeditions against the Saracens” under Henry the Navigator, and gave assurance to his Order of Christ that military actions in Africa would be considered “just” wars in the eyes of the Church.”
On June 18, 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued the Dum Diversas Apostolic Edict declaring war against the people in the land of Guinea. The document stated,
“we grant to you full and free power, through the Apostolic authority by this edict, to invade, conquer, fight, subjugate the Saracens and pagans, and other infidels and other enemies of Christ, and wherever established their Kingdoms, Duchies, Royal Palaces, Principalities and other dominions, lands, places, estates, camps and any other possessions, mobile and immobile goods found in all these places and held in whatever name, and held and possessed by the same Saracens, Pagans, infidels, and the enemies of Christ, also realms, duchies, royal palaces, principalities and other dominions, lands, places, estates, camps, possessions of the king or prince or of the kings or princes, AND TO LEAD THEIR PERSONS IN PERPETUAL SERVITUDE, AND TO APPLY AND APPROPRIATE REALMS, DUCHIES, ROYAL PALACES, PRINCIPALITIES AND OTHER DOMINIONS, POSSESSIONS AND GOODS OF THIS KIND TO YOU AND YOUR USE AND YOUR SUCCESSORS THE KINGS OF PORTUGAL.”
The Dum Diversas was followed up by the Romanus Pontifex papal bull of January 8, 1455 granting the Portuguese a perpetual monopoly in trade with Africa.
And thus started the Dum Diversas War against African people that has erroneously been misnamed a “slave trade”. The truth of the matter is that it was neither a “trade” nor did it involve “slaves”. It was a war in which 100 million African people were killed and 12.5 million prisoners of war were trafficked and subjected to slavery. Those left behind suffered colonialism.
Understanding that the Dum Diversas Apostolic Edict issued by Pope Nicholas V on June 18, 1452 was a declaration of “total war” - a special category of war that doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants, is a crime against humanity, has no statute of limitations and is a more solid basis for reparations than the current narrative of “slavery as a human rights violation and crime against humanity” - was a conceptual breakthrough that provided the basis for a new, more historically and legally accurate narrative replaceing “slave trade” with “military invasion, war and trafficking of prisoners of war resulting in chattel enslavement and ethnocide.” Historically, reparations were always associated with war damage, not economics and unfair trade deals. However, Imari Obadele, one of the founders of the Republic of New Afrika, articulated the true nature of the military invasion and the reparations for war damage in the 1970’s, and after him, more recently, Prof Hilary Beckles' speech “The Age of Terror: Europe and the Trade in Africans in West Africa,” given 3-2-2023
Shortly after my conceptual breakthrough and new reparations legal strategy to present African reparations claims to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) as reparations for the Dum Diversas War under the Geneva Convention, the American Society of International Law and the University of the West Indies hosted the Symposium: Reparations Under International Law for Enslavement of African Persons in the Americas and Caribbean, May 20-21, 2021. Following the Symposium, The African Commission on Human and Peoples Rights (ACHPR), met at its 73rd Ordinary Session held in Banjul, The Gambia, from 21 October 2022 – 9 November 2022. The ACHPR’s Resolution on Africa’s Reparations Agenda and The Human Rights of Africans In the Diaspora and People of African Descent Worldwide - ACHPR/Res.543 (LXXIII) 2022 - Dec 12, 2022 stated that
"2. Calls upon member states to: . . . take measures to eliminate barriers to acquisition of citizenship and identity documentation by Africans in the diaspora; to establish a committee to consult, seek the truth, and conceptualize reparations from Africa’s perspective, describe the harm occasioned by the tragedies of the past, establish a case for reparations (or Africa’s claim), and pursue justice for the trade and trafficking in enslaved Africans, colonialism and colonial crimes, and racial segregation and contribute to non-recurrence and reconciliation of the past;, . . . 4. Encourages civil society and academia in Africa, to embrace and pursue the task of conceptualizing Africa’s reparations agenda with urgency and determination.”
This was a recognition that the current European “slave trade narrative” was problematic for Africa’s claim since the chattel enslavement - the evil phenomenon, previously unknown in hisotry, for which reparations was being sought - happened largely outside of Africa in the Americas. Colonialism, an equally evil, related, but distinct phenomenon for which Africa is due reparations, required a different approach, or at least a solid foundation based on the military invasion of the continent. Moreover, due to ignorance, many people, even scholars and reparations leaders, are under the false impression that Africans themselves were complicit in the “slave trade” and perhaps started it even before the arrival of Europeans. How then, could Africa claim reparations for something it did and happened outside of Africa? A new conceptualization was needed that situated the original crime on the African continent and was comprehensive for ALL African people regardless of their location and valid for their descendants whether taken from Guinea or Dahomey or Angola or Kongo and trafficked to Haiti, Brazil, Barbados, Jamaica, Panama or the colonies of the United States. I succeeded in providing that conceptualization.
The first person to recognize the significance of my work was Kamm Howard, the former National Co-Chair of NCOBRA and the Director of Reparations United. He used my work in the above mentioned Presentment to the Holy See in Furtherance of Reparations which he along with others delivered to Bishop Paul Tighe, Secretary of the Pontifical Council of Culture in a formal meeting at the Vatican on July 18, 2022. The document concludes by stating,
“COMPELLED BY INTERNATIONAL LAW, CUSTOMS, AND NORMS REGARDING REDRESS FOR TOTAL WAR, WAR CRIMES, AND CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY, AND ENCOURAGED BY THE WORDS AND SPIRIT OF THE ENCYCLICAL FRATELLI TUTTI, IN WHICH POPE FRANCIS CALLS FOR A DEEPENED SENSE OF OUR SHARED HUMANITY, WE SEEK FULL REPARATIONS AND HEALING FOR PEOPLE OF AFRICAN ANCESTRY…. CONSEQUENTLY, FROM ALL THE ABOVE, THE HOLY ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH HAS A PROFOUND MORAL AND LEGAL OBLIGATION OF FULL REPARATIONS.”
Kamm Howard, who refers to the Dum Diversas Wars as “TransAtlantic Chattelization Wars (as described by Prof. Chinweizu - who also gave us the concept of internal reparations)”, graciously acknowledged,
So it was with a great sense of pride and accomplishment, having articulated Africa’s claim legally, that I traveled to Geneva, Switzerland in December of 2022 to present it to the newly established Permanent Forum on People of African Descent (PFPAD). Afterwards, CARICOM announced that it was considering approaching the ICJ. In the view of Kamm Howard, “The ICJ opinion on the status of Afro-descendants being prisoners of war. This was raised at PFPAD 1 and as we all know a petition for adoption was presented at PFPAD 2. What occurred was the capture of this idea by those who have state power to be utilized only for state reparations CARICOM nations.” Sharing my concerns with Dr. Eric Phillips, Chair of the Guyana Reparations Commission, he responded:
However, by the time of the Accra Reparations Conference in November 2023. Mr. Phillips’ position had changed and he became the major critic, leading some pushback, mostly from people within CARICOM, against the shift from the European “slave trade narrative” to the new African “Dum Diversas War” narrative. According to Dr. Phillips:
"Your view of approaching the ICJ with a "prisoner-of-war" strategy that has no historical or literature heritage (Durban, DDPA, even the PFPAD which is a derivative of Durban") is questionable from a practical point of view. "
"it was African tribes who fought other African tribes...to obtain "prisoners-of-war" ......albeit, they were incentivised by colonizers...."
It is these two objections that I want to address with this post. José Lingna Nafafé has written a brilliant book that directly answers these erroneous ideas. Nafafé’s seminal research shows clearly that there is a “prisoner of war” strategy that has a historical, literary and LEGAL heritage but, like the historians that came before, Dr. Phillips and others are largely ignorant of. Additionally, Nafafé, usuing primary documents never before studied by the historians, effectively dismantles the argument that African tribes were complicit in slave trading and thus any reparations based on the Dum Diversas War conceptualization will provide an escape for Europeans who refuse to pay reparations. As ICJ Judge Patrick Robinson puts it, as reported by Kamm Howard,
“At a Cambridge conference I spoke at, Judge [Patrick] Robinson stated that those African ‘tribes’ that took and or forced to take direction, weapons, and reward from European nations didn't dissolve the Europeans from guilt, but enhanced European guilt.”
The excerpts below, from Nafafé’s Lourenço da Silva Mendonça and the Black Atlantic Abolitionist Movement in the Seventeenth Century will provide a concrete case study showing why the Dum Diversas War reparations claim is the African claim that has been missing from the reparations movement.
Introduction
“In 1684 Lourenço da Silva Mendonça from the kingdom of Kongo in the Indies ‘arrived in Rome to take up an important role for Black peoples.’ That role was to bring an ethical and criminal kufunda (case) before the Vatican court, which accused the nations involved in Atlantic slavery, including the Vatican, Italy, Spain and Portugal, of committing crimes against humanity. It detailed the ‘tyrannical sale of human beings . . . the diabolic abuse of this kind of slavery . . . which they committed against any Divine or Human law’. Mendonça was a member of the Ndongo royal family, rulers of Pedras (Stones) of Pungo-Andongo, situated in what is now modern Angola. He carried with him the hopes of enslaved Africans and other oppressed groups in what was a remarkable moment that, I would argue, challenges the established interpretation of the history of abolition.
Legal, moral, ethical and political debate on the abolition of slavery has traditionally been understood to have been initiated by Europeans in the eighteenth century - figures such as Thomas Buxton, Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharp, David Livingstone, and William Wilberforce. To the extent that Africans are recognized as having played any role in ending slavery, especially in the seventeenth century, their efforts are typically confined to sporadic and impulsive cases of resistance, involving ‘shipboard revolts’, ‘maroon communities’, ‘individual fugitive slaves’ and ‘household revolts’. Studies of these cases have never gone beyond the obvious economic disruptions caused by enslaved people resorting to poisoning, murder and attacks on plantations and their masters’ household properties. Even those former enslaved Africans who gained their freedom through sheer endeavor and subsequently argued in the strongest terms for the abolition of slavery in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano, were seen as limited in scope, without international impact and reliant on their European counterparts. Curiously, to date, no historian of slavery of West Central Africa, Africanists or Atlanticists have researched the Black Atlantic abolition movement in the seventeenth century; and those who have attempted to engage with the debate often conclude that any action driven by Africans was a localized endeavor. No historian has yet provided an in-depth study of the highly organized, international-scale, legal court case for liberation and abolition spearheaded by Lourenço da Silva Mendonça, or as Mendonça called it the ‘complaint . ..
In this book, I examine in detail how Mendonça and the historical actors with whom he was involved - such as Black Christians from confraternities in Angola, Brazil, Caribbean, Portugal and Spain - argued for the complete abolition of the Atlantic slave trade well before Wilberforce and his generation of abolitionists. . . . It reveals, for the first time, how legal debates were headed not by Europeans, but by Africans.’ . . .
To fully comprehend Mendonça’s work, it is crucial that we understand from the outset that the enslavement of Africans was part of the Portuguese conquest of West Central Africa, and the enslavement of Angolans was inseparable from Portuguese military aggression in the region. From the beginning of Portuguese settlement there in the mid-sixteenth century, war was waged against the West Central African people. This was the catalyst for the enslavement of ordinary civilians.
If we are to grasp the rationale behind the capture of enslaved people in the region and understand how they were obtained, it is crucial to recognise the role played by the Municipal City Council of Luanda, which regulated the shipment of the enslaved Angolans sent to Brazil. Indeed, it is impossible to understand the significance of Mendonça’s court case without taking account of the involvement of the Municipal City Council of Luanda in the slave trade. Central to the argument of this book, then, is the story of the destruction of Pungo-Andongo and the death of its last king, Joao (John) Hari II, who was Mendonça’s uncle. Exiled as prisoners of war, Ndongo’s royals, including Mendonça, his brothers, uncles, aunts and cousins, were sent first to Salvador in Bahia, then to Rio de Janeiro and other captaincies in what is nowadays Brazil, and finally to Portugal. Crucially, to fully understand the involvement of sobas (Angolan local rulers) in the slave trade in Angola and perhaps eslewhere in Africa, I contend that it is necessary to take into account the introduction in 1626 by Fernao de Sousa, the Portuguese governor in Angola, of baculamento, a tax payment of enslaved people in place of encombros, a tax payment in produce. This is a piece of new data that has not been used by historians of West Central Africa, Africanists and Atlanticists. I argue that it had far-reaching consequences for the historiography of the region in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Unaware of this legislation, West Central African historiography on ‘taxation’, ‘wars’, ‘debt’ and ‘legal practices’ has unwittingly been prevented from truly understanding the reasons for and methods of enslavement. These historians of West Central Africa have remained ignorant of Sousa’s introduction of the baculamento. Subsequent governors and their captains in the presidio (Portuguese outpost) in Angola used the baculamento for centuries to naturalise the Atlantic slave trade. And the baculamento has remained obscure until now; most West Central African historians have taken it as accepted wisdom that slavery was an African practice, and the idea that Africans colluded in Atlantic slavery has never been challenged. Generations of scholars have studied systems of ‘taxation’, ‘wars’, ‘debt’ and ‘legal practices’ without interrogating the Portuguese institution of baculamento, which overrode local practices; instead, blame has been placed on the Angolan institutions. All Angolan soba allies of the Portuguese conquest were obliged to make a payment of 100 enslaved people annually to Portugal. This Portuguese taxation, which was named after the local baculamento practice - a tribute system- profoundly disrupted the Angolan socio-political and legal system and resulted in social upheaval. Communities and their rulers were turned against each other, a new local judicial procedure was imposed that served the interests of the Atlantic slave trade, putting judicial officers in local courts in Angola to adjudicate local cases in their own interest - what Kimbwandende K.B. Fu-Kiau called a turning point in African governance and leadership in West Central Africa. pp 1-11
Conquered, and subjected to Portuguese rule, Angolan kings and sobas loyal to the king of Portugal were made subject to annual tax payment in human beings in 1626, thus turning people into a currency. This was particularly the case for Angolan kings, because ‘native’ soldiers were recruited directly from the region where the Portuguese had established control and maintained fairs (markets). The Municipal Council of Luanda was charged with dividing land already conquered from the Angolans between the Portuguese and African war captains, so-called guerra preta. P. 12
All loyal sobas in both Angola and Kongo were conquered by the Portuguese and forced to give obedience to the Portuguese Crown in five areas: (1) pay annual tax in enslaved people to the Crown; (2) allow recruitment of soldiers for war to fight alongside the Portuguese contingent of soldiers stationed in Angola or Kongo against fellow Angolans or Kongolese; (3) open local and regional markets for the Portuguese to freely trade and impose their rule; (4) allow Portuguese priests to build churches and carry out Christian mission activities in the area; (5) allow land to be alienated for the Portuguese use. In return, sobas were granted protection from their Angolan enemies, and their children offered Portuguese education. Footnote 43, p. 12
Guerra preta was a term used to refer to Angolan soldiers who were recruited by force from the Portuguese-controlled or -conquered region of Angola Footnote 45, p. 12
On 19 November 1664, members of the Municipal Council of Luanda showed their power by lodging a complaint with the Crown that was adjudicated by the Portuguese Overseas Council, which dealth with all overseas affairs:
‘That the trade of the same Kingdom [Angola] consists only in the enslaved that is carried out in the lands of Soba’s vassals of His Majesty, that is, from presidios such as Lobolo, Dembos, Benguella, and from those that are mostly conquered by that government . . . that the most important thing that there is in that kingdom, which is in need of maintaining, is the Royal standard tax duty in slaves that they dispatch from the factory of Your Majesty. It is not that its profit is great, but also for being used for sustaining the Infantry, and to pay governors’ salaries of five presidios of hinterland, of secular priests in Kongo, and of other clergy of that kingdom, and other salaries, and budgets.’
This clearly demonstrates that the City Council’s budget depended entirely on revenues from enslavement. The slave trade in Angola was the lifeblood of the council and maintained the Portuguese project of conquest; without it, there was no Portuguese Empire. . . . P. 13
Mendonça’s family tree demonstrates that he was descended from the kings of Kongo who ruled over what is today known as West Central Africa and were the first royals to adopt Christianity in the region. Afonso I (1509-1543), the king of Kongo, is said to have been related to Mendonça’s great-grandfather, Ngola Kiluanji Kia Samba (1515-1556), king of Ndongo and Matamba. It was not a far-fetched statement, therefore, when Mendonça made the claim in the Vatican that he was descended from the ‘royal blood of the kings of Kongo and Angola’.
Given Mendonça’s origins in Kongo and Angola, Africans were demonstrably the prime campaigners for the abolition of African enslavement in the seventeenth century. In presenting his court case in the Vatican about the plight of enslaved Africans in Africa and in the Atlantic, and the oppression of Natives and New Christians in Portugal, he put forward a universal message of freedom - all these groups included people whose humanity was being denied. This challenges the accepted view that ‘the conduct of the slave trade involved the active participation of the African chiefs’. There were, indeed, many within Africa who refused to accept and actively opposed the Atlantic slave trade, and who abhorred its ideology and practice. Mendonça represented those constituencies from his own family - his grandfather, Philipe Hari I, and father, Ignacio da Silva - who were coerced into the slave trade by the Portuguese regime in Angola. P. 16
As mentioned, towards the end of 1671, after the war of Pungo-Andongo, Mendonça, his brothers, uncles, aunts and cousins were sent to Salvador, Bahia, by the governor of Luanda, Francisco de Taora “Cajanda’ (1669-1676); they lived there for eighteen months. In 1673, Mendonça was then taken to Rio de Janeiro, where he lived for, possibly, six months. After spending two years in Brazil, he was sent to Portugal in August 1673. In Portugal, he stayed at the Convent of Vilar de Frades, Braga, by order of the Portuguese Crown. His three brothers were sent to Salvador, Bahia, by the governor of Luanda, Francisco de Tavora “Cajanda” (1169-1676); they lived there for eighteen months. In 1673, Mendonça was then taken to Rio de Janeiro, where he lived for, possibly, six months. After spending two years in Brazil, he was sent to Portugal in August 1673. In Portugal, he stayed at the Convent of Vilar de Frades, Braga,too, but to different monasteries: Basto, Moreira and Selzedas. Mendonça probably studied law and theology in Braga for three or four years, from 1673 to 1676 or 1677, before returning to Lisbon, where he stayed for perhaps four years from 1677 to 1681. . . . p. 20
Gray uses the term ‘petition’ in Mendonça’s case to identify it as a request to seek a solution to alleviate the plight of the enslaved Africans; he takes no account of the legal argument embedded in the case. This is where I differ from him. According to Roman law there were different types of petition: ‘private petitions to the Roman emperor’ and ‘subscriptions of legal sources’. The first were issued to make a case for clarifying the law on behalf of private individual petitioners who had questions about it. [Siphiwe Note: much like an Advisory Opinion from the International Court of Justice (ICJ)]. Generally, the ‘petitioners had no interest in legal matters at all; they wanted honours, jobs and financial concessions’. The ‘subscriptions of legal sources’ on the other hand ‘contained formulations of principle . . . they were a response not to intellectual difficulties, but to practical ones. Petitioners went to the imperial government to get action, not advise.’ Normally they were written by legal professionals or lawyers. The presentation Mendonça delivered contained a statement of principles. For this reason, it cannot have been a petition in the first sense; it was not simply a request to end the suffering of the enslaved Africans in the Atlantic, but was a legal claim, supported by legal argument. Footnote 92 pp. 23-24
When it comes to historical sources, in 1682 the Jesuit missionaries Francisco Jose de Jaca and Epifanio de Moirans, who knew and supported Mendonça’s court case, completed their work Servi Liberi Seu Naturalis Mancipiorum Libertatis Iusta Defensio ( Freed Slaves or the Just Defence of the Natural Freedom of the Emancipated). Both also offered a critique of the capture of Africans in Africa who were then taken to the Americas as enslaved people. While renowned Spanish Jesuit Barolome De las Casas (1484-1566) defended the Indigenous Americans against slavery, the lesser-known Jaca and Moirans also spoke out against the enslavement of Africans using the legal arguments of the time. Their work, however, did not come to the fore in the debate on the Atlantic slave trade until the beginning of the 1980s, when their defence was translated from Latin to Spanish by Jose Tomas Lopez Garcia as Dos Defensores de los Esclavos Negros en el Siglo XVII (Two Defenders of the Black Slaves in the Seventeenth Century). Neither Jaca nor Moirans went to Africa as missionaries, but they both worked as Jesuit priests in Venezuela and Cuba, where they met. Their defense is a major work on the injustice of African enslavement in the Americas, and on the abolition of slavery in the Atlantic yet it is almost unknown. They analyzed in great depth the same legal terms that were used by Mendonça in the Vatican, such as ‘natural’, ‘human’, ‘divine’, ‘civil’, and ‘canon law (jus canonico)’, challenging why Atlantic slavery was being practiced against these laws. They argued that the Atlantic slave trade was illegal, stating that ‘when we begin with natural law, all men are born free’. They contended that the responsibility for those enslaved Africans in the Americas law with the pope, because ‘the lords of blind slaves with their ambition to impress the Governor (the governors in the Indies are subject to the Catholic King and the kings are subject to the Pope). This chain of responsibility made it necessary for the pope to punish the guilty parties committing such crimes, particularly the Portuguese governing authorities in Africa, Brazil and the Americas. And this obligation also implicated the pope in a crime against humanity: the Atlantic slave trade. Indeed, Jaca and Moirans stood in the witness box in the Vatican to testify on behalf of Mendonça’s court case, arguing that each ‘person is free by natural law’.
In their thesis, Jac and Moirans also asked uncomfortable questions as to why Christians bought enslaved Africans, who were captured using force, fraud, intimidation, kidnapping and theft. . . . Furthermore, they openly criticized the Atlantic slave trade and demanded that the enslaved Africans’ owners pay back what they owed the enslaved for their work and release them from bondage. For them, as for Mendonça, natural, human, divine and civil laws were universal, and had been broken by the enslavement of Africans.
Dating from the same time, the three-volume history of the Angolan wars completed by Antonio de Oliveira Cadornega in 1681 is fundamental to understanding the socio-political and cultural circumstances surrounding Mendonça’s court case, the context of the Portuguese conquest and the wars waged on the Ndongo kingdom. pp 25-27
With regard to the question of slavery in Africa, in the nineteenth century, Pedro de Carvalho, Portuguese secretary to the governor in Angola between 1862 and 1863, stated in his book, Das Origens da Escravidão Moderna em Portugal (Origins of Modern Slavery in Portugal), that ‘Africa is a land of slavery by definition. Black is a slave by birth.’ Contrary to the lone voice of Portuguese priest Father Oliveira, who in Elementos Para a História do Município de Lisboa criticized Portugal as an enslaving society by seeing it as the only country responsible for Atlantic slavery, Carvalho argued that ‘we [the Portuguese] did not invent Negroes’ slavery; we have found it there, which was the foundation of those imperfect societies.’ Other Portuguese historians have also defended Portugal’s involvement in the Atlantic slave trade by echoing sentiments expressed by both Carvalho and Brasio. Among them is the nineteenth- century writer and patriarch of Lisboa, Father Francisco de S. Luis. In Nota Sobre a Origem da Escravidao e Trafico dos Negros (Reflection on the Origin of the Slavery and the Traffic of Endlaved Black Africans) - an answer to French authors Christophe de Koch and Frederic Schoell, who had accused Portugal of being responsible for the slave trade - Luis contributed to the invention of the seductive and misleading narrative that Arabs and Africans were already trading in enslaved people in Africa before Portugal became involved in the Atlantic slave trade. This has become the dominant version of the history of slavery in the region and is intended above all to shift responsibility and guilt from Europeans to Africans.
The historiography of West Central Africa initially focused on ita - ‘war’ - as an enslaved method. . . . Away from the focus on ‘war’, historians have paid particular attention to xicacos (tributes of vassalship) - or ‘taxation’. Both Beatrix Heintze and Mariana P. Candido have considered these two elements together and engaged with the significance of the fact that ‘raiding’ and ‘taxation’ were important as a source of income to cover the Portuguese administration’s expenditure in seventeenth-century Angola. Subsequently, the focus on ‘war’, ‘raiding’ and ‘taxation’ has given way to an emphasis on ‘debt’. . . . Alongside ‘debt’, historians have also examined ‘judicial proceedings’ - the tribunal de mucanos. A tribunal of mucanos means ‘legal verbal proceedings in their disputes and demands’ in the Angolan language Kimbundu. Mucanos were local courts, indigenous to West Central Africa, used to deal with legal cases. The above-mentioned historians have used these local legal structures to argue that the enslavement of Angolans was part of the West Central Africans’ culture, and that enslavement was used as a punishment for those found guilty of breaking the law. Ferreira argues that civil and criminal cases were used by sobas to enslave the guilty in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He challenges West Central African historiography that views enslaved Africans in the region as war captives and calls for its revision, deploying individual cases to reveal that enslavement was carried out through acts of kidnapping and betrayal. In a similar vein, Candido has demonstrated that in Benguela the Portuguese governing authorities were not only waging war as a method of capturing Angolans but also using debt and judicial practices to enslave them. Similarly, Joseph Calder Miller in his work Way of Death has argued that the Portuguese used the judicial system to obtain enslaved Africans in the region by enforcing debt recovery as a method in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For Miller, the enslavement of Angolans was carried out in regions far away from areas of Portuguese settlement. Alongside historiography on ita, Curto has demonstrated the problem of social conflict that was created by the slave trade in which people were ‘kidnapping’ others in revenge for enslaving their family members, particularly the slave-traders in the region. This social conflict was actually driven by the need to pay debt. pp 30-32
Mendonça began his reclamazione or court case in the Vatican not with African involvement in slavery, but rather with a bold statement of his argument and evidence about how the capture of Africans was implemented, and the methods that were deployed to enslave them. In doing so, he refuted the established thinking that Africans were willing participants in the Atlantic slave trade, and the idea that there were existing markets in Africa for enslaved Africans. Mendonça accused the Vatican, Italy, Portugal and Spain of crimes against humanity, claiming, ‘they use them [enslaved people] against human law.’ The legal concept of ‘crime against humanity’ may not have been current at the time of Mendonça’s case, although it is implicit in both natural and human laws. However, the term is frequently used in the documents Mendonça presented in the Vatican, and Roman legal jurisprudence has influenced the European legal system since that time. I believe that Mendonça’s use of the term ‘crime against humanity’ anticipated its use in modern times. Pp 43-44
The Vatican’s response was that the people involved in buying and selling enslaved Africans, particularly those found committing crimes against Christians, should be punished, and the Vatican put huge pressure on Spain and Portugal to stop such cruelty to enslaved Christians in Africa and in the Atlantic. Both Carlos II of Spain and Pedro II of Portugal, whose reigns coincided with Mendonça’s court case, wanted to abolish Atlantic slavery, but they were prevented from doing so by advisors including the Council of Indies and the Portuguese Overseas Council. The Portuguese Crown responded to the Vatican’s demand of 18 March 1684, made in response to Mendonça’s court case, by improving conditions of shipment for enslaved Africans being taken from Angola and Cape Verde to Brazil. p. 43
The Municipal Council of Luanda became the site of political intrigue, jealousy, deceit and mutiny; it was a political landscape in which the main drive was for economic gain, and the enslavement of Angolans was a key part of that package. The methods deployed to capture Angolans - through wars, pillage and treachery - formed the basis for Mendonça’s Vatican court case. . . .Mendonça’sevidence based court case challenged the established seventeenth-century assertion that Africa was a slaving society that already took part in and willingly aided the European Atlantic slave trade. His evidence demonstrated how the Atlantic slave trade operated on the ground in Africa, and how violence was used as a strategy for maintaining slavery’s existence. The accused were the Vatican, and the Italian, Portuguese and Spanish political governing authorities, and Mendonça brought together African accusers from different organizations, confraternities and interest groups including constituencies of ‘men’, ‘women’ and ‘young people’ within the confraternities themselves. pp 54-55
Joaa Hari II rebelled against the payment of tax in enslaved people and declared the independence of Pungo-Andongo from Portugal in 1671. This was a struggle that Mendonça continued to argue in the Vatican in 1684-1687. pp 55
So far, the story of slavery has been told as a narrative in which the Africans were the victims of their own crime. That crime is said to have consisted in the enslavement of their own people by their governing bodies, embedded in their socio-political, economic, religious and legal system. The abolition of Atlantic slavery, on the other hand, has mainly been told as a narrative in which the morally superior Europeans came to rescue the Africans from this very system. Both narratives made it possible for the European colonizing nations to explore Africa while exploiting African labour in a dehumanizing and violent fashion, through an intervention whose only purpose was economic gain and political power, corrupting their own Christian morality by using it to validate this domination and the turning of human beings into currency. Mendonça’s criminal court case makes it clear that these narratives are nothing more than treacherous tales aimed at justifying the unjustifiable. The case not only points up that a role in the abolition movement was taken by Africans with a sophisticated understanding of the connection between divine, natural, civil and human law but also that they showed political nous by uniting other oppressed constituencies with the Black Atlantic. Indeed, Mendonça’s universal pledge for freedom made it clear that Atlantic slavery was introduced to Africa by Europeans. It was the Vatican as a seat of Christendom with its universal ethics and the European colonizing nations that were implicated in this crime against humanity. To this day, we live with the consequences of the false criminalisation of Africans and their descendants, while the true perpetrators have not been held accountable. Mendonça’s story makes this unquestionable. pp 55-56
On 6 March 1684, when Mendonça presented his evidence-based court case in the Vatican, he began with statements on how Africans were captured. As a member of the Royal Court of Pungo-Andongo, he would have doubtless have recalled historical cases of ordinary people having been rounded up from their homes, fields and daily lives and having been enslaved in Angola; he would have experienced war; and he would have heard stories of people being seized in raids, kidnapped, and taken to the Americas as enslaved people. He would have heard from his grandfather, father, uncles, aunts and brothers - all allies of the Portuguese - about illegal wars conducted, treachery used and robbery carried out on Angolans captured, enslaved and shipped to Brazil on behalf of Portugal. His report in the Vatican confirms cases of ‘those who have been ‘abducted’, ‘kidnapped’, ‘hunted’, ‘snatched, ‘taken from the fields with fraud’ and ‘sold’ to ‘merchants’ who would in turn ‘sell them in Europe like animals’ or in the Americas for that matter.
So to begin to understand Mendonça’s criminal court case about the predicament of enslaved Africans in the Atlantic, it would be useful to start in West Central Africa, where he first experienced his people being seized and carried off into slavery in the Americas. It is essential that we locate his work in the political, legal and economic landscape of Kongo and Angola. It is also fundamental that we understand from the beginning that enslaving Africans was an integral part of the Portuguese conquest of west Central Africa. This is evident from the 1512 brief to the kings of Kongo, and later Angola, by Dom Manuel, King of Portugal. It is, therefore, impossible to draw a distinction between what we might perceive as a ‘slavery period’ in Africa at the beginning of the Portuguese encounter with West Africa or West Central Africa in general and the conquest. . . .
It was in the city councils, such as that of Luanda, that decisions were made about how Africans were to be captured and enslaved. The councils were the places in which decisions were made about conquest - the so-called ‘just war’ - and the wages of the soldiers fighting in those wars were paid. Those who disagreed with the politics of the council and its decisions were exiled to Brazil or Sao Tome. Such was the fate of the Portuguese governor of Luanda, Correia de Sousa, as well as Mendonça’s family, which was considered a threat to the ‘common good’ of the council. pp 58-59
Early historiography of West Central Africa tended to emphasize that the capture and enslavement of Angolans were a means of financing the Portuguese conquest of the region. Both Heintze and Candido have put considerable effort into demonstrating that raiding and taxation were important mechanisms of the Portuguese administration in maintaining their economic strength. Whilst Ferreira explores the idea that markets/feiras in eighteenth-century Angola were used as a means of obtaining enslaved Angolans, he indicates that their regulations were carried out by sobas. However, he concedes that the Portuguese authorities in Angola created these markets in an attempt to bridge local trading regulations. Vansina has taken this debate further and examines a different perspective on the markets, arguing that the Portuguese intervened to introduce a new ‘distance’ market in the region in enslaved Angolans, using caravans. For Vansina that market was based on the slave trade.
Thornton, Heywood and Curto have argued that the very foundation of Kongo was based on slave labour and that Afonso I (1509-1543) was complicit in the slave trade during his reign. . . . According to Thornton and Heywood, Afonso I’s cooperation with Portugal in the slave trade is attested by his letters to Manuel I, king of Portugal (1495-1521). Thornton states that the ‘warfare in this time was nevertheless important, for Nimi a Lukeni’s (1380-1420) father was said to be a raider who had sought his fortune by reducing one or another local stronghold and demanding tribute’. . . .However, Thornton appears to have been reliant on the oral sources of Father Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo (1621-1678), an Italian Jesuit priest, sent to Angola by the Vatican, in his assessment of pre-colonial Kongo . . . The difficulty with Cavazzi’s oral sources lies in the fact that they were collected in the seventeenth century and translated from Kikongo (one of the Kongo languages) into Italian, his Native language; he would have been inclined to use terms such as ‘slave’ or servus (Latin for slave) in describing situations in which conquered Africans in Europe were obliged to offer slave labour to their conquerors. . . . Missionary sources such as those collected by Cavazzi cannot be viewed as reliable, given his Christian ideology, the fact that he was ignorant of local cultural practices and the language he used in rendering terms from Kikongo in Italian. . . .
[Portuguese King] Manuel also expected Afonso I to pay back the expenses incurred for the education of his children whom he had sent to Portugal previously. He stated:
‘And I remind him [Afonso] of the great expense that we make with the sending of these ships, friars and clerics and things that we have sent him and those that have gone before you, and so the expense that is made here [in Lisbon] for the maintenance and teaching of his children, for that he must load said ships as fully as he can.’
These ‘expenses’ included personnel, Portuguese soldiers’ wages and items stated in Manuel’s 1512 Regimento that were shipped to Kongo for Afonso I, such as: armas (firearms) and escudos darmas (coats of arms), o seello das armas (cell weapons), bamdeira das armas (flags bearing coats of arms), gemtes e armadas (soldiers), oficiaes macanicos (mechanical officers or armed engineers), hu letrado (a judge) frades e clerigos (priests; friars and clerics) and other material goods. . . . These items were to help Alfonso I set up his court along the lines of those kept by Christian monarchs in Europe, ‘as from the beginning of your Christendom, we hope that in those parts there a lot will follow in the service of Our Lord and the addition to his holy Catholic Faith. . . .
What was said during the embassy of Pedro, Afonso I of Kongo’s cousin, who was sent to Portugal as an ambassador between him and Manuel, we may never know. However, what is clear from that diplomatic correspondence is that the Crown wanted enslaved people, minerals and a trade monopoly between Kongo and Portugal. From Manuel’s brief there were many issues that were not included in the Regimento. They were left for the Crown’s envoy to communicate to Afonso I directly ‘for the King, you will tell him as we spoke here with Dom Pedro his cousin’ as soon as they arrive in Kongo, such as the intention that he be given firearms and their use “for him to be well informed of the foundation [reason] we have and for giving him the firearms’. It is clear from the Regimento that he was expected to use these gifts to establish his kingdom in the likeness of Portugal: the army and arsenal were to be used in accordance with Portuguese institutions and customs, including Christianity, the Church, defense, justice and governance.
Manuel made it clear that slave-capture and metals were the main purpose of his alliance with Kongo. In other words, the goal of the Crown was to gather slaves: ‘mainly, the ships [sent to Kongo] should return full of slaves and other merchandise’. Manuel went further in his pleas to Afonso I: ‘tell him [Afonso] if slaves are traded in his country then merchandise will be taken [from Portugal] to trade them’. The Crown also promised further aid, if Afonso I cooperated; Portugal would help him when he needed it. Manuel remarked ‘with great pleasure, you will always find help and favor from us.’ The aid he received from Portugal came about because of his commitment to Christianity ‘just as we usually give and send them to the Christian Kings and Princes.’ African kings who did not profess Christianity would not meet the criteria for aid ‘as for the heathens and non-Christian kings and princes we do not send them gifts or greetings’. Afonso’s war captives from part of his own kingdom (Ndongo) were to help him fulfill his obligation to Manuel. The description makes clear that the social division he made among the inhabitants of his kingdom was an attempt to protect his people from the vicious Portuguese slave trade. Afonso did not have enslaved people in his compound. He had to go and wage war against Matamba and Ndongo to get them for the Portuguese Crown. He was armed by the Crown, which expected him to act as Christian monarchs acted. It took Afonso two years to organize the trade in enslaved people for the Portuguese Crown.
The word terreyro that Hewood interprets as a market is ambiguous. It can mean a ‘square’ but this does not necessarily imply ‘market’ as Hewood suggests. Curto argues that Afonso I opened a market in Sao Tome, when in fact it was a Portuguese market. In fact, he sent his people there to ensure that people being stolen from his kingdom were not enslaved or made into war captives. Moirans points out that a just war did not take place in Africa. . . .
In my view, the changes in taxation introduced by governor Fernao de Sousa gave birth to slave-raiding. . . . Soba allies were obliged to pay the tax in the form of human bodies - that is, enslaved people. Since this tax system was not a viable method, they resorted to raiding people to pay the tax imposed on them. . . . What is new in my interpretation is the understanding that the new tax system in enslaved people was deliberately imposed by the Portuguese and became part of the constitution of the Municipal City Council of Luanda. Based on new primary sources, I uncovered this law and realized that the taxation system based on it was designed to be permanent in West Central Africa. pp 63-68
We must also bear in mind that the acquisition of enslaved Africans was not so straightforward a transaction as we have been led to believe. There were no markets in which natural-born or captured Africans could be bought as enslaved people in Angola in the seventeenth century; such markets were only found in Portugal, Brazil and the Americas. Those who have argued for the existence of markets in Angola - such as Heintze, Miller, Ferreira and Boxer - have missed the point since they were ignorant of the 1626 changes. Documentary sources available to us do not support their speculations. From the accounts of both Antonio Bezerra Fajardo and Frei Melchior da Conceicam, there is no reason to equate kitanda (feiras or markets) with a market at which enslaved people were to be found for sale. Angolan institutions and practices cannot be held responsible for the ruthless methods (including kidnapping) used by the Portuguese to capture people in the region. Furthermore, Mendonça’s claim in the Vatican refutes this interpretation. Angolans saw kitanda as places for the exchange of goods but never as marketplaces for the sale of human beings as a business in an open space. People in Angola who had been unjustly ‘convicted’ of a crime they did not commit, ‘snatched’, ‘kidnapped’ or ‘stolen’ from their families could not be stocked and sold in a public space. The testimonies of former enslaved Africans such as Equiano, Guguano, Baquaqua and so on tell us a different story; Mendonça’s court case gives us a different, more accurate understanding of what the enslavement of Africans in the region was like. Angolan markets such as those of “S. Jose do Ecncoje, Dondo, Lembo, Lucamba and Ambaka’s presidio were created by the Portuguese’. They were attached to local presidios (Portuguese outposts) and regulated by the authority in Luanda as well as their respective captains and captains-major. Early exchange of enslaved Africans was taking place in presidios. These forced negotiations between the Portuguese and their conquered allies’ sobas were carried out in the outposts. Even the sobas did not consent to them. pp. 69-70
Since historians do not understand the underlying mechanism of enslavement in West Central Africa, the central focus of their studies is on markets as places for the enslaved or at least places in which slavery transactions took place, rather than what they were: markets for exchange of local produce. The historians created the misleading idea of a society with slave markets, believed to be governed by sobas who were seen as willing to sell human beings as goods for a transnational market in the seventeenth century and rife in the eighteenth and nineteenth century Angolan society controlled by the armed Portuguese over conquered subjects - was overlooked. footnote 83 p. 70
After the Dutch occupation of Angola (1641-1648), there was a major shift in terms of the Portuguese military organizations in Angola. From 1666, each presidio - such as Mbaka, Cambambe, Massangano or Muxima - was composed of: one captain, one captain-major and twenty-five soldiers. They were manned with pumbeiros and Quimbar (a pejorative term used to describe ‘a half-civilized Black person’ that comes back to his village after living for sometimes in towns where the Portuguese were). . . . The court’s officials employed in these outposts were charged with the task of obtaining enslaved people from local sobas under the control of Portuguese outposts by false verdicts. These controlled sobas were obliged to accept ‘forced gifts’ or ‘buttering-up gifts’ such as ocombas (okombas) and ynfucas (infucas) from the captain and captain-major of the outposts. Ocombas and ynfucas are Kimbundu words. How these terms were used in a ‘disciplinary power’ on conquered sobas in Angola are described by Sousa himself, as stated by Brasio:
‘According to Fernaou de Sousa, ocombas [okombas] consists of a pearl of wine, cloth, or another good that the captain of the presidio [Portuguese outpost] send to sobas of his district, or any other White person similarly send to the soba, with the intention that the soba pay him back. They do it with the pretense of friendship and of a good relationship. According to the same Fernao de Sousa, another gift, Ynfutas [infutas] consists of selling the ‘forced gift’ or ‘buttering up gift’ to the sobas, with kind words and ways in which it does not appear to them that they will either pay or that they will not pay it later. They give them these goods either on request or by force, and then the time passes by, they then return to demand that these gifts be paid back, under the penalty of arresting their women, children and vassals (children of Morinda) who are free, and to sell them as slaves.’
Another Kimbundu term used in the period was encombros or emcombos, meaning a muted goat. . . .Emcombos, also known as emponda or mponda, was a traditional gift given to appease a person high in the hierarchy or establish a friendship with him/her. It was a form of a contract or testament that made an agreement binding and committed both parties to peaceful interaction. To make it legal and binding required the presence of high dignitaries such as ambassadors who were witnesses of the agreement and were responsible for taking the gift with them back to the king. . . . This was not a payment in enslaved people as the Portuguese made it to be when they came to dominate politics and the economy of the time for the people they conquered in Angola.
Customary practices such as ocombas and ynfucas used for building communities in West Central Africa were used by the Portuguese for their own ends. They appropriated these terms, which sounded natural to the Mbundu people, but the way they applied them changed the Angolans’ understanding of them. To the outside world these terms would appear to be used in accordance with Mbundu practices. However, they were taken out of context and used to serve a purpose for which they were not intended - to obtain slaves. The buying and selling of enslaved people was not an established practice; the Portuguese aligned their criminal acts with the Angolans’ cultural practices. P. 71-73
In its first contact with the region of West Central Africa, Portugal sought a contractual agreement: this led to the vassalship of conquered African rulers under legal, economic, and political systems already in existence in Europe. Dom Manuel’s brief to his counterpart Afonso I stated that: ‘we will send him our judge that administer legal proceedings in his Kingdoms in accordance with our system and in the same way this applies to things relating to war that they be carrying out in our manner from here.’ The legal system in West Central Africa was thus transformed. P. 74
To maintain trade and to continue the exploration of Angola, especially with regard to the exploitation of the region’s metal deposits (with silver being of particular importance), the Portuguese Crown needed to nurture a local labour force. However, the lucrative plantations of Brazil also required African labour. Angular and Brazil both held great potential for economic gain, and the Crown sought to maintain a fine balance between the two. In both regions, however, the governor’s interests lay primarily in creating personal wealth, which was done most quickly through the Atlantic slave trade. . . . Faria, a Portuguese economist of the seventeenth century, stated that the wealth accrued from Africa made it possible for the Crown in Portugal to conquer the Far East and Brazil. He declared:
‘It is of note to those who have news of business of this Kingdom [Portugal] that the concentration and rights of the Coast of Guinea have been for many years the principal Revenue of the Crown of Portugal, and with it has become wealthy. And it gave it leverage to conquer the Orient and the New World. With it came the right of the import from Cape Verde, and Rivers of Guinea, Mina, Sao Tome and ANgola nearing 200,000 per annum.’ p. 80
The demand for African labour in Brazil’s sugar plantations and for use in general agriculture and mining increased the incentive for war in Angola to supply Angolans for the slave market. P. 81
Correia de Sousa came to the realization that he was not going to succeed in exerting his will over Angola if he continued to seek approval for all his motions from the council, which prioritized its own interests. Instead, he turned to the army to be the enabler of his political will. Soldiers wielded great power in Angola thanks to their role in the region’s conquest. Significantly, their salary had often presented a stumbling block for many governors in Angola, as they were paid from the booty that came from war, conquered lands and captured people, often in local currencies . . . . Governors had generally been extremely accommodating of army demands, recognising the need to lubricate and continue the mechanism of conquest. The City Council simply did not have the economic resources to sustain the conquest without waging illegal wars on ordinary people, including those already considered allies of Portugal. p. 85
Let us now look at how the siege of Kazanze led to treachery being employed in capturing Angolans and turning them into slaves. The attack was what Heywood and Thornton described as a ‘violent and duplicitous war against Kazanze.’ . . . Correia de Sousa knew of the problems facing the army, and knew also that to survive and fulfill his economic ambitions, he required their support. His discontented soldiers needed reimbursement in the form of land, and the territory of neighboring Kazanze presented the perfect solution. . . . Correia de Sousa’s claim to ‘give Angola to God’ translated as an ambition to loot the lands, raid, kidnap and then send the people into slavery in Brazil, Sao Tome and the Spanish West Indies.
Correia de Sousa’s war was unjust, and based on an economic rationale, and not on the Kazanze people’s rejection of Christianity, which was the main condition for waging a ‘just war’ on them. . . . The considerable value of the Kazanze’s lands, rather than the pretext he claimed - that the people of Kazanze were rebellious and a threat to Portuguese existence in the region - provided the driving motive for Correia de Sousa’s war. Soon after the war, Correia de Sousa divided Kazanze land among his Portuguese soldiers: ‘twelve leagues around Luanda were cleared and divided among veteran soldiers, so that they might till it, which will be of great benefit to the state’. The Kanzanze case, in which 1,211 people were rounded up and kidnapped, including children and women, is used here as an optic through which to comprehend the call for justice and application of law in the Atlantic, particularly with regard to the capture of enslaved people. p. 86-87
[Correia de Sousa] therefore invaded the lands of the king he was charged with serving, and hence breached the law that governed his tenure in Luanda. By declaring Kazanze a land belonging to the king of Spain, he also rendered it a Christian land, which should never have been subjected to war by the Portuguese. This makes sense of Mendonça’s claim in the Vatican that enslaved Africans in Brazil and the Americas, such as those from Kazanze, were already Christians. . . . Suffice it to say here that most of the Africans shipped to Brazil as slaves were not slaves at all, but were likewise ‘Christian’ people captured under the same circumstances as the Kazanze.
By his own account of the attack on Kazanze, Correia de Sousa appears to have used African war tactics and Angolan mercenaries to starve the enemy and force them to surrender. According to his report and as documented in a map from 1623, he encircled Kazanze with five ditches, in which he stationed five captains and sergeants. He ordered all the captains and their soldiers to cut down the trees with axes, sickles and cleavers to allow their ‘arrows to reach the enemies’. According to the battle report, the Kazanze defended themselves, wounding between twenty-five and thirty Portuguese soldiers and Angolan mercenaries. Many Kanzanze soldiers surrendered, and the Kazanze [chief] fled with five of his sobas; he was later captured and brought to Luanda. Correia de Sousa interrogated them there and, having extracted important information, ordered the beheading of the ‘Kazanze’ [chief] and two sobas for their role in ‘robbing properties in Tombo’. ‘They were brought to Luanda, where they were decapitated publicly for justice, with two other sobas allies. P. 89
Correia de Sousa’s demand for an election was in fact a deception. He called the macotas (elders or councilors) of Kazanze to Luanda to perform the ceremony there. They went in good faith, but on arrival found there was to be no election. . . . He used treachery to detain them. When they arrived, he had them rounded up and put on a ship to Brazil to become the subjects of Governor Diogo de Mendonça of Salvador, Bahia. The murinda (ordinary subjects) were then called to Luanda under the pretext of the election. All the murinda (a total of 1,211) were forced to board five ships hired by Correia de Sousa and sent to Brazil. Many of them were children and elderly men and women. Almost half of them - a total of 583 - died onboard due to the appalling and inhumane conditions. . . . Their death was beyond doubt caused by Correia de Sousa’s treachery. pp. 90-91
The case of the war in Kazane and the exile of its inhabitants to Brazil as enslaved people by Correia de Sousa in 1622 is key in enabling us to understand the socio-political environment in which Portuguese slave-trading developed in Angola, and the wider practice of slave-trading unfurled in the Atlantic. It also highlighted the raiding, kidnap and treachery used to capture ordinary people. It was in this context that Mendonça contextualized and refined his anti-slavery statement. The idea of so-called African slavery - that is, the idea that Africans were complicit in slavery - has overshadowed cases such as Kazanze’s, which is just one example among many. p. 90
Aside from Correia de Sousa’s own account, the most valuable insight into the war waged on Kazanze comes from the Catholic priests working in Angola and Kongo at the time. After the enslavement of the Kazanze, they launched an appeal at the High Court of Appeal, describing what Correia de Sousa had done. . . . All the High Court appeals argued strongly against the invasion as an unjust act and claimed that there was no justification for the exile of the Kazane people and their sobas to Salvador, Bahia. . . All the High Court Appeal writers claimed that Correia de Sousa had constructed the invasion to suit his own interests. pp. 91-92
From the evidence of [Cardoso’s report], there is a clear indication that the enslavement of the Kazane was illegal, the war against them was neither “just’ nor legal and the killing of their leaders was motivated by economic interest. . . . The individuals captured in Kazane and taken to the Americas as enslaved people were ordinary civilians, not given the protection that would have been offered to soldiers, who would come under the category of kijiko. p. 93
The Jesuit High Court of Appeal hearing states that:
‘... the vassals of Kazanze were in our allegiance, in our settlement . . . .he hired five ships and filled them with those miserable people, who came to show their allegiance; he sent them to Brazil . . . [and] left their land depopulated, without a sign of people.” pp 93-94
Crucially, the war against the Kazanze demonstrates the injustices of slavery, and how the wars used in the period to justify the enslavement of Africans were based on a fraudulent claim. . . . Moreover there is very little evidence of the already preposterous argument of a ‘just war’ being fought by Kongo and Angola, to justify the capture of people who were then enslaved. The decision to enter into war with Angolans was made unilaterally by the governor and the Municipal Council of Luanda, without consultation with the Crown in Madrid, and the grounds necessary to declare a ‘just war’, as prescribed by the Crown, were starkly absent. . . . Moreover, the substance of Madrid’s orders to the governors of Angola was that war could only be declared if Angolans were preventing the preaching of the Gospel. . . . Correia de Sousa had, in effect, violated the law set by the pope and the kings of Portugal and Spain. In Salvador, Bahia, judges were brought to give their view on the legality of the situation. Their view was clear: the exile and enslavement of the Kazanze was illegal, the captives were to be returned to Angola, and His Majesty must order Correia de Sousa to pay for their return with his own money. . . . Correia de Sousa claimed that the Kazanze were legally the spoils of war - that is to say, war captives. In other words, they were all runaway slaves: ‘for all of these persons [Kazanze], for reason of war and justice, they are slaves, if they did not come, they [soldiers] would have been obliged to enter to their forest and for not being killed, they have chosen the remedy by giving themselves up without any party’. pp 96-100
ARE BLACK PEOPLE IN AMERICA STILL PRISONERS OF WAR IF THEY HAVE VOTED?
"Resistance generally begins with the desire of individuals to remove intolerable conditions imposed by an unpopular regime. Feelings of opposition towards the governing authority and hatred of existing conditions that conflict with the individuals values, interests, aspirations and desired way of life spread from the individual to his family, close friends and neighbors. In the 1950s and 60s, this was exactly the case for 'Black people' towards the insitutionalized racism, 'Jim Crowism', and second-class status that had long been imposed by the oppressor-state social order. Rosa Parks felt that to have to surrender her bus seat to a white male was intolerable. The Deacons for Defense regarded systmatic Klan murders, bombings and beatings of the people to be intolerable. The men and women who joined Huey Newton and Bobby Seale to form the Black Panther Party had determined that racist police oppression and brutality was intolerable. {Note: Siphiwe Baleka felt that being forced to pay income taxes to a fraudulent IRS was intolerable and thus he stopped paying taxes. He felt an undignified life in the USA was so intolerable he left and moved to his ancestral homeland of Guinea Bissau. He felt the lack of international recognition of New Afrikan rights to self determination was intolerable so he accepted to serve as the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Provisional Government of New Afrika.] A significant problem for the New Afrikan Independence Movement today is that New Afrikan people, for the most part, do not perceive either their personal or their collective condition as 'intolerable'. In fact, since the 1980s, the paramilitary style police intimidation/repression campaign that begun with COINTELPRO (Phase One) has escalated to the degree that rampant killing of New Afrikan males by police as a matter of policy is viewed to be routine. It is an irony that our people hled conditions to be intolerable which have subsequently worsened, and that they now find not merely tolerable, but actually, of little or no cause for concern. A significant part of this problem has been an underdeveloped understanding of war and warfare on the part of our people in general and our nationalist leadership in particular . . . . The facts are that New Afrikans are still enslaved, and have no control of the major factors that govern their lives. . . . It is imperative that we undertake a major campaign to make self-determination a cause that is compelling or which seems compelling enough to motivate sufficient numbers of New Afrikans to act assertively in its support. It is our task to convince the New Afrikan people that they have nothing to lose and more to gain by rejecting oppressor-state domination over their lives and futures, and establishing independence. This belief system will not come to the people on its own, and will especially not even be considered by them as long as the oppressor-state's information warfare machine is allowed to run un-checked." - from the New Afrikan Military Science Institute, The Strategic Communications Campaign and Narratives for Information Battles, MSI 2-2 21 November 2010
On June 18, 1452, Pope Nicholas the V issued the Dum Diversas Apostolic Edict declaring war on the people living on the African continent. This initiated the invasions and warfare that resulte in 12 million people being enslaved in the Americas. The trafficking of these prisoners of war was deliberately called the “Trans Atlantic Slave Trade” in order to disguise it as a matter of commerce and not warfare. Rather then admit that prisoners of war were being trafficked and enslaved, they created the narrative that slaves were being bought and sold as new products using the trademarks “slaves”, “negroes”, and “blacks”. The truth is, they were prisoners of war!
The 1949 Geneva Convention: Article 4 (1) defines prisoners of war and Article 5 states, “the present Convention shall apply to the persons referred to in Article 4 from the time they fall into the power of the enemy and
until their final release and repatriation”
Now ask yourself: have you been released from alien domination? Do you still live in the territory and jursidction of a government created and dominated by an alien people? Have you been returned or repatriated to your ancestral homeland? Were you ever given a choice? Under international law, you still have the status of a prisoner of war until these things happen or you waive your right to claim the prisoner of war status.
Now, if you ask most black people in America if the are citizens of the United States (and hence NOT prisoners of war), they well say, often proudly, yes, I am a citizen of the United States. If you ask them why, they will say “because I have the right to vote”. A few may also mention the 14th Amendment and state that they have a US passport! Some will even boast that they served in the military!
However, even the United States government admits that they can’t positively answer the question regarding the citizenship of black Americans!!!
The US Government has stated in the Brief in Support of Motion to Quash Indictment for Lack of Jurisdiction Under Article III, U.S. Constitution Brought by the Defendant (Imari Obadele and Gaidi Obadele) that
"the issue of whether black folks now within the United States have ever been converted, in accordance with settled principles of universally established law, into United States citizens, and divested altogether of their original foreign African nationality". . . . "is a matter of law."
Recently, a reparations activist in Guyana made the following statement in a WhatsApp forum: "you have voted and hence have voluntarily accepted [that] you are a citizen....prisoners of war don't vote....." In response, I quoted the author of the New Afrikan Military Sciene Institute MSI 2-2 Report (2010): who recently discussed this issue with me:
"To more particularly articulate the point regarding consent, consider:
I did not give my consent to be part of the the polity, US or USA, therefore, imposed exercise of power against my choice or will constitutes force/duress. To employ force to control someone is compelled performance, by definition of US law. Compelled performance is defined as involuntary servitude, which is defined as slavery, which is a violation of the laws of the United States and most State republics. Now, the law , which protects rights of the individual, restrains the imposition of force except in "due process" of law (and a process was established). However, this applies because the people of the polity have all agreed, i.e. given their consent that this is the system and that they are all compliant with it. Now, when people immigrate to this country with minor children, they may get Green Card and then citizenship, and all is well. But, when the child is no longer minor but attains the age 21, he or she must obtain a Green Card and go through the process, or be deported (here unlawfully). I have actually seen this done. It is interesting because, when slaves were purportedly freed, they were never asked (except by Sherman) if they wanted to participate. Matters not how many times your father and mother voted, the logic of the polity's system suggests that upon reaching 21 years of age, you should have been put to question regarding your choice. Why??? "Scott vs Sanford!" At the founding of this polity African descendants, whether free or enslaved, were not considered a part of the polity. At no point have Blacks ever been considered as part of the Founding polity. You are included under the operation of law, 'failure to rebut'. Of course without your full knowledge of the terms such a contract is voidable. Because of Chief Justice Taney's very articulate dissertation in Scott, the 14th Amendment was deemed necessary to create a legal status for Blacks. This is not my opinion, its history. Our history, which the Creed reminds Us of, holds all of the legal points when We recognize contract law and its operation on or condition.”
That said, please read:
WHAT EVERY AFRICAN AMERICAN MUST CONSIDER BEFORE VOTING IN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS
and
The African American Case for Independence at the International Court of Justice
and
NEW AFRIKAN INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENT AND HUMAN RIGHTS: Statement to the 20th session of the UN Intergovernmental Working Group on the Effective Implementation of the Durban Declaration
WORLD AQUATICS AND THE GUINEA BISSAU NATIONAL OLYMPIC COMMITTEE: FRAUD, THEFT, DISCRIMINATION & CORRUPTION - ILLEGAL PAYMENTS!!!!
May 27, Bissau - President of the Guinea Bissau Swimming Federation (FNGB), Siphiwe Baleka, received evidence today that Sergio Mane, President of the Guinea Bissau National Olympic Committee and Mr. Duarte Ioia, received an illegal payment from World Aquatics in the amount of $17,500. This despite the fact that it is almost exactly two years since World Aquatics (previously known as FINA) opened an investigation “to clarify key issues related to the Guinea Bissau Swimming Federation, such as the legitimacy and current composition of its governing body” and was later informed that on November 6, 2023, FNGB Secretary General Daiana Taborda Gomes filed criminal complaint at the the Public Ministry of Bissau Regional Court, Crime Branch alleging that someone used the name of the FNGB to open account at the Bank Atlantique Guine Bissau and began to benefit from some transfers from World Aquatics (International Swimming Federation) which amounts to theft from the FNGB.
“World Aquatics has all the documentation showing both the legality of the swimming federation of which I am President and the criminal actions of Mr. Sergio Mane, President of the Guinea Bissau National Olympic Committee and his accomplice, Mr. Duarte Ioia, who are committing fraud and theft pretending to be the legally-registered swimming federation,” said FNGB President Baleka. “World Aquatics is now complicit in this crime since it refuses to stop payment or send a stabilization team to Guinea Bissau like it did for Kenya.”
In an email to World Aquatics on April 2, President Baleka pointed out:
‘1. It has been 674 days since your letter of May 29, 2022 informing us of FINA, now World Aquatics' investigation "to clarify key issues related to the Guinea Bissau Swimming Federation, such as the legitimacy and current composition of its governing body." On August 16, 2022, you emailed, “FINA has reviewed all the documents and other information you have sent us and will include this information in its overall assessment of the [FNGB] situation. Currently, the whole matter is awaiting the FINA Bureau's consideration and decision. Once a decision has been made, FINA will inform you immediately.” Finally, you responded on April 21, 2023 “we will contact you if ever we require further information and/or if a decision is rendered.” No results of any investigation or final determination has been communicated to the FNGB.
2. It has been 634 days since a judicial process was initiated at the Regional Court of Bissau (Distribution No. 633/2022) to determine who is legally-authorized to govern aquatic sports in the Republic of Guinea Bissau and there has been no action in the case due to the broken and dysfunctional judicial system in the country. Judge Infanta was suspended on suspicion of corruption, and left the country for a long time.
3. It has been 238 days since a letter was delivered to Domingos Monteiro Correia, National Director of the Judiciary Police at Marien Ngouaby Street in Guinea Bissau starting a criminal investigation involving Sergio Mane, President of the National Olympic Committee (COGB) and Mr. Duarte Ioia (whom FINA was investigating), both of whom committed the crimes of fraud, discrimination, theft and perjury.
4. It has been 148 days since FNGB Secretary General Daiana Taborda Gomes filed criminal complaint at the the Public Ministry of Bissau Regional Court, Crime Branch alleging that someone used the name of the legally-registered FNGB to open account at the Bank Atlantique Guine Bissau - a process that can only be done by providing the registration documents of the FNGB which are in possession of FNGB Secretary General Daiana Taborda Gomes - and began to benefit from some transfers from World Aquatics which amounts to theft from the FNGB.
5. Meanwhile, World Aquatics has allowed the participation of a 28-year old swimmer from Guinea Bissau with 287 World Aquatics Points entered by Mr. Duarte Ioia (under criminal investigation) at the World Championships in both Doha and Fukuoka. In Fukuoka, the swimmer was disqualified in the 100 M Freestyle and finished 115th out of 116 athletes in the 50 M Freestyle with a time of 30.63. There was no national selection process to determine who would represent the country at the World Championships. There was only a private arrangement whereby the nephew of a friend of the President of the COGB was entered to compete. As a result, every swimmer in Guinea Bissau was discriminated against, including the country's best swimmer with a time of 25.37 and 559 World Aquatics Points.
6. Section 8.3 of the World Aquatics Constitution states: "The Bureau shall have the power to suspend or expel a Member if
a) the Member does not comply with its obligations towards World Aquatics;
b) the Member significantly violates this Constitution or the World Aquatics Rules;
c) according to the respective general assembly of a Member, the Member has lost its status as a National Body representing Aquatics in its country;
d) the Member is unable to preserve its independence for reasons beyond its control (e.g. in case of undue governmental interference);
e) the Member acts in a manner contrary to any of World Aquatics' objectives;
f) or in the view of the Bureau, other important reasons justify a suspension or an expulsion.
For the reasons above, as the legally-registered swimming federation recognized by the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Sport in the Republic of Guinea Bissau (see attached documents), we hereby request, as there has been "no final determination" in your investigation of the situation in Guinea Bissau, and now that it has become a criminal matter within the country and national team selection is now a discriminatory private arrangement, that World Aquatics issue a sanction against Mr. Duarte Ioia and his group with a complete ban from all of World Aquatics competitions and events, including the upcoming Olympic Games in Paris, for all of the reasons listed in section 8.3 of the World Aquatics Constitution. This would be consistent with World Aquatics' action last year in the case of the Kenyan Swimming Federation. We would welcome a Stabilization Committee to come to Guinea Bissau. Finally, we request that Guinea Bissau athletes be permitted to compete at World Aquatics events under a neutral flag until there is a just final determination.”
The following week, President Baleka was interviewed by the media in Guinea Bissau:
April 10, 2024 Interview with O Democrata newspaper
[INTERVIEW- article translation from the original Portuguese] Siphiweka Baleka, a North-American-Guinean athlete, who represents the national colors in swimming, denounced the existence of a “spider web” of corruption, discrimination and fraud in the swimming federation and at the level of the Guinea Olympic Committee -Bissau, stating that he was the target of betrayal and discrimination in the swimming federation.
“Despite the discrimination and betrayal I was subjected to and the leaders of the federation and the Olympic Committee committed a crime of perjury in international justice to penalize me, I have never regretted choosing Guinea-Bissau, because I am here to fulfill a mission of my ancestors. No matter how complicated this mission is, has risks and all the constraints of this world, I will continue to fight for the swimming federation”, said the athlete, revealing that he was the victim of crimes of fraud, betrayal, discrimination, incompetence and impunity that currently register with the swimming federation in Guinea-Bissau.
Swimmer Siphiweka Baleka is an American athlete who decided to look for his roots in Guinea-Bissau, which through DNA analysis was discovered to belong to the Balanta ethnic group.
The athlete was seen for the first time on the podium at the Men's International Swimming Championship, held in Egypt in October 2019, with the flag of Guinea-Bissau, which read BALANTA and painted his body with paintings from the Balanta ethnic group, that is, from 'Nghayé'. Baleka dominated that championship and won three gold medals in three events.
ATHLETE ACCUSES SÉRGIO MANÉ AS A GREATEST STRANGULATION TO THE MODALITY THAT THE OLYMPIC COMMITTEE REPRESENTS
Siphiweka Baleka stated that he is no longer willing to work with Duarte Ioia and Sérgio Mané, not today, not tomorrow, not ever, because they are “persona non grata”, having pointed out Sérgio Mané as a stranglehold on the sport that the Olympic Committee represents, in particular to the swimming federation.
“I have sent letters to Duarte, the minister of sports and Sérgio himself asking for mediation and reconciliation, but the latter never deigned to respond to a single letter from me. After the legalization of the swimming federation, we requested to participate in a tournament in zone II of West Africa, but Sérgio Mané blocked our attempt and called me an American citizen”, he reported.
In the letter dated April 21, 2022, addressed to the Secretary General of the African Swimming Confederation, Mohamed Diop, the Guinea-Bissau Olympic Committee said it was following with concern the attempt to destabilize the Federation by an American citizen , Siphiweka Baleka, who acquired the Bissau-Guinean nationality that he intended to represent at the Tokyo Olympics, because “he did not understand the eligibility criteria that would allow him to participate in the games”.
In the same letter, the Committee stated that it did not recognize “an entity other than the one headed by Duarte Ioia, whose composition of bodies was with the International Swimming Federation”.
On this subject, Siphiweka Baleka said that Sérgio Mané's attitude reveals how serious the discrimination he suffered from him is and the losses he had to accept because of a person who does not see him progressing in the swimming federation, remembering that he does not committed no fraud or crime to obtain Guinean nationality, but said he assumed that this struggle was not only due to the fact that he was an American citizen, but rather that he identified with the Balanta ethnic group in Guinea-Bissau.
“Sérgio Mané and Mohamed Diop know each other very well and it must have been easy to manipulate him with false information about me and when we traveled to Senegal he simply blocked our participation. If I had participated in Senegal's event with the same time as Ghana's, I would have gotten a medal. It was in the Dakar competition that Pedro Rogeri, 25 years old, was called for the first time to compete for Guinea-Bissau”, he indicated.
Siphiweka Baleka revealed that in the first event in which Pedro Rogeri participated, he was in the last three positions on the list of competitors, did not bring any medal and swam seven seconds later than him, an eternity, which reveals that he has no future.
He said he was stopped, because if he had had the opportunity to represent the country at the Olympic Games, he would have been in the eyes of the international media and would have revealed the strangulations, erotic behavior of managers and the difficulties that athletes in this sport face and this would expose Sérgio Mané.
“But that wasn’t what was at stake. My participation at my age would draw the world's attention and attract investors, but the lack of vision of some managers put me on the inside,” she lamented.
He stated that if he were recognized and if he were entrusted with the leadership of the federation, he would first work to get FINA to recognize him, because with this recognition the federation would benefit from a support program of 30 thousand dollars to scout for new talents throughout the territory. national, organize the first internal competition, mobilize funds from its contacts to finance the sport and support the complete training of 20 athletes, 10 boys and 10 girls who would compete in the next world tournament and the next Olympic games, as well as building a swimming pool quality for internal competitions.
He revealed that he had drawn up a five-year plan that was submitted to the general director of sport and accused Sérgio Mané of hijacking his vision and plans for the swimming sector, because “where do funds come from to take Pedro two more people to compete in a single event, stay in a renowned hotel for six days, including full meals, without results?”
“If it were me, it would have been different. At 50 years of age, I could enter six races and win at least two important medals. Since 1996, Sérgio Mané has always been secretary or president of the Committee. Almost thirty years later, he has had or brought tangible results to the country,” he criticized and said that statistically, the country's participation in world championships and Olympic games is critical.
“In 1996, Guinea-Bissau took three athletes to the Olympic Games, in 2000 three, 2004 three, 2008 three, 2012 four, 2016 five and in 2021 four”, he indicated, highlighting that statistics reveal that there has been no improvement in this sector and that Sérgio Mané put the country in a bad light, because “it is not fair that a person who has not had any performance for almost 30 years remains at the head of the Committee”.
“In Tokyo, the country was represented by 4 athletes plus 12 people. Where did the money come from to support these people’s expenses and vacations? Every four years for almost 30 years, Sérgio just went on vacation, for a walk. He is a member of the federation of Olympic committees that hold their general assemblies each year, which are also holidays. I doubt that the Olympic Committee does not receive money from the International Olympic Committee on behalf of each Federation created. Money that should have been channeled to each federation to execute its program. He never carried out a single activity in Guinea-Bissau. If it's a lie, submit reports. Who received the thirty thousand dollars from the swimming federation, a new federation within the committee? It’s a question that remains for whoever wants to answer them, but I’m sure that Sérgio is capable of anything, of taking the money for his personal interest,” he said.
“IN ADDITION TO BEING OF GUINEASE DESCENDANT, THE GOVERNMENT WANTED HIM TO COMPETE FOR GUINEA-BISSAU”
He revealed that the letter from the Ministry of Justice that approved the naturalization contained two reasons, firstly because he is a Guinean descendant of the Balanta ethnic group, secondly because it was in the national interest for him to represent Guinea-Bissau and he challenged the national authorities to clarify who has the legitimacy to lead the federation.
“We have a certificate from the Ministry of Justice that recognizes us as representatives of the federation, also from the Ministry of Youth, Culture and Sports, only the Olympic Committee has been outside of all guidelines, due to signs of corruption. The Committee filed a complaint against me, but so far there has been no decision, because the judge handling the case was being accused of corruption in another case and left the country. There is impunity and lack of justice,” he said.
Siphiweka Baleka said that she filed a criminal complaint with the International Sports Court based in Switzerland, against the president of the Guinea-Bissau Olympic Committee and that of the Swimming Federation, Sérgio Mané and Duarte Ioia respectively, for being complicit in the registration of the Guinean athlete, Pedro Rogeri, who participated, on behalf of Guinea-Bissau, in the last swimming world championship in Doha, Qatar.
He said that he has been a victim, for two years, of discrimination and attempted exclusion by the directors of the Swimming Federation and the Olympic Committee, remembering that, as a national athlete, his rights were violated and prevented from competing for Guinea-Bissau.
Siphiweka Baleka said he was surprised why, as interim president of the federation, he was not informed of Pedro Rogeri's call to represent the country in an international event without his knowledge and accused Duarte Ioia and Sérgio Mané of complicity in the appointment of this 25-year-old athlete. age.
“In a country where rules and institutions work, before nominating an athlete to represent their country, there must first be a national championship to choose the best and fastest athletes in this sport. If there was an intention to nominate him, why wasn't I contacted? What criteria were used that led to the choice of Pedro Rogeri? All of this leads me to conclude that I am being discriminated against, which is why I filed a complaint against these gentlemen”, he clarified.
In the interview, he displayed several documents, including one where the invitation to come and represent Guinea-Bissau was formulated and that he would have all the necessary support to do so and the letter from the Olympic Committee which was addressed on the same day and signed by Sérgio Mané, president of the organization.
The naturalized Guinean athlete, who represented Guinea-Bissau twice, in Egypt in a qualifying tournament for the Tokyo Olympics and in the 14th edition of the African competition tournament in Ghana, revealed that the two entities had made a commitment to help him. you to achieve your goals, Tokyo Olympics.
“It was at that time that the former Secretary of State for Sports, Dionísio do Reino Pereira, sent me a letter informing me that my naturalization process had been started so that I could compete in the Tokyo Olympic Games”, he clarified.
He informed that after all the promises he received from the national authorities and from Duarte Ioia and Sérgio Mané, he publicly expressed, in the United States of America, his intention to take up residence in Guinea-Bissau and, in two weeks, after the announcement, practically dominated the covers of the American sports press and The dropped the Sport to Drive Semis, which led a group of people and the Association of North American Retirees to announce support for his decision.
“After this announcement, I went on television in a national program seen by many people. It was then that I received several sponsorship proposals, including a ten thousand dollar contract signed with a group of American retirees”, he said, clarifying that they knew it would not be easy to get a gold medal in this competition, but they still bet on me. person and I was the subject of news in the local media, because I would be the oldest swimmer in Olympic history at fifty years of age, the first African American to represent his country of origin in the Olympic Games and above all, the first Guinean athlete to represent the country at the Olympic Games.
“There would be three of my legacies that would attract funds to Guinea-Bissau. It was precisely this that motivated many people to announce support and investments and I decided to leave my family, a wife and my two children, and my company to take up residence here in Bissau. The contract with the retiree would be to prepare a documentary of my entire preparation, from the United States of America, Guinea-Bissau and up to the Olympic Games. After the Olympic Games, the documentary would be released followed by a series of interviews and speeches around the world, to show my performance that despite being fifty years old I still have the physical conditions to compete at a high level. The documentary had been paid for and each interview would also be paid for by the retirees”, he clarified and said that he had received, under this contract, an estimated amount of six thousand dollars, which he invested in his trip and in the first weeks of his stay in Guinea-Bissau. .
According to Siphiweka Baleka, the remaining amount was blocked because he had not participated in the Tokyo Olympics, not because of incapacity and because he also concluded that at the organizational level, the country had not done anything for an athlete of his level, there are no swimming pools for his preparation, remembering that in order to participate it was necessary for the country to submit a request for Universality and it did so, for the first time, on June 17, 2021 with the signatures of Duarte Ioia and Sérgio Mané and it was submitted on June 27, 2021. same year, it was submitted before the deadline.
He said he was surprised by the decision of the International Swimming Federation (FINA), because the event in which he would participate was not a competition that gave access to qualification for the Olympic Games, which is why the document was rejected and rejected.
He maintained that in order not to miss this opportunity he had to respond in a hurry before the 27th of June, the deadline, so that he could participate on the 26th of the same month in Ghana in one of the events that would give the country a passport to the Olympic Games, because he wants Neither Duarte Ioia nor Aniceto Bernardo speak French or English.
For Siphiweka Baleka, these constraints reveal that the two have no experience in swimming nor contacts in regional, continental and international organizations, remembering that the contacts and their own intention for Guinea-Bissau began when in 2019 they won, in a personal capacity, at an event held in Egypt, he received six gold medals, displaying the flag of Guinea-Bissau, which led the newspaper O Democrat to choose him as Figure of the Week in one of its editions.
“After my participation in this event, I met people, made contacts and at the next event, a national competition, I asked to be allowed to represent Guinea-Bissau. My 2019 performance influenced the organizers. The Egyptian federation asked the Guinea-Bissau federation to send my registration form that I could participate in Egypt and that's where I met Duarte Ioia and Sérgio Mané. They gave me the email and pass to fill out the document that accredited me as a Guinean athlete. I went and competed”, he stated and stressed that after the country submitted the second registration, FINA rejected it with the argument that the deadline for depositing the Universality registration was the 20th, not the 27th of June 2021.
“On all FINA platforms there was no deadline of June 20th, only the 27th. I asked Sérgio Mané that we appeal to a court against FINA's behavior because the deadline of the 20th was not on any of that organization's platforms, but it didn't help. My whole life, family, business depended on my participation in the Tokyo Olympics and because it was also our right to complain about what FINA was doing to penalize Guinea-Bissau and me”, he revealed.
The athlete informed that after all this story, he consulted the FINA documents and discovered that he alone, without the Swimming Federation, could file a lawsuit and he did so with the help of some of his fans, because he needed a thousand dollars and in The next phase of the process would have to pay 20 thousand dollars, which were assumed by a production company that would have the right to make a documentary about the athlete about his life and his participation in Tokyo and part of this documentary would be from Guinea-Bissau, including all necessary details.
“It was a case against FINA, not the Guinea-Bissau Olympic Committee. All parties had to present evidence and at the evidence discovery session, a letter appeared from the Swimming Federation of Guinea-Bissau written in French saying that, from June 21st to July 8th, the federation's email had been violated and that it was not the federation that had control of the mail. FINA asked for information about the email violation, so far it has not received anything from Duarte or Sérgio,” he said.
According to the athlete, it was at that time that the Court announced that it would publish its decision on July 28, two days before his first competition in Tokyo, so he had to be in Japan beforehand and if the decision was favorable he could compete, but given the situation of the Covid-19 pandemic he had difficulties, but thanks to his supporters he managed to pay for his trip.
“I was accredited as a Guinean athlete, because the Guinea-Bissau Olympic Committee had included my name on the national caravan list. In Tokyo, I was not allowed to travel because my badge had been cancelled. I remained there for six days at the airport on my own, waiting for the day of judgment, which unfortunately was not in my favor. No one from Guinea-Bissau intervened to resolve my situation”, he reported.
He admitted that one of the reasons that led him to lose justice are two letters, one of nullity of all documents and another of violation of the e-mail, sent by the Committee to FINA, but he seems reticent about the legality of the decision and the clarity of the process, because “how do Sérgio Mané and Duarte Ioia explain their signatures on one of the documents that call my evidence into question, above all original signatures with stamps in use at that institution, they only know about the email violation?” .
He said he did not doubt that the fraud started in Guinea-Bissau with the complicity of the three elements, namely Duarte Ioia, Sérgio Mané and Aniceto José Bernardo, however he cleared Duarte Ioia of this matter because he did not have knowledge of technology.
He accused Sérgio Mané of having instructed Duarte to act in this way against himself and commit perjury before the courts, stating that despite his complicity in the case, Duarte Ioia humbly decided to apologize to him, because “he was embarrassed by everything that happened around me, he took responsibility for the history of Japan and helped me compete at a continental level so that I could have access to the world swimming tournament that would be in October 2021.”
“After my participation in the tournament in Ghana, Duarte Ioia made his position available on October 25, 2021 and appointed me as the interim president of the Swimming Federation until the organization's General Assembly takes place. The federation didn't even have a legal personality, it was just on paper and it seemed that the support Duarte received from the Olympic Committee was legitimate. When I took on the role on an interim basis, I informed the minister of sports and FINA that we were in a process of revitalizing the organization and renewing the social bodies”, he indicated.
He said that it was from that moment that he knew that nothing had been done internally about swimming and he committed himself to legalizing the federation in Guinea-Bissau and, consequently, FINA, but surprisingly he received a letter from Duarte Ioia saying that he had resumed the its functions, because “I was unable to fulfill my promise to organize the organization’s statutes and hold the General Assembly”.
One of the arguments presented by Duarte Ioia to make his position available to which O Democrat had access in one of the documents he consulted is that he would appoint Siphiweka Baleka as interim president, submitting his figure for approval by the competent bodies.
In reaction, the athlete revealed that he managed to draw up the statutes that were entered on January 29, 2022, as well as holding the General Assembly in March of the same year, one of his missions.
It should be noted that the sports section and the editorial team of O Democrat contacted the general secretary of the Guinea-Bissau Olympic Committee, Eugénio de Oliveira Lopes, to react to the allegations that were made, but he told us that he would need to contact the president first of the body, Sérgio Mané, before reacting.
By: Filomeno Sambú
Photo: Aguinaldo Ampa
Having received no justice from either the Republic of Guinea Bissau or World Aquatics, President Baleka filed a case at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (see below).
For an exhaustive documentation of the conflict, fraud, theft, discrimination and perjury committed by Mr. Sergio Mane and Mr. Duarte Ioia, see:
Will Siphiwe Baleka and the Guinea Bissau Swimming Federation be Blocked from the Olympics Again?
Update: While writing this post, World Aquatics sent the following message:
PGRNA Minister of Foreign Affairs Siphiwe Baleka discussed the UN Permanent Forum and the Request for an Advisory Opinion from the ICJ on the 𝑹𝒆𝒑𝒂𝒓𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒔 𝑵𝒐𝒘 podcast
May 26 - PGRNA Minister of Foreign Affairs Siphiwe Baleka discussed the UN Permanent Forum and the Request for an Advisory Opinion from the ICJ.on the 𝑹𝒆𝒑𝒂𝒓𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒔 𝑵𝒐𝒘 podcast sponsored by Reparations United.
The Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika addressed the Afrodescendant Nation National Reparations Convention in Washington, D.C.
May 18 , Washington D.C. - Siphiwe Baleka, Minister of Foreign Affairs for the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika, addressed the National Reparations Convention held at the Lincoln Temple United Church , 1701 11th Street, NW Washington D.C. Esteemed leaders, scholars, and diplomats from Reparations Organizations joined in solidarity, unity, and dedication to the pursuit of Self Determination.
Minister Baleka’s presentation during the convention was five minutes and can be viewed at the 1:33.00 mark.. Below is the complete, unedited thirteen minute presentation by Minister of Foreign Affairs SIphiwe Baleka.
ADDRESS TO THE
ADN NATIONAL REPARATIONS CONVENTION
It is an honor and privilege to join you all at this historic reparations convention. I am Siphiwe Baleka, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika which was founded when over 500 delegates attended the National Black Government Conference sponsored by the Malcolm X Society and declared Independence for the black New Afrikan nation on March 31, 1968.
The founding fathers have always emphasized that we are seeking reparations for War damages. The war against our ancestors was initiated by a declaration of war issued by Pope Nicholas the V on June 18, 1452 which authorized the invasion of our homelands on the African continent. Our ancestors were captured, trafficked as prisoners of war, and subjected to chattel enslavement that resulted in ethnocide - the destruction of our ancestral identities - and the loss of our sovereignty. These are the first two damages of war that must be repaired. The war was then continued by legislation introduced into the British colonies in the Americas, and then continued by the Constitution of the United States of America. By the time of the Civil War the enslaved Africans had simultaneously suffered ethnocide while at the same time experienced ethnogenesis - the mixing of various African genetic material into new combinations along with a unique shared heritage born from their brutal chattel enslavement - hence the birth of a New Afrikan nation. After Emancipation, the war was continued against the New Afrikan nation when a coup assassinated President Lincoln and took over the government and the new President rescinded legislation that provided for our return to Africa as well as provided land in the Carolinas and Davis Bend, Mississippi, where we established New Afrikan self governing colonies pursuing Independence. Any attempt at establishing independence for our subjugated black New Afrikan nation within the United States was criminalized. In 1919, both Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. DuBois separately petitioned for the former German colonies in Africa to be given as an independent homeland to build our mighty New Afrikan nation. The League of Nations replied that a procedure required the United States to sign a special treaty agreeing to the international protection of its internal minorities. The question of the New Afrikan non-self governing territories and status as an internal colony of the United States was ignored. When the League of Nations was replaced by the United Nations, the United States government failed to list its internal domestic black colony as a non-self governing territory under the UN mandate system like it did for Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. This is the reason why the era of decolonization on the African continent which led to the recognition of independence for 55 states did not apply to the Republic of New Afrika at its founding. The international community simply ignored our struggle because the United States committed an international fraud by convincing the world that we were citizens of the United States and not an internal domestic colony with the right of self determination. In 1973 Republic of New Afrika President Imari Abubakari Obadele and Attorney Gaidi Obadele exposed this fraud in the Article Three Briefs Establishing the Legal Case for the Existence of the Black Nation The Republic of New Afrika in North America that was filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi. The government’s response, the Brief in Support of Motion to Quash Indictment for Lack of Jurisdiction Under Article III, U.S. Constitution Brought by the Defendant states, “Every element of the limits of Sec. (b)(2) clearly exist, with the exception of Obadele showing that he is a person of foreign nationality. That question, however, is a matter of law and requires a decision upon the issue of whether black folks now within the United States have ever been converted, in accordance with settled principles of universally established law, into United States citizens, and divested altogether of their original foreign African nationality”;
Following a workshop of the National Conference of Black Lawyers on September 11, 1987 the PG-RNA submitted to the United States Congress Reparations: A Proposed Act To Stimulate Economic Growth in the United States And Compensate, In Part For the Grievous Wrongs of Slavery And The Unjust Enrichment Which Accrued To The United States Therefrom. The act laid out a simple formula for the payment of reparations: One-third of the annual sum to shall be paid directly to each individual; one third to be paid to the duly elected Government of the Republic of New Afrika, and one-third to be paid directly to a National Congress of Organizations consisting of all the churches and organizations which for a period of two years prior had been engaged in community programs. On September 26, 1987 the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (NCOBRA) was founded.
It is extremely important to understand that the modern reparations movement in the United States was originally conceived by the nationalist element as payment to a nation for war damages suffered by that nation from war conducted against it by colonial governments and their successor state government, the federal government of the United States, and private entities enlisted to prosecute the war, including banks, insurance companies, and many others.
It is also important to understand that a Newsweek poll in 1969 showed that 27% of black people under the age of 30 wanted independence and a separate government of its own and were willing, like the Africans on the continent, to engage in armed struggle to get it. In response to this growing New Afrikan national consciousness, the United States Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) intensified the war against the New Afrikan Independence Movement and created its Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) with the following objectives:
Prevent unity
Prevent rise of a leader
Identify and neutralize [warriors]
Alienate the concept of nationalism from the people
Prevent nationalism from embedding in youth and future generations
Because of the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr, Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, and others, as well as the imprisonment of the leaders of the New Afrikan Independence Movement, nationalist consciousness was replaced first with an infusion of drugs creating a drug culture followed by gangsta rap. Meanwhile, in order to mainstream the support for reparations movement, a decision was made to de-emphasize the nationalist element and reduce the amount of overt and covert oppression faced by its proponents. And thus you have the current status today where nationalist consciousness barely exist in black America and is almost completely absent from the Reparations Movement and discussions among the various reparations tasks forces and commissions today. The danger is that if the nationalist portion of the reparations demand continues to be neglected, reparations will not lead to New Afrikan sovereignty and since this is the primary harm committed against us, so-called reparations will not repair this most important harm.
Sovereignty can also easily be restored if the international community supports our righteous struggle for land and independence just like it is now supporting the Palestinians who are demanding sovereignty over their land and recognition as a member of the United Nations. The first step is to conduct a plebiscite - a vote of all people recorded as Black in the 1970 Census and their descendants of voting age - that allows each person to choose one of the following options: (1) return to their ancestral homeland in Africa, (2) the creation of a new African nation on American soil, (3) full US citizenship and (4) emigration to another country. After the vote, the resources are to be given based on the number in each category. There must be a "self determination" component in which the people choose for themselves what form of reparations they want in order to achieve "satisfaction".
The plebiscite is something we must do for ourselves. It will require organizing the logistics for approximately 70,000 voting centers in our black churches, so that 29 million of us can exercise self-determination - deciding which of the four options is best for our family. In this way, we can unite all segments of our community under the plebiscite campaign even though we may disagree on the best way forward for our destiny. Those who want to integrate into America need not fight with those who want to repatriate to their homeland in Africa nor with those who want to liberate the national territory of the Republic of New Afrika. Self determination allows all of us to respect each other and unite in order to get the reparations and remedies that we all need.
The New Afrikan Diplomatic Civil Service Corps (NADCSC) has diligently prepared the Plebiscite Campaign that can lead to a successful plebiscite by 2030 or earlier. It is open to all organizations, activists and individuals who wish to take responsibility for organizing the vote of the approximate 29 million eligible voters. It won’t be easy, and as my great Grand Uncle Reverend Eustace Lewis Blake, the 44th Pastor of Richard Allen’s historic Mother Bethel AME Church in Philadelphia, told his 2,000 congregants at his St. James AME Church in Newark, New Jersey, ‘the price of freedom is not cheap’.
Republic of New Afrika Minister of Foreign Affairs Siphiwe Baleka Concludes Successful Diplomacy Tour in Ougadougu, Burkina Faso
H.E. SIPHIWE BALEKA, MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS, PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF NEW AFRIKA with KARAMOKO JEAN MARIE TRAORE, MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS, REGIONAL COOPERATION AND BURKINA FASO CITIZENS ABROAD.
May 9, 59 ADM* (2024) - The Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika (PGRNA) has initiated diplomatic relations with the Republic of Burkina Faso during a Diaspora Investment Summit organized by H.E. Ambassador Arikana Chihombori Quao through the African Diaspora Development Institute (ADDI) in partnership with the embassy of Burkina Faso in Washington, D.C.
PGRNA Minister of Foreign Affairs presented his credentials to Mr. Hermann Toé, Special Advisor of the Minister of Foreign Affairs along with a Concept Note for discussion that included positioning Burkina Faso to be champions of the Global Afrikan Reparatory Justice Movement and Pan Afrikan Movement through support of the upcoming Afrodescendant Nation National Reparations Convention, Right to Return citizenship legislation and the request for an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice on “The status of Afro Descendant People as prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention and their right to conduct plebiscites for self-determination.”
“By supporting these efforts, Burkina Faso will further deepen the admiration, respect and support of the African Diaspora that the ADDI mission has so successfully launched,” stated Minister Baleka. “Our great leader, Malcolm X told the African Heads of State, including the President of the former Upper Volta (now the Republic of Burkina Faso) that as Afrikan people dispersed throughout the west, ‘our problems are your problems’. Just as the African Diaspora supported the African liberation movements on the continent, the African Diaspora that constitutes the African Union 6th Region, which includes the Republic of New Afrika, needs citizenship on the continent and a sponsor nation to submit our request for an advisory opinion from the ICJ on the fundamental legal issues concerning reparations for the Dum Diversas War and the legal obligations of the detaining powers under the Geneva Convention towards the descendants of the prisoners of that war that were trafficked and enslaved in the Americas..”
Mr. Baleka believes that if the government of Burkina Faso submits the request for the ICJ Advisory opinion and announces a Diaspora citizenship policy, they will catapult themselves into the forefront of the Reparations movement from the side of African states.
“Burkina Faso will attract the same respect and popularity that South Africa did when it went to the ICJ on behalf of the Palestinians. This will garner Burkina Faso even more global African admiration, especially in the Diaspora and will provide them the narrative that anything the west does to them is in retaliation for standing up for justice for African people, solidifying even more Burkina Faso’s Pan African legitimacy. In turn, the PG-RNA, the Diaspora and Pan Africanists commit to promoting tourism and investment in Burkina Faso as a priority. and make Ougadougu the location of conferences, conventions and Pan African Congresses for the next two Decades. The idea is to make Burkina Faso the Ghana of the 1960’s minus the CIA infiltration,” said Minister Baleka.
It should be recalled that the government of Ghana was heavily criticized for canceling a Pan African Conference that includied H.E. Ambassador Arikana Chihombori Quao, Julius Malema, PLO Lumumba and Peter Obi that was called by Ghana industrialist Nana Kwame Bediako, who made an appearance during the ADDI Youth event in Burkina Faso. Meanwhile, many veteran Pan African activists, leaders and organizations are skeptical of the planning for the 9th Pan African Conference scheduled for Lome, Togo later this year. There is a growing belief that only Burkina Faso can credibly host such an event.
During the visit, Minister Baleka, who also serves as the Head of Research and Strategy for the Pan African Federalist Movement (PAFM) West Africa Region, had the opportunity to visit the Thomas Sankara Center, a community institution in Ougadougu and discuss PAFM objectives of supporting “sectorial federation” leading towards a United African States by 2030. The West African region is considered an integral part of the “Corridor of Victory” and Burkina Faso is emerging as its center piece..
WHAT IS THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT REPUBLIC OF NEW AFRIKA?
The Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa (PG-RNA) was founded with a Declaration of Independence issued by a convention in Detroit on March 31, 1968. It was inspired by the Malcolm X Society, and the Provisional Government's purpose has been to complete the work of revolutionaries like Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, Osborne Perry Anderson, Tunis Campbell, Edwin McCabe, El Hajj El Malik Shabazz (Malcolm X), and Queen Mother Moore, by establishing a New Afrikan state in North America. FREE THE LAND!!! First and foremost, the Basic Policy of the Government has not changed. Our policy as stated in the platform papers of December 1969 state: The basic policy of the government is to establish national strength through sovereignty, effective international relations, and inherent viability. Our position is that all the land where Black people live, in what has been called "the continental U.S.," is our land, where we have lived on it traditionally, worked and developed it, and fought for it. This is the subjugated territory of the Republic of New Africa. Our basic national objective is to free this land from subjugation: to win sovereignty. The New Africans’ claim, by rights of heritage and reparations, five states of the Deep South: Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. In this area in many counties New Afrikans//Blacks already constitute a numerical majority. One set of these counties lies along the Mississippi River from Memphis to the Louisiana border and constitutes a contiguous territory containing more than 15,000 square miles – a territory which We call the Kush District , almost twice as large as the state of Israel. It is here that the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa has opened its struggle for land and independence .
NEW AFRIKA'S NATIONAL TERRITORY
In accordance with the rights of our people under international law, including our right to a contiguous and fruitful land mass as a part of the reparations due us from the United States, and in view of the United States' failure and refusal in years since the U.S. Civil War to reach a land and reparations settlement with any of the legitimate representatives of the New Afrikan nation, in 1968 the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika, acting for our people as a nation, PROCLAIMED the territory in North America, now known as Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina as the core of the National Territory of the Black Nation in North America, the Republic of New Afrika. It is the primary task of the Provisional Government to organize the people of the nation for success in their struggle for independence and sovereignty over this land mass
NEW AFRIKAN CITZENSHIP
CITIZENSHIP BY BIRTH
Each Afrikan person born in America is a citizen of the Republic of New Afrika.
CITIZENSHIP BY PARENTAGE
Any child born to a citizen of the Republic of New Afrika is a citizen of the Republic of New Afrika.
CITIZENSHIP BY NATURALIZATION
Any person not otherwise a citizen of the Republic of New Afrika may become a citizen of the Republic of New Afrika by completing the procedures for naturalization as provided by the People's Center Council. Following paragraph was added after third PCC reading and approval on 28 March 1997. Any person of Afrikan descent is entitled to acquire citizenship in the Republic of New Afrika by a simple declaration of Republic of New Afrikan citizenship, made before an official of the Government on a form prescribed by the President and executed, with signature, by the person declaring Republic of New Afrikan citizenship.
itizenship, as provided by the People's Center Council.
CONSCIOUS CITIZENSHIP
All citizens of the Republic of New Afrika who are aware of their citizenship are conscious New Afrikan citizens. As a result of an over 300 year-old policy of force and fraud used by the United States government and the governments of various American states against the New Afrikan nation, many citizens of the Republic of New Afrika are not aware of their human right to New Afrikan Citizenship and, indeed, are not aware of the existence of the New Afrikan nation in North America. The growth of the conscious New Afrikan citizenship is related to the success of the liberation struggle. The objective measurement of that growth shall be considered in the development and implementation of Provisional Government policy, programs and structure as determined by the People's Center Council.
Ministry of Foreign Affairs Immediate Program of Action:
In January, 58 ADM (2024), the People’s Revolutionary Leadership Council approved the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Immediate Program of Action submitted by Interim Minister of Foreign Affairs Siphiwe Baleka, with the following Primary Objectives:
Win support in the African Union and the United Nations for the New Afrikan and Afro Descendant plebiscite for self determination in the United States;
Secure “right to return” citizenship legislation in African Union member states;
Request an Advisory Opinion from the International Court of Justice on our status as prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention and other fundamental questions pertaining to our reparations claims;
Secure diplomatic recognition from AU member states and other liberation movements
The basis of PGRNA foreign policy is the words of Imari Obadele in 1970:
“Indeed, along with the petition drive a specific campaign must be conducted among New York legislators and U.S. Congressmen (particularly black ones) to make them - and, concurrently, the world - see that our cause is just under moral law and correct under international law and that the law of the United States is deficient in failing to provide a peaceful formula for the separation of communities seeking their independence. . . . Let us return a moment to the first question: how sovereignty is to be achieved in the first place. From what has already been indicated, it is clear that the overall strategy is to present the United States, the United Nations, and the world with an implacable accomplished fact: the free vote of a community for independence. It is, then, to seek a favorable deployment of world-wide diplomatic pressures and internal (U.S.) political pressures. It is, finally, to follow up the independence vote with creation of a local government and a pattern of action by the local government and the Republic that constitutes the exercise of Sovereignty. In other words, the Government, after the vote, must act like a government. . . . Next we shall demonstrate to the world, by means of a plebiscite, a vote, that it is New Afrika, not the United States, which has the consent of the people who dominate those areas”
The words of Imari Obadele in 1972:
“The problem with international law is that there is nobody there to enforce it - except the powerful. Powerful nations enforce international law only when it suits them - or when they are forced to. . . . The development of foreign support, inside and outside the United Nations, is another of the vital supporting strategies. . . ”;
The words of Imari Obadele also in 1972:
“The essential strategy of our struggle for land is to array enough power (as in jiu-jitsu, with a concentration of karate strength at key moments) to force the greatest power, the United States, to abide by international law, to recognize and accept our claims to independence and land. The purpose of this strategy can be further simplified: it is to create a situation for the United States where it becomes cheaper to relinquish control of the Five States than to continue a war against us to take back or hold the area”; and
The 1933 Convention on the Rights and Duties of States as quoted by Imari Obadele in 1987:
“Article one of the convention states: ‘The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) the capacity to enter into relations with the other states.’”
H.E. Siphiwe Baleka, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the PGRNA in front of the Burkina Faso President Thomas Sankara Memorial
Feb 3, 2024 - The Interim Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika Applies to Renew Observer Status at the African Union
Feb 26, 2024 - Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika Advises African Union Legal Reference Group
Apr 26, 2024 - Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika Statement to the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent
Apr 26, 2024 - THE POLITICAL-LEGAL HISTORY OF THE REPUBLIC OF NEW AFRIKA AND THE WAR WAGED AGAINST IT BY THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Apr 27, 2024 - Analysis by the Republic of New Afrika of Legal Issues Requiring an Advisory Opinion from the International Court of Justice
IS THE UN PERMANENT FORUM ON PEOPLE OF AFRICAN DESCENT THE LATEST REFINEMENT OF SCIENTIFIC COLONIALISM?
SCIENTIFIC COLONIALISM: EXAMINING THE MANDATE FROM THE AFRO DESCENDANT PEOPLE ISSUED TO THE PERMANENT FORUM ON PEOPLE OF AFRICAN DESCENT TO REQUEST AN ADVISORY OPINION FROM THE INTERNATIONAL COURT OF JUSTICE ON THEIR STATUS AS PRISONERS OF WAR UNDER THE GENEVA CONVENTION
As stated in the Analysis by the Republic of New Afrika of Legal Issues Requiring an Advisory Opinion from the International Court of Justice submitted to the UN Permanent Forum on People of African Descent (PFPAD) the CARICOM Reparations Commission, and the African Union Commission,
“It has been 298 days since [Forum] President Barr stated she would sign the Request and 274 days since she announced that analyzing the request “jointly” would be an agenda item at the just concluded 3rd session of the Forum. But there still has been no joint analysis of the legal considerations. Perhaps this is why Fourm Secretary Niraj Dawadi, immediately following the closing session, felt it necessary to approach me to tell me that the Forum believes requesting an advisory opinion from the ICJ is very important but that due to shortage of resources and time, the members have not had proper opportunity to discuss it yet have concluded that because of its importance, the Request must have broad support. More interesting, however, was the admission that the Forum is concerned that if they exercise their mandate as I have suggested, and the Forum goes directly to the ICJ, that it will, according to Mr. Dawadi, “open the flood gates to petitions.” The concern is that this would set a precedent and every group will then expect the forum to act on their petition. It should be noted this was the very issue that both the League of Nations and the United Nations faced at their establishment - the question of receiving petitions from non-state actors. It was also the contentious subject at the Expert Side Session on Reparatory Justice held on April 17, 2024 in Geneva - whether or not Afro Descendant who are ‘stateless’ will be accorded the same status within the UN as states and how.”
THE ISSUE IS THE QUESTION OF OUR PETITIONS BEING RECEIVED AND CONSIDERED
In 1917, Cyrl V. Briggs petitioned to establish self-governing New African colonies, calling for “Colored Autonomous States”. This seemed to be the appropriate application of President Woodrow Wilson's calls for self determination under his “14 Points”. By the time of the Paris Peace Conference and in its aftermath in 1919, the League of Nations decided to use Scientific Colonialism as the foundation of its Mandates System.
It is of supreme importance to understand the concept of “scientific colonialism” and the history of petitioning in the League of Nations and the United Nations in order to understand the role of the recently established PFPAD, and in particularly, the issue provoked by the MANDATE FROM THE AFRO DESCENDANT PEOPLE ISSUED TO THE PERMANENT FORUM ON PEOPLE OF AFRICAN DESCENT TO REQUEST AN ADVISORY OPINION FROM THE INTERNATIONAL COURT OF JUSTICE ON THEIR STATUS AS PRISONERS OF WAR UNDER THE GENEVA CONVENTION at the first session of the Forum. The history is expertly provided by Ananda V. Burra in her work, Petitioning the Mandates: Anti-colonial and Anti-racist Publics in International Law. Burra writes,
“This dissertation is the first systematic legal-historical study of how transnational anticolonial and antiracist solidarity movements shaped the international law of non-state activism in the Mandates System of the League of Nations. In particular, this dissertation examines how anticolonial activists, colonial officials, and members of the newly-formed international bureaucracy in the League negotiated a language of grassroots international protest, one based around the practice of individuals and social movements petitioning international organizations about colonial abuse. African American activists were particularly active in this field, framing their involvement in the Mandates as a protest against racial discrimination, turning a mirror on the United States’ own racial politics while embodying a new stateless subjectivity. Petitioning in the interwar and immediate post-war years shows us how intercontinental forms of protest could be deployed in fighting what states saw as primarily local battles. These battles spanned the period from 1920 until at least 1956, when the International Court of Justice engaged with the history and jurisprudence of the right to petition in international law. This dissertation traces the origins of petitioning in the Mandates System to grassroots activism in 1918 and 1919, far earlier than other works on the League have suggested. . . . What was it about the Mandates System that, despite its marginal position in international colonialism, made it a key battleground for determining the role colonized peoples would play in the UN? How did Pan-African petitioning in the League shape the possibilities for individuals to participate in the UN after the Second World War? How did these battles become a focus for post-Second World War and Cold war debates over international rights and political participation? . . .
[T]he Mandates System started its life as a legal and political anomaly. It had been created to address one of the most serious post-First World War territorial question: what to do with German and Ottoman colonies after the war. These territories - in the Middle East, Africa, and the Pacific - had been captured during the war, and several different states had advanced claims to occupy them its end. Ottoman territories in the Middle East - Syria, Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq - had been captured by the British and the French, with help from local Arab allies and troops from India (in the case of the British) and sub-Saharan Africa (in the case of the French). French troops had captured parts of what was then German West-Africa in Togo and Cameroon, and British troops from the Gold Coast and Nigeria had effectively disarmed German defenses in the area. British and Belgian troops in East Africa defeated German forces in Rwanda-Urundi.
The white British Dominions of South Africa, Australia and New Zealand had asserted their newly strengthened sovereign status within the British Empire through their participation in the war. South Africa, under the Boer generals Botha and Smuts, had overcome local white sympathy for Germans in South-West Africa and defeated German troops with the aim of incorporating the territory into South Africa. Australia and New Zealand did the same for most German possessions in South-East Asia and the South Pacific, as did Japan for German islands north of the equator. The Dominions were eager to have colonies of their own as proof of their emerging semi-sovereignty in the new century. In terms of the civilizational logic of early twentieth century, when a state aquired colonies (with the concomitant responsibility to impart civilization to them), this signaled its arrival into the community of nations. In South Africa, in particular, the messianic vision of Cecil Rhodes - to bring black Africa under white power and towards salvation - expressed itself in the campaign to take control of South-West Africa. Thus, for many states on the winning side of the war, this symbolic aspect of acquiring new colonies made the disposition of captured territories all the more important.
Yet the optics of fighting a world war to increase colonial holdings were not good, especially in the United States. Outright annexation of enemy territories arguably violated President Woodrow Wilson’s promises in his “Fourteen Points'' speech of 1918. For the British, the main architects of the League of Nations’ Covenant, asserting British superiority in the field of colonial governance over both the German and the French militated against allowing other states to annex territories outright. . . . As Manela argues, Wilson’s persona became a talisman that several anticolonial activists latched on to as a ‘herald of a new era in international affairs.’ This was even though Wilson never imagined that his call for universal self determination would apply in the colonial world. More than anything else, Wilson’s rhetoric was borne of his wish to outflank any more radical views on international reorganization and governance. Wilson may have provided the political justification restraining colonial empires from annexing the German and Ottoman colonies, but it was British lawyers and diplomats who took the lead in shaping the post-1918 international legal order. The intellectual roots of the Mandates can be traced back to the late nineteenth century and the rise of ‘developmentalism’ as a core tenet of liberal imperial planning in Britain. Colonial states were beginning to deploy new ways of intervening in the everyday lives of their colonial populations at this moment.
With the rise of social science research and the production of statistical analysis, states were much more capable of monitoring their domestic and colonial populations on a large number of metrics. As Timothy Mitchell has observed, ‘as Britain and other colonial powers faced a harder task in justifying the continuation of colonial occupation, new statistical work could clarify the purpose and authority of imperial government.’ Academics like Alfred Zimmern and colonial diplomats like Lord Milner theorized the British Empire as a family of states and state-like entities, some more mature than others, some possessing more international legal autonomy than others. Zimmern, one of the drafters of the League of Nations Covenant, described the British Commonwealth as a ‘procession’: ‘It consist[ed] of a large variety of communities at a number of different stages in their advance towards complete self government.’ Scientific colonialism supplied a logic of development, suggesting the possibility that territories could move from one category to another. The challenge as these thinkers saw it, particularly in Africa, was to promote a form of colonial rule that would both uplift the natives and provide for international free trade. British colonies and protectorates in India and Africa were taken as models, and Milner’s disciples had already suggested that such governance systems be exported to other colonial areas. . . .”
Additionally, Antony Anghie writes in Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law:
“In the Mandate System, however, the problem of sovereignty took a very different character. In the final analysis, the League was subordinate to the will of sovereign states. In the mandates, this relationship was radically altered. Here, international institutions, rather than being the product of sovereign states, were given the task of creating sovereignty out of the backward peoples and territories brought under the mandate regime. The emergence of international human rights law during the UN period is axiomatically characterized in virtually all the literature on the subject as a revolutionary and unprecedented moment in the history of international law because it undermined the fundamental principle of territorial sovereignty, which had been in existence since the emergence of the modern European nation-state and the writings of Vattel. It was only because of the emergence of the UN system of international human rights law that international law and institutions can regulate relations between a sovereign and its citizens. It is in this context that the truly extraordinary character of the Mandate System project, when put at its highest, becomes more apparent. It did not seek merely to qualify the rights of the sovereign, but rather to create the sovereign . . . . Nevertheless, the interior of the state remained outside the control or even scrutiny of international law, which could address state behaviour only when it emerged into the conscious sphere, as it were, when it manifested itself in the external actions of the state and thereby became a properly international issue. The frustration for inter-war jurists was that, while they could vaguely conceptualize the interior in various ways, they were unable to act upon it.
The discovery of interiority is central to the phenomenon of modernity as a whole. The great literature of modernity -- the works of Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf -- are preoccupied with mapping the interior, with tracing and examining the workings of an inner consciousness. International jurists sensed that access to the interior of the state would revolutionize their discipline in much the same way that Joyce had revolutionized the novel and Freud had revolutionized our understanding of human nature. And yet, this inquiry was precluded by sovereignty doctrine. We might understand the monumental significance of international human rights law in these terms: it enabled international law and institutions to enter the interior, to address the unconscious, and thereby to administer ‘civilizing therapy’ to the body politic of the sovereign state.
Whereas previously the internal character of the sovereign European state was immune from scrutiny, in the inter-war period it was precisely through the Mandate System that international law and institutions had complete access to the interior of a society. It was in the operations of the Mandate System, then, that it became possible for international law not merely to enter the interior realm, but also to create the social and political infrastructure necessary to support a functioning sovereign state. Here, then, sovereignty was to be studied not in the context of the problem of war and of collective security, but in a very different constellation of relationships that are central to the understanding of sovereignty in the non-European world.
It was in the Mandate System that international law and institutions could conduct experiments and develop technologies that were hardly possible in the sovereign Western world. It was in the Mandate System, furthermore, that many of the interests of jurists such as Pound, Alvarez and Hudson could find expression. This was because the task confronting the Mandate System involved far more than the granting of a simple juridical status. Rather, international law and institutions were required to create the economic, political and social conditions under which a sovereign state could come into being. In this sense, law had to be combined with sociology, political science and economics in order to achieve the goals of the Mandate System. [ Note: and hence the necessity of collecting statements/reports from all fields directly from the dependent people themselves to enter into the interiority of their consciousness]. It was through international institutions that such a task of synthesis could be addressed. . . . AT THE LOCAL LEVEL, THE DUTY, AS LUGARD CHARACTERIZED IT, TO DEVELOP MANDATE TERRITORIES REQUIRED LARGE INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECTS. THE COMPELLING NEED FOR ‘ARTERIAL RAILWAYS, WITH HARBOURS AND TELEGRAPHS, THE PUBLIC BUILDINGS AND HOUSES FOR STAFF’, IN LUGARD’S WORDS, ‘JUSTIFIED ANY SACRIFICE THESE PUBLIC WORKS FURTHER ASSISTED IN ELIMINATING THE SLAVE TRADE AND INTER-TRIBAL WARFARE; AT THE SAME TIME, THEY ALSO EXPANDED MARKETS. THIS FOCUS ON ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND EFFICIENCY HAD A RADICAL EFFECT ON COLONIAL POLICIES IN GENERAL; MORE PARTICULARLY, IT LED COLONIAL POWERS TO VIEW NATIVES IN TERMS OF THE LABOUR AND ECONOMIC WEALTH THEY REPRESENTED. SIMPLY PUT, THE NATIVE WAS NO LONGER MERELY TO BE CONQUERED AND DISPOSSESSED; RATHER, HE WAS TO BE MADE MORE PRODUCTIVE. . . .‘WELFARE’ THUS MEANT, FOR EXAMPLE, REQUIRING THAT WORK TOOK PLACE IN HYGIENIC CONDITIONS AND THAT THE PMC AND THE ILO SHOULD COLLABORATE IN ENSURING THIS. IN THIS WAY, THE NEW FORM OF COLONIALISM, BASED ON PRESERVING AND DEVELOPING THE NATIVE AND HER TERRITORIES AS PRODUCTIVE ASSETS RATHER THAN EXPLOITING AND EXHAUSTING THESE ASSETS, PRESENTED ITSELF AS AN EXEMPLIFICATION OF HUMANIST AND LIBERAL PRINCIPLES.”
Hence, the petitioning system was designed to be the mechanism for accessing the interior of the colonial subjects for the purpose of making them more productive and “civilized” in the colonial system!
All the statements sent to PFPAD are the latest inputs into the scientific colonial project at this stage.
During the early period, however, both Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. DuBois separately and simultaneously attempted to bring the New Afrikan and Afro Descendant claims to the Paris Peace Conference and make a claim for the former German colonies to be given as a New Afrikan/Afro Descendant Independent Nation. On November 10, 1918 Marcus Garvey, who was prevented from attending the Paris Peace Conference, nevertheless submitted the Resolution of the UNIA Peace Aims, which, among other things, stated,
“Be It Resolved, That we, the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League of the World, representing the interests of the New Spirited Negroes of America, Africa and the West Indies, assembled in Universal Mass
Convention in the Palace Casino, New York, on Sunday November 10, 1918, hereby beg to submit the following peace aims to the Allied Democracies of Europe and America, and to the people of democratic tendencies of the world.
And Be It Further Resolved, That we believe that it will only be through a proper recognition of the Negro’s rights and the rights of all weaker peoples at the Peace Conference that future wars will be obviated.
And We Further Pray That the Peace Conference to assemble will take cognizance of these our aims
That the principle of self-determination be applied to Africa and all European controlled colonies in which people of African descent predominate.
That all economic barriers that hamper the industrial development of Africa be removed.
That Negroes enjoy the right to travel and reside in any part of the world even as Europeans now enjoy these rights.
That Negroes be permitted the same educational facilities now given to Europeans
That Europeans who interfere with, or violate African tribal customs be deported and denied re-entry to the continent.
That the segregatory and proscriptive ordinances against Negroes in any part of the world be repealed and that they (Negroes) be given complete political, industrial and social equality in countries where Negroes and people of any other race live side by side.
That the reservation land acts aimed against the natives of South Africa be revoked and the land restored to its prescriptive owners.
That Negroes be given proportional representation in any scheme of world government.
That the captured German colonies in Africa be turned over to the natives with educated Western and Eastern Negroes as their leaders.” [emphasis added].
Similarly, on November 17, 1918, W.E.B. DuBois, who was allowed to attend the Paris Peace Conference and was received, submitted the Memoranda on the Future of Africa, that stated,
“The barter of colonies without regard to the wishes or welfare of the inhabitants or the welfare of the world in general is a custom which this war should put to an end, since it is a fruitful cause of dissension among nations, a danger to the status of civilized labor, a temptation to unbridled exploitation, and an excuse for unspeakable atrocities committed against natives. . . If the world after the war decided to reconstruct Africa in accordance with the wishes of the Negro race and the best interests of civilization, the process might be carried out as follows: the former German colonies with one million square miles and twelve and one-half millions of inhabitants could be internationalized. To this could be added by negotiation the 800,000 square miles and nine million inhabitants of Portuguese Africa. It is not impossible that Belgium could be persuaded to add to such a state the 900,000 square miles and nine million natives of the Congo, making an International Africa with over two and one-half million square miles of land and over twenty million people. This reorganized Africa could be under the guidance of organized civilization. The Governing International Commission should represent not simply governments but modern culture - science, commerce, social reform, and religious philanthropy . . . We can, if we will, inaugurate on the Dark Continent a last great crusade for humanity. With Africa redeemed, Asia would be safe and Europe indeed triumphant.”
And here then, is the origin of three phenomenon:
1) the deployment of scientific colonialism and the use of colonial subjects themselves to provide access to the interior of the colonial subjects and the information needed for development under colonialism; and
2) the continued privileged status of states and the secondary status of Afro Descendant people under alien domination in the international system; and
3) the discrimination against some non-state actors deemed unacceptable to the colonial powers.
With regard to the latter, for example, Marcus Garvey and the UNIA, who wanted African sovereignty for the former German colonies, were not received by the colonial powers in Paris while DuBois and the NAACP, considered to be more “respectable”, less black and desiring an “international mandate” for control of the former German Colonies, were received. And this is precisely what is taking place in PFPAD.
Thus, PFPAD can be viewed as the most recent development to further scientific colonialism. Rather than have states provide reports, for example, as mandated on the Periodic Review system of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the Forum has become the premier place for Afro Descendant non-state actors to do the work of scientific colonialism by providing it the information and data it needs to simultaneously engage in development work while maintaining the status quo of neo-colonial domination and the process of “civilizing” the natives under alien domination. Moreover, we see within PFPAD that Afro Descendants from the territories still under alien domination, will not be afforded the same status, influence and support as the Afro Descendants represented by state delegations. This was made obvious during the third session of the Forum when, on the opening day, I received an overwhelming standing ovation after my presentation highlighting PFPAD’s inaction on the
MANDATE FROM THE AFRO DESCENDANT PEOPLE ISSUED TO THE PERMANENT FORUM ON PEOPLE OF AFRICAN DESCENT TO REQUEST AN ADVISORY OPINION FROM THE INTERNATIONAL COURT OF JUSTICE ON THEIR STATUS AS PRISONERS OF WAR UNDER THE GENEVA CONVENTION.
Though the Mandate for the Request was submitted with 248 signatures and received the overwhelming support from the floor at the Forum’s third session, the new PFPAD President Dr. June Soomer, who served as Chair of St. Lucia’s Reparations Commission, told TAG24 NEWS that she will not take independent action on the petition request and that the matter must first be discussed among all of the forum members, she said, and a decision will not be reached until all legal considerations are taken into account.
The day after my standing ovation, David Commissiong, Barbados’ Ambassador to CARICOM, gave a presentation on Panel #1: Reparations, Sustainable Development & Economic Justice. This is the same panel that I requested to be on as far back as January 24. David Commissiong was allowed on the panel to represent the privileged class and state interests in CARICOM while I, as Minister of Foreign Affairs of a non-recognized provisional government and representative of the people who had mobilized its civil society on this issue, was refused a space on the panel and relegated to addressing the Forum from the floor.
During his presentation, Ambassador Commissiong called for the full support of the proposal for the establishment of a new, Special International Tribunal on Reparations to adjudicate reparations claims and quantify reparations remedies. Ambassador Commissiong then proceeded to explain,
“We need such a Special International Tribunal on Reparations because at present, there is no international court properly equipped to deal with the reparations claim of the magnitude and complexity of our claim for our claim of reparations for hundreds of years of African enslavement. The closest that we have to such an institution is the International Court of Justice, but not only is the ICJ inadequate in terms of its design, it also suffers from the fact that many of the former enslaver nations have made reservations to the ICJ treaty, reservations that prohibit the ICJ from adjudicating crimes that they committed during the colonial era. The establishment of such a Special International Tribunal on Reparations will require a positive decision of the United Nations General Assembly. Let us resolve to portend the international advocacy work that will be required to successfully deliver the creation of this critical institution at the UN General Assembly.”
While the proposal for the Special International Tribunal on Reparations is a worthy proposal to be supported, let's look more closely on what happened. On the opening day, I successfully rallied the delegates at the PFPAD 3rd session to the idea, “Let’s end the 1st Decade of People of African Descent with a real accomplishment - initiating the case for reparations. It only takes the new Forum Chair June Soomer to sign the request and send it to the registrar of the ICJ. This can be done at the concluding session of this Forum if we the delegates demand it.”
This is an initiative led by the people and for the people requiring PFPAD to take action now under its mandate. Rather than support this, the Barbados Ambassador framed the issue as a choice between the Barbados proposal for the tribunal versus requesting an advisory opinion from the ICJ. He then confuses the issue by raising issues that concern actual litigation at the ICJ and NOT having anything to do with the advisory opinion process. He then concludes with a cry to rally around the Barbados tribunal proposal, thereby creating doubt as to the proper course of action and diluting the consensus momentum achieved on the first day by civil society delegates representing the people.
Meanwhile, what the Barbados Ambassador didn’t say during the panel is that CARICOM, led by Barbados, recently decided that it was, indeed, going to file a Request for an Advisory Opinion from the ICJ!
So the Ambassador from Barbados attempted to discredit civil society’s effort to get access to the court while behind the scenes already planned to get such access in the name of the Reparations Movement!
And more than likely, when CARICOM makes its request for the ICJ opinion, it will be done in a way to further the agenda of CARICOM states rather than the agenda coming directly from the people themselves. It will be framed in such a way as to make it seem that CARICOM is leading the way in this arena while the people’s request will be ignored. This is a blatant example of what is called elite capture, in this case, by CARICOM states. One must wonder if this is part of the strategy to have Barbados Prime Minister Mia Motley elected as the next UN General Secretary?
I ask, have we been duped once again by supporting the Forum which may only be an instrument of scientific colonialism?
By any means necessary,
Siphiwe Baleka
Minister of Foreign Affairs
January 24, 58 ADM* (2024)
Ms. Epsy Campbell Barr, President
Permanent Forum of People of African Descent (PFPAD)
RE: CMA-O-009-2023 - REPLY TO JULY 18 LETTER/PGRNA#8/1/24/58 REQUEST TO PRESENT ON A PANEL AT THE PFPAD 3RD SESSION
President Barr,
Once again, it was a pleasure to spend time with you during the Accra Reparations Conference and gain a better understanding of PFPAD’s development and position on the MANDATE FROM THE AFRO DESCENDANT PEOPLE ISSUED TO THE PERMANENT FORUM ON PEOPLE OF AFRICAN DESCENT TO REQUEST AN ADVISORY OPINION FROM THE INTERNATIONAL COURT OF JUSTICE ON THEIR STATUS AS PRISONERS OF WAR UNDER THE GENEVA CONVENTION.
As you know, at the Forum’s first session on December 6, 2022, as President of the Balanta B’urassa History and Genealogy Society in America (BBHAGSIA), I invoked the mandate of UN Resolution 75/314 requesting an advisory opinion from the ICJ, consistent with our interpretation of the Durban Declaration Programme of Action, UN Charter 96, and Article 65 of the ICJ Statute. The Forum has already concluded in its recommendations to “promote an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice on the legal question of reparatory justice” and your July 21 letter to me stated “I have requested the incorporation of this item in the agenda of the next meeting, to proceed to analyze it jointly. I also inform the High Commissioner of the United Nations of this, . . .” To assist in the joint analysis, on November 20, 2023 I launched an Input Form for lawyers and jurists in order to gather their opinions on the legal questions that have been submitted.
Therefore, as the father and leading figure of this initiative, and consistent with the IDPAD Coalition UK letter of support for the original PFPAD Request for an ICJ Advisory Opinion, I am requesting that I be included on any panel at the PFPAD 3rd session that will be discussing this agenda item.
Finally, I wish to inform you that on January 6, 58 ADM (2024), I was sworn in as the Interim Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika (PG-RNA) that was founded on March 31, 1968 at the National Black Government Conference hosted by the Malcolm X Society. The direct precursor to the PG-RNA was the Organization of Afro American Unity (OAAU) established by Malcolm X on June 28, 1964 and granted observer status to the Organization of African Unity (OAU) on July 17, 1964. I made mention of the Republic of New Afrika’s history in my July 18 letter to you, calling your attention to the NEW AFRIKAN INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENT AND HUMAN RIGHTS: Statement to the 20th session of the UN Intergovernmental Working Group on the Effective Implementation of the Durban Declaration and The African American Case for Independence at the International Court of Justice and emphasizing that:
3. At the end of the US Civil War, the United States legislated voluntary, compensated repatriation and ceded territory for New Afrikan self-governing territories in pursuit of independence;
4. The assassination of President Lincoln led to a campaign of fraud and terror to deny New Afrikan’s right to return to their homeland, reduce the status of the recently established self-governing territories, and deny the full recognition of the New Afrikan’s political rights
5. Cyril Briggs, W.E.B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey advocated for New Afrikan self-government and independence, the latter two petitioning the League of Nations for justice and for self determination. The United States, however, refused to sign a special treaty agreeing to the international protection of its internal domestic colonies.
6. The United States failed its sacred trust obligation under the UN Charter Chapter XI Article 73 to promote New Afrikan well-being and to “develop self-government, to take due account of the political aspirations of the peoples, and to assist them in the progressive development of their free political institutions.” It further failed to declare New Afrikan territories as trust territories, under UN Charter, Chapter XII Article 77.1.c trusteeship system.
It is for this reason that PG-RNA, through the New Afrikan Diplomatic and Civil Service Corps (NADCSC), is conducting a Plebiscite campaign and takes special interest in the Request for an ICJ Advisory Opinion question:
(d) What rights do the Afro Descendants throughout the Americas and Caribbean have to exercise self-determination and conduct plebiscites to discern who wants to repatriate to their ancestral homeland, who wants to establish independent nation states of their own, and who wants to integrate into the states they currently reside?
Given the recent attention to South Africa’s case against Israel at the ICJ, now is the time for the case against “slow genocide” and reparatory justice for the victims of the Dum Diversas War and subsequent chattel enslavement to be raised at the ICJ.
By any means necessary,
Siphiwe Baleka
Minister of Foreign Affairs
*Letters of support attached.
Republic of New Afrika: Overview of National Security
Analysis by the Republic of New Afrika of Legal Issues Requiring an Advisory Opinion from the International Court of Justice
April 21, 59 ADM* (2024)
Members of the UN Permanent Forum
on People of African Descent
Members of the CARICOM
Reparations Commission
Justice Blaise Tchikaya, Chair
AU Commission For International Law
Analysis by the Republic of New Afrika of Legal Issues Requiring an Advisory Opinion from the International Court of Justice
Michael McEachrane, Rapporteur for the United Nations Permanent Forum on People of African Descent (PFPAD) stated in the Preliminary Conclusion and Recommendations of the Forum’s 3rd Session,
“The Permanent Forum calls on all relevant stakeholders to continue to advance various methods in the pursuit of reparatory justice. This can be accomplished through the utilization of UN tribunals on reparations to document and resolve specific claims,(see endnote1) the return of artifacts and assets, the recognition of the right of return and diaspora citizenship, (see endnote 2) and the reform of laws, policies, structures systems, practices, as well as the creation of a Global Reparations Fund, the Presentment model, (see endnote 4) advocacy aimed at non-governmental actors, and the advancement of claims before the International Court of Justice.” [emphasis added]
Earlier during the 3rd session, the new PFPAD President Dr. June Soomer told TAG24 NEWS that she will not take independent action on the petition request. The matter must first be discussed among all of the forum members, she said, and a decision will not be reached until all legal considerations are taken into account.
Such legal considerations, however, is exactly what, civil society was expecting to conclude at the 3rd session since former President Epsy Campbell-Barr stated in a July 31 letter to Siphiwe Baleka, that “As president of this space, I have requested the incorporation of this item in the agenda of the next meeting, to proceed to analyze it jointly. I also informed the High Commissioner of the United Nations of this. . . .” [emphasis added] This followed her statement in an interview with New Afrikan youth leader DaQuan Lawrence that,
“I’m going to sign the petition first because I know that this is the kind of thing that we have to do. . . . The role of civil society is enormous. We as the Permanent Forum, without civil society, we are nothing. Almost nothing. Because we have an isolated voice inside the UN. Because they gave us a little money. They gave us a big mandate without all the tools that we need to achieve all the goals that they gave us but that’s why I understand that the petition of Siphiwe Baleka is one of those things that we need because we need the International Court of Justice to take our own reality as a reality to deny rights of generations…” [emphasis added]
Thus it has been 501 days since I invoked the Forum’s mandate to REQUEST AN ADVISORY OPINION FROM THE INTERNATIONAL COURT OF JUSTICE ON NEW AFRIKAN AND AFRO DESCENDANT STATUS AS PRISONERS OF WAR UNDER THE GENEVA CONVENTION AND THEIR RIGHT TO CONDUCT PLEBISCITES FOR SELF DETERMINATION.
It has been 298 days since President Barr stated she would sign the Request and 274 days since she announced that analyzing the request “jointly” would be an agenda item at the just concluded 3rd session of the Forum. But there still has been no joint analysis of the legal considerations. Perhaps this is why Fourm Secretary Niraj Dawadi, immediately following the closing session, felt it necessary to approach me to tell me that the Forum believes requesting an advisory opinion from the ICJ is very important but that due to shortage of resources and time, the members have not had proper opportunity to discuss it yet have concluded that because of its importance, the Request must have broad support. More interesting, however, was the admission that the Forum is concerned that if they exercise their mandate as I have suggested, and the Forum goes directly to the ICJ, that it will, according to Mr. Dawadi, “open the flood gates to petitions.” The concern is that this would set a precedent and every group will then expect the forum to act on their petition. It should be noted this was the very issue that both the League of Nations and the United Nations faced at their establishment - the question of receiving petitions from non-state actors. It was also the contentious subject at the Expert Side Session on Reparatory Justice held on April 17, 2024 in Geneva - whether or not Afro Descendant who are “stateless” will be accorded the same status within the UN as states and how. Towards that end, Dr. Barryl Biekman reminds us that,
“In my conversation with some of the delegates I have noticed an interest to learn more about the UN decision making processes and as far it concerns the formal adoption into a Resolution for the Second Decade. . . . Take note of the important role of the HRC (Human Rights Council) as the HR mechanism, the UN Authority that has the last word in the sense of the responsibility regarding the content of the Declaration to be adopted in a Resolution by the United Nation General assembly. Within this decision making process other HR mechanisms such as the WGPAD (working group of Experts on People of African Descent); The PFPAD; the Eminent Persons for the implementation of The DDPA has an important advisory voice. Important is also the Role of Civil Society Non State Actors with consultative ECOSOCC status. They have the right, asked and unasked, to deliver input during the HRC Sessions. In the SAME LEVEL as the PFPAD.” [emphasis added]
Meanwhile, The Accra Proclamation on Reparations calls for the formation of a Legal Reference Group to provide “legal advice on the question of reparations, including best practice on the law, practice and litigation of the reparation’s agenda.” It also calls for the Amplification of marginalized voices in the reparatory justice movement and Increased role for the United Nations in the Exploration of legal and judicial options for reparations.
The Republic of New Afrika (RNA) has been both the leading and most marginalized voice in advancing the legal reparations claims. On June 25, 1973, RNA President Imari Abubakari Obadele and Attorney Gaidi Obadele filed in the U.S. District Court For the Southern District of Mississippi, The Article Three Briefs Establishing the Legal Case for the Existence of the Black Nation The Republic of New Africa in North America. To this day it remains the most advanced legal analysis of the New Afrikan and Afro Descendant legal considerations. On November 21, 2010 the New Afrikan Military Science Institute MSI 2-2 Report reviewed, updated and restated the legal considerations which the PG-RNA Ministry of Foreign Affairs submitted to Justice Blaise Tchikaya, Chair AU Commission For International Law on February 21, 2024.
The PG-RNA is, therefore, in a unique position as an unrecognized sovereign government desiring access to the International Court of Justice for adjudication of reparations claims for war crimes and damages. It is for this reason that entities such as the African Union, CARICOM and the Forum, can and should recognize the PG-RNA and facilitate its access to the ICJ as stated in the Durban Declaration and Program of Action (DDPA). They can, as Ethiopia and Liberia did in the case of Ethiopia v. South Africa; Liberia v. South Africa, initiate advisory proceedings on behalf of the people living in those dependent territories.
As stated in Part Three: The Existence of the New African Government As Distinct From the State in the Article Three Briefs:
“It is not uncommon for lawful governments to exist before such governments partake of full sovereignty. . . . The first precedent is, of course, the Mayflower Compact, which created the law and the government for Plymouth Colony. Drawn on shipboard on 11 November 1620, before the Pilgrims either had set foot on the land or had any title to it whatsoever, in other words, before they had sovereignty over any land - the Compact created the basic law of the Colony, and remained the basic law of the Colony for years, and also organized the men who signed the Compact into a Government. . . Conversely it is clearly manifest, keeping in mind the recent history of Europe [note: and I might also add the current situation in Haiti] that a state can exist without a government. . . . The fact is the United States has failed in a century of war [1868 to 1968] and other political action to extinguish the African nation in America even though, as in [Supreme Court] Mr. Justice Johnshon’s simile, we have from time to time been like the ‘Israelites while inhabiting the desert’ - ‘though without land they can call theirs in the sense of propriety their right of personal self government has never been taken from them, and such a form of government may exist though the land occupied be in fact that of another.’ Government may, then, be defined as a group or persons organized under law to lead the political life of the nation. . . . Apart from any consideration of the character of the New Afrikan State, the Government of the Republic of New Africa was duly created and enjoys a real sovereignty over citizens and land - though the land sovereignty may be said to be coincident with that of the United States. The Government of the Republic of New Africa can and has passed laws defining and protecting the rights of citizens and others who come within New African jurisdiction. . . . We submit that the citizens of the Republic of New Africa and the members of the Republic's Government do not owe a common allegiance with citizens of the United States or members of the United States government, and are, therefore, alien to the United States: an aggregate of aliens composing a State must be a foreign State; each individual being foreign, the whole must be foreign. An aggregate of aliens composing a Government must be a foreign government.” [emphasis added]
In the United States government’s response to the Article Three Briefs, it stated,
“Every element of the limits of Sec. (b)(2) clearly exist, with the exception of Obadele showing that he is a person of foreign nationality. That question, however, is a matter of law and requires a decision upon the issue of whether black folks now within the United States have ever been converted, in accordance with settled principles of universally established law, into United States citizens, and divested altogether of their original foreign African nationality”. [emphasis added]
As a foreign government once recognized by the Lincoln Administration, we have not been able to have our claims against the United States government heard and the question of our status as either foreign nationals of African origin or citizens of the United States, answered. It is for this reason that I, as founder and President of the Balanta B’urassa History and Genealogy Society in America, a New Afrikan civil society organization, submitted A MANDATE FROM THE AFRO DESCENDANT PEOPLE ISSUED TO THE PERMANENT FORUM ON PEOPLE OF AFRICAN DESCENT TO REQUEST AN ADVISORY OPINION FROM THE INTERNATIONAL COURT OF JUSTICE ON THEIR STATUS AS PRISONERS OF WAR UNDER THE GENEVA CONVENTION at the first session of the Forum.
Therefore, in the spirit of Ubuntu and goodwill, I attach both the Article Three Briefs and the PGRNA#10/2/19/58 BRIEF FOR THE AU LEGAL REFERENCE GROUP ON REPARATIONS containing A Matter of Law, the excerpt from the New Afrikan Military Science Institute MSI 2-2 Report. Together, they provides a complete analysis of the legal considerations that can only be answered using universally accepted principles of law at the International Court of Justice, as attested by both the Provisional government of the Republic of New Afrika and the United States government itself.
Reparations by any means necessary,
Siphiwe Baleka
Minister of Foreign Affairs
Cc: H.E. Youssouf Mondoha Assoumani Chairman AU PRC; Dr. Namira Negm Legal Council AU Legal Team; William Carew Head Of Secretariat, AU ECOSOCC; The AU Citizens and Diaspora Organizations Directorate (CIDO); Barbara Reynolds, Chair Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent (WGEPAD); Dr. Hilary Brown, Programme Manager Culture and Community Development, CARICOM Secretariat; Accra Reparations Conference Secretariat; Dr. Barry Biekman, AUADS High Council
ENDNOTES:
The Statement to the 20th session of the United Nations Intergovernmental Working Group on the Effective Implementation of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action given in Geneva, Switzerland 10-21 October 2022 entitled NEW AFRIKAN INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENT AND HUMAN RIGHTS. That statement detailed how the reparatory justice claims of the New Afrikan Independence Movement, headed by the PG-RNA, have been repressed pursuant to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) and the United States National Security Memorandum (NSC) 46 - dated March 17, 1978. https://www.balanta.org/news/new-afrikan-independence-movement-and-human-rights-bbhagsia-statement-to-the-20th-session-of-the-intergovernmental-working-group-on-the-effective-implementation-of-the-durban-declaration
See https://www.balanta.org/news/pfpad-durban and https://www.balanta.org/news/towards-a-right-to-return-amp-citizenship-policy-for-descendents-of-people-taken-from-territories-in-africa-during-the-transatlantic-trafficking-and-enslavement-of-african-people
Based on the PRESENTMENT TO THE HOLY SEE IN FURTHERANCE OF REPARATIONS to Bishop Paul Tighe, Secretary of the Pontifical Council of Culture drafted by Balanta B’urassa History and Genealogy members Siphiwe Baleka and Kamm Howard https://www.balanta.org/news/the-board-as-i-see-it-developments-concerning-global-afrikan-strategic-litigation