Against the empire: the Black Panthers in Congo, insurgent cosmopolitanism and the fluidity of revolutions

Abstract

In 1971, while the Black Panther Party was torn by internal warfare and the attacks from the FBI COINTELPRO, Eldridge Cleaver, then Minister of Information and head of its International section, led a delegation to the capital city of the People’s Republic of Congo, Brazzaville, for a three-week trip. Three men and two women arrived in a country which ‘name was almost synonymous to Africa’. After two years spent in Algiers, Eldridge Cleaver hoped to relocate the BPP international section in sub-Saharan Africa to tie the party and the Black Power Movement to an African ‘Socialist’ revolution. To document what should have been a founding moment interconnecting revolutions, the filmmaker Bill Stephens edited Congo Oye: We have come Back, and Eldridge Cleaver published an essay, Revolution in the Congo. Both conjured up a black ‘insurgent cosmopolitanism’ uniting Marxist-based protests from black people worldwide. This paper first explores how Congo epitomized Eldridge Cleaver and the Panthers’ imageries of Africa: from the fatherland to the continent of a new anti-imperialist struggle where they could start a global revolution. Second, it confronts the Black Panthers’ rhetoric of liberation to the Congolese perspective and analyzes how both developed parallel discourses on decolonization and the porosity of revolutions that hardly became one.

Keywords:

• Black Panthers
• Congo-Brazzaville
• insurgent cosmopolitanism
• Marxism-Leninism

Notes

1. Right On!, originally named Babylon, was a journal founded in 1971, by Panthers who followed Eldridge Cleaver’s ideological orientation.

2. Congo Oye was a tune sung by marching regiments the Panthers met in Brazzaville.

3. The Panthers were confronted to the flexibility of Congolese schedules. They waited three hours before Ngouabi accepted to be interviewed.

4. In Congo Oye, precolonial Africa is represented by unnamed statues and masks, some of which actually are Dogon.

5. Malcolm X wanted to ‘bring the Negro question’ before the United Nations and have the United States condemned for violating human rights.

6. Massemba-Debat developed Bantu socialism as a combination between Central African traditions and modernity. Ngouabi replaced it with scientific socialism.

7. Intercommunalism means the solidarity of the oppressed, exploited by the United States’ capitalist and imperial system.

8. Kathleen Cleaver later explained that the Panthers had few details on what happened and did not understand how and why some of the people they met, had been arrested or killed. (K. Cleaver, 1998, p. 244).