The U.S. federal government is helplessly deadlocked in conflict with Native Americans occu- pying Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Approximately 300 well–armed Sioux Indians are deter- mined to demonstrate that their people must be treated as human beings by the U.S. govern- ment.  

The Caribbean Island nation of the Bahamas becomes independent of Britain. In 1984, it is estimated that this island nation has 228,000 citizens and a land area of 5,380 square miles.  

The Tanzania–Zambia Railway, a Chinese–funded project that will connect the east African coast with the Zambian “copper belt” reaches the Zambian border. The 1,000–mile link is designed to lessen Zambia’s dependence on transportation and harbor facilities in South Africa.  

An International Women’s Day is declared for March 8 to commemorate the struggle of all women against exploitation, racism, sexism and imperialism.  

Bobby Seale dramatically returns to Chicago to testify in defense of his one–time co–defen- dents, "the Chicago 7,” bringing back memories of the stormy political persecution trial that rocked the U.S. in 1969–1970. (The trial of the “Chicago 8,” changed to the “Chicago 7” when Bobby Seale’s case was severed from the rest, was one of the first moves by the U.S. govern- ment to repress the “New Left.”) One incident that highlighted this spectacle of government- directed political repression is the binding and gagging of Bobby Seale in the courtroom. During the “Chicago 8” trial, U.S. marshals try to stuff gauze into Bobby Seale’s mouth to keep him silent; the straps and gag cut off circulation to his arms and head. The “Chicago 7” defendents are David Dellinger, Jerry Rubin, Rennie Davis, Thomas Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, John Fronies and Lee Weiner. Over 150 contempt–of–court citations are handed down by Judge Julius Hoffman at the conclusion of this trial, all of which are ultimately dismissed by Judge Edward Gignoux, flown in from Maine, because no Chicago judge would accept the case. See Bobby Seale, “Our Strongest Weapon Is All of Us” in The Conspiracy: The Chicago 8 Speak Out (1969).  

Billy Dee Williams and Richard Pryor star in Paramount Studio’s "Hit!"  

When he is appointed Deputy Chancellor of the entire New York School system, Dr. Bernard R. Gifford becomes the highest ranking Black in the city’s school system.  

Twelve African miners are killed and 27 injured in clashes with South African police during a major strike at an Anglo–American Corporation–owned mine in Carltonville. The incident climaxes a year of intensive labor unrest in the country, including widespread strikes in Durban earlier this year that disrupt life in South Africa’s third largest city.  

Claude Brown, author of Manchild in the Promised Land (1966), publishes his The Children of Ham, which describes the struggle to survive waged by thirteen black youths, ages 14 to 22, who live in a dilapidated, gutted and abandoned tenement in Harlem, New York.  

Seven citizens of the Republic of New Africa (RNA), which is led by Imari Abubakar Obadele, are convicted in a U.S. District Court in Biloxi, Mississippi, on charges stemming from a shoot–out at RNA headquarters in Jackson in August 1971. Charges against the two women and five men include conspiracy to assault federal officers, conspiracy to possess weapons, and assault on a federal officer. Sentences range from three to 22 years; appeal bonds are set at $20,000 for each defendent.  

The apartheid régime in South Africa is shaken when massive strikes erupt in Natal.  

Six west African nations end a two–week meeting to discuss a massive recovery effort follow- ing the devastating five–year Sahel drought and famine.  

The Army has four African generals and the Air Force has one. The Navy has one African admiral.  

Jim Brown stars in United Artists’ "I Escaped from Devil’s Island." 

Lydia Lewis is the first African to be named “Miss Kentucky” in the 26 years of the pageant.  

Renault Robinson, executive director of the  Afro–American Patrolmen’s League, complains that being an African mayor today is like being a “lion without teeth.” As soon as you get in power, “they,” the white power structure, “withdraw control of the police force.”  

It is estimated in an off–year census that 23.7 million American Africans reside in the United States.  

After 10 years of war against Portugal, the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands (PAIGC) claims independence for Guinea–Bissau.  

The Chicago Board of Aldermen approves a new $800,000 police undercover operation to plant paid police informers inside “militant” organizations. The new agent–provocateurs will receive $16,116 per year. See Ernest Volkman, “Othello,” Penthouse (ca. 1979) for a description of how an African FBI informer conspired to provoke a violent dispute between the Black Pan- thers and US (i.e., United Slaves) in California.  

New World Films releases "The Harder They Come" starring Jimmy Cliff, Jamaican Reggae recording artist.  

Amilcar Cabral, Secretary–General of PAIGC, is assassinated by agents of Portuguese colo- nialism.  Following this heinous crime PAIGC militants launch a decisive military action break- ing the back of Portuguese power in rural Guinea–Bissau.  

Warner Brothers releases "Enter the Dragon" with Bruce Lee and Jim Kelly, specialists  in the martial arts.  

The North American Region Planning Conference for the Sixth Pan-African Congress is held in the Center of Pan-African Culture, Kent State University, on May 11. The Conference is attended by more than 300 North American representatives and others from around the world. 

"Five on the Black Hand Side" is released by United Artists with Clarice Taylor, Leonard Jack- son, Virginia Capers, Glynn Turman, D’Urville Martin, Richard Martin and Sonny Jim. Brock Peters and Michael Tolan produce this movie based on Charlie L. Russell’s play.  

The “Virgin Island Five,” Africans falsely convicted of killing eight whites on a plush golf course in St. Thomas in 1972, are taken from the U.S. Virgin Islands to an unknown prison farm in rural Georgia. The five, Ishmaeli Labeet, Raphael Joseph, Beaumont Gereau, Warren Ballen- tine and Meral Smith, are confined in damp cells without access to sunlight or fresh air. Each of them is sentenced to eight life sentences plus 90 years!  

In Seattle, Washington, three major utillity companies — Seattle City Light, Pacific Northwest Bell and Washington Natural Gas Company — admit they helped the FBI spy on Elmer Dixon III, a Black Panther Party member, during 1970–1971.  

During “Operation Amilcar Cabral,” avenging the assassination of their first Secretary–General, PAIGC forces capture a key Portuguese garrison at Guiledge, a turning point in the Guinea– Bissau liberation struggle.  

Carl Anderson appears as Judas Iscariot in Universal Studio’s "Jesus Christ Superstar."  

In Oakland, California, demonstrations take place in support of the United Farmworkers Union. Over 200 demonstrators participate in bringing the “Boycott Safeway” message to local Safe- way stores.  

In Atlanta, an all–white jury deliberating for only 90 minutes finds Milton Leon Hicks guilty of rape, armed robbery and burglary in DeKalb County.  He is sentenced to two life terms and 20 years.  

On the final day of PAIGC’s second Congress, held in the liberated region of Boe, Guinea–Bissau, the late Amilcar Cabral is posthumously given the title of “Number One Militant of PAIGC.” Aristides Pereira is unanimously elected Secretary–General.  

Infuriated by their inhuman treatment, prisoners at McAlester Prison in Oklahoma set fire to 12 buildings.  

"Gordon’s War," directed by Ossie Davis, is released by Twentieth Century–Fox with Paul Win- field, Gilbert Lewis and Nathan C. Heard.  

Josephine Baker visits northern California’s Bay Area. During World War II, Ms. Baker drove an ambulance for the anti–fascist forces and placed her beauty and artistic talents at the service of allied troops, entertaining them and encouraging them in their struggle for freedom. For her war work, she received from the French government the Legion of Honor with the Palm, the Croix de Guerre and the Rosette of the Resistance. In recent years, she again demonstrated her love for all humanity and her determination to translate that love into a living reality by adopting more than a dozen homeless children. Her “rainbow children,”  as she sometimes referred to them, came from Europe, Africa and Asia, all the races of humankind.  

"Detroit 9000," with Hari Rhodes and Vonetta McGee, is released by General Films.  

Wilbert Allen publicly admits that as an FBI informer he spied on several Winston–Salem, North Carolina, community leaders, including Larry Little, co–ordinator of the Winston–Salem branch of the Black Panther Party.  

Thomas Bradley, the mayor of Los Angeles, becomes the first African American president of the National League of Cities.  

A Day of Solidarity with the Struggle of the Arab People is declared in support of revolutionary Arab forces in their fight for the liberation of Palestine and against three evils — imperialism, racism and Zionism.  

The Black Appalachian Commission, Inc., publishes Black Appalachian Viewpoints in order to dispel the myths surrounding the area of the country known as Appalachia, which heretofore has been synonymous with poor white people, “lil’ Abner” types.  In reality, more than 1.3 million African people populate the area, which extends across 13 states, divided into four sub–regions — southern New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, south–eastern Ohio, West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, western Virginia, eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina, eastern Mississippi, Alabama, northern Georgia and north–western South Carolina. The total population of Appalachia is 18.2 million.  

Map 20. Appalachia

Bobby Seale runs for mayor of Oakland; Elaine Brown runs for a City Council seat. Both lose the election.  

A slave camp, the “Far South Camp,” where 27 people are being held in bondage, is unco- vered in southern Florida. The “slaves” include 25 African men and one woman, and one white man. Some have been held in slavery for as long as four years. They are lured into the camp with promises of good pay and wine. If they attempt to leave their lives are threatened.  

Arab oil–producing countries are asked by the New York–based Action Committee on Ameri- can–Arab Relations to pressure American oil companies into spending $1 million each to counteract Zionist political pressures on American politicians. The United States is viewed by the Arabs as the “greatest battle–ground of the Middle East conflict.”  

Reactionary Chilean military forces overthrow the Popular Unity (UP) government of Chile’s Marxist President Salvador Allende shortly after its third anniversary in office. There is signifi- cant evidence of U.S. involvement in the coup, which results in the death of President Allende and, according to some reports, at least 1,000 Chilean citizens. Massive demonstrations of solidarity with the Chilean people are organized all over the world. Hundreds of thousands of people hold street demonstrations in Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina and Peru. Early on the morning of September 11, Naval and Marine units take over the cities of Valparaisco, Quillota, Quinteros (the port for Concepción) and Talcahuano. Informed of this, Allende rushes from his home to the presidential palace, the Moneda. He begins broadcasting to the country and announces that the military has demanded his resignation. “I will not resign,” he says. “I am ready to resist with whatever means, even at the cost of my life.” A three–hour gun battle ensues and ends with the military capturing the Moneda. All news coming out of Chile is controlled by the military which announces that Allende committed suicide rather than surren- der. While this claim may be true, there is general suspicion that Allende and several of his aides were murdered (see Edward Boorstein, Allende’s Chile, An Inside View (1977).  

Pan–Africanists denounce SCLC’s acceptance of $50,000 in Gulf Oil Corporation’s “blood money,” declaring that any dealings with the notorious company is tantamount to “treason against African people all over the world.” Gulf Oil is a major financial source propping up Portuguese colonialism in Angola and Mozambique.  

The Arkansas Black Political Caucus meets in Little Rock to plan the Second National Black Political Convention to be held in March 1974. Ron Daniels, co-chairperson of the National Black Political Empowerment Committee, spoke on “new politics for black people” and “unity with diversity,” i.e., political unity without monolithic political beliefs. See Harold Cruse, “The Little Rock National Black Political Convention,” Black World, Parts I and II, October and November 1974.  

In Fort Valley, Georgia, the U.S. Justice Department files a suit charging that African voters seeking to cast absentee ballots are not given the same assistance as white people and, therefore, had their voting rights violated.  

Of the black male population, 56% (11,337) is 24 years old or younger; 52% of the black female population (12,464) is in this age group. The median age for black males is 21.7. For black females the median age is 24. In contrast, 46% of the white male population (89,424) is 24 years old or younger, and 41% of white females (93,625) is in this age group. The median age for white males is 28. For white females, the median age is 30.6. Black Americans are 6.5 years younger than white Americans.  

Six months before the scheduled launching of the North American Zone (NAZ) Festival at Howard University in February 1974, officials and organizers of the NAZ of the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture announce that regional organizers are urged to identify and catalog outstanding arts groups, cultural organizations and artists within each of the nine North American regions.  

Scholars from six countries are using a computer to decipher Africa’s oldest written language, the cursive Meroitic script of southern Egypt. Meroitic was the language of the people of Kush (Meroë)—thought to be Ancient Ethiopia — which flourished from the 7th century BCE to the 4th century CE.  

1974  
The Lusaka Agreement between Portugal and FRELIMO effects a cease–fire in Mozambique, and provides for a Transitional Government with a Joint Military Commission to take office on 20 September in Lourenço Marques (later changed to Maputo), the capital city.  

Despite the widespread belief that the governing conservative coalition in Guatemala is really beaten in the presidential election, the left–leaning opposition front, led by General Efraín Ríos Montt, seems to have resigned itself to the victory of government candidate Kjell Eugenio Laugerud García.  

The National Black United Fund is launched in New York City; it was actually incorporated in 1972.  

John Ford of Memphis is the first African American elected a congressman from Tennessee in the history of the state.  

Joaquín Balaguer wins a third four-year term as the President of the Dominican Republic. It is, however, a hollow victory for the 66-year-old conservative, for, during the election campaign, it is charged that his party’s shock troops, the “Red Guards,” are active in suppressing the opposition. More than 15 persons are killed.  

Marvyn Dymally is elected Lieutenant Governor of California.  

In the Caribbean, pleas for the independence of Anguilla, Nevis, Surinam, and Abaco are renewed. Anguillian leader Ronald Webster reminds Great Britain that the three-year independence-study period is over and that his island is ready to cut itself away from St. Kitts and Nevis, whose local council voted for secession from St. Kitts. Surinam’s Prime Minister, Henk Arron, says his country will gain its independence from the Netherlands before the end of 1975. He notes that local agriculture will be improved, where necessary. The Abaco Inde- pendence Movement, a separatist party led by Charles R. Hall, Jr., is “trying to get total auto- nomy within the Bahamas or independence outside of it.” On the Turks and Caicos Islands, just east of the Bahamas, a group of citizens led by  State Councillor, Liam Maguire, wants to sever the colony’s ties with Great Britain and to align politically and economically with Cana da.  

Fascist and colonialist riots break out in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. They are subse- quently put down with the combined intervention of Portuguese militants and FRELIMO com- batants.  

Jill Brown becomes the very first woman, African or otherwise, to be trained by the Navy as a pilot.  

The International Monetary Fund authorizes a $15.9 million “compensatory financing” loan to Jamaica to help relieve the island’s international payments problem resulting from a shortfall in export earnings from sugar, bauxite and other commodities in 1973.  

Gerald Ford, a Republican from Michigan, becomes the 38th U.S. President after the resigna- tion of Richard M. Nixon who committed “high crimes and misdemeanors” while in office. Pre- sident Ford is the first president not elected to office by a popular or Electoral College vote.  

Alice M. Henderson of Atlanta, Georgia, becomes the first female U.S. Army Chaplain. Prior to entering military service, she was the associate minister of an African Methodist Episcopal Church in Atlanta.  

Mr. Erskine Ward, director of the Sugar Producer’s Association, discloses that, as a result of a major drop in production, Barbados is expected to lose more than $4  million “Badjun” dol- lars this year.  

Gerald E. Thomas becomes the second African American to be named a rear admiral in the U.S. Navy. A 1951 graduate of Harvard University, he is assigned to Pacific Destroyer Squa- dron 9, a fleet of six destroyers.  

President Carlos Andres Pérez says Venezuela will immediately proceed to nationalize the U.S.–dominated Venezuelan oil industry.  

FRELIMO starts a three–month political course for cadre in liberated Mozambique. President Samora Machel says, “This course will prepare cadre for our Movement who, like young plants will be transplanted throughout the whole country with the task of instilling a new conscious- ness in our people and organizing its vanguard.”  

The Cuban government releases four Floridians who had been detained for several months after their shrimp boat was commandeered for fishing illegally in Cuban waters.  

Georgetown, Guyana, is chosen as the site for a Chinese agricultural trade exhibit.  

The sixth Pan–African Congress is held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the first since 1945.  This is also the first of the Pan–African Congresses to be held in Africa. The Congress calls for an end to foreign domination in Africa, liquidation of foreign military bases, and adoption of socialism rather than capitalism. The prime organizers of this Congress are former SNCC workers.  

Several banana–growing nations in Latin America — Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador, Nicara- gua, Honduras and Guatemala — have initiated a “banana war” over their right to levy a tax on banana exports. In Costa Rica it is alleged that Standard Fruit (a U.S.–owned subsidiary of Castle & Cooke, Inc.) had plotted the assassination of Panama’s leader, Brigadier General Omar Torrijos, and had made plans to overthrow the governments of Costa Rica and Hondu- ras. The scheme is supposed to call for the use of Vietnam veterans from New York, as well as British mercenaries. United Brands (formerly the United Fruit Company) and the Del Monte Corporation maintain their silence on this issue.  
 

From J.A. Rogers. Your History for the Beginning to the Present (The Pittsburgh Courier       Publishing Co., 1940). Reprinted from the original collection of Heru-Ka Anu, 1983.

Jamaica’s Prime Minister Michael Manley declares war on criminal gunmen, “the evil in our midst.”  

African Liberation Movements reiterate their determination to continue the struggle for the 
complete independence of all Africa.  

The Mexican government’s oil monopoly, PEMEX, plans to open 2,000 oil wells in 22 states by 1976, increasing production from 550,000 barrells daily to more than 700,000. If plans succeed, Mexico will be self–sufficient in oil.  

Emperor Haile Selassie is deposed after years of internal opposition and is replaced by a pro- visional military régime set up by the Co–ordinating Committee of the Armed Forces (later to be known as the Dergue). Selassie had ruled as a constitutional monarch since 1931.  

A $38.5 million loan to Colombia is approved by the Inter–American Development Bank to aid a project which will expand to one million kilowatts the capacity of a hydro–electric plant now under construction.  

The second Congress of the People’s Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG) is held in liberated territory. It assesses new conditions in the Arabian peninsula and unites its forces in Oman.  

Miguel Angel Asturias, Guatemala’s noted novelist, poet, journalist and diplomat, dies at age 74. Born in 1899, Dr. Asturias won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1967. A year earlier the Lenin Peace Prize was conferred on him for his triology focusing on the United Fruit Company and its powerful role in Guatemala and other Central American countries. The titles of the three novels, all published between 1950 and 1960 are: Viento fuerte, El Papa verde, and Los ojos de los enterrados.  

A massive Iranian counter–insurgency effort by the ruling Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlevi, begun in late 1973, is defeated. In 1951 Premier Mohammed Mossadegh, who nationalized the Anglo–Iranian Oil Company, was ousted in the CIA–orchestrated coup code named “Operation Boy Scout,” which installed the Shah. See Elliott Roosevelt, Counter–Coup: The Struggle for Iran (1979). This book is ordered off the bookstore shelves just as it was going on sale to the public because of Iran’s holding several American Embassy staff as hostages after the U.S. gives the Shah safe haven.  

Premier Pham Van Dong of North Vietnam meets with Premier Castro in Havana, Cuba.  

Twenty–seven journalists, political opponents and former government officials have criminal charges filed against them for “violating the Nicaraguan Constitution and endangering the wel- fare of the state.” Officially Nicaragua is led by a three–man junta. In actuality it is headed by ex-President Anastasio Somoza Debayle, who had to leave office in 1971 because he could not succeed himself legally. When these charges are filed, he is running for re–election.  

The mission boards of the United Church of Christ announce that the Continental Oil Company (CONOCO) has agreed to stop offshore production in Namibia, making it the first multi–nation- al oil company to bow to shareholder pressure and withdraw its investments. The four remain- ing American companies — Standard Oil of California, Getty, Phillips, and Texaco — soon follow.  

Urban Venezuelan guerrillas say they are responsible for a series of fires and explosions that begin the day the president is inaugurated. A warehouse complex, several oil pipelines and a U.S.–owned supermaket are destroyed or damanged in Caracas.  

The government of Dominica promises to enact some laws against anti–white racism when a U.S. tourist is fatally shot. Four others are attacked with cutlasses (i.e., machetes) and other white tourists are stoned.  

More than 30,000 Angolans march in a funeral procession in Luanda for victims of white–set- tler vigilante attacks. This is the largest political demonstration ever held in Angola.  

Armored cars guard Haiti’s palace and President Jean–Claude Duvalier, giving evidence of the same political unrest the characterized the régime of his father, “Papa Doc.”  

Portuguese and PAIGC representatives sign a joint statement declaring the formal indepen- dence of Guinea–Bissau. A cease–fire is effected, ending 11 years of armed struggle.  

A UN Security Council resolution to expel South Africa from the world body because of apart- heid and illegal occupation of Namibia is vetoed by France, Britain and the United States. The American Ambassador to the U.N., John Scali, responds to the growing international strength of Third World nations with a tirade against “the tyranny of the majority.”  

Premier Robert Bradshaw of St. Kitts–Nevis, brings not only these two islands into the Carib- bean Regional Community and Common Market (CARICOM), but also defies Great Britain when he signs for the breakaway island of Anguilla, which severed its relationship with St. Kitts–Nevis in 1967.  

The struggle of the Eritrean People continues. The Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) has con- ducted guerrilla warfare since 1961, fighting for Eritrean national self–determination against the reactionary Haile Selassie régime and its military successor. The Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) also operates in the area, oftentimes conflicting with the ELF.  

1974 
Grenda, the "Spice Island," becomes politically independent of Britain with 113,00 citizens. The small island nation has a land area of 133 square miles. On March 13, 1979, the black despot, Eric Gairy, is overthrown by the New Jewel Movement (JEWEL: Joint Endeavor for Welfare, Education and Liberation) led by Maurice Bishop. In addition to his corruption, Gairy's political rule is characterized by his terrorist "Mongoose Gang" and the unbridled brutality and viciousness typical of dictators and tyrants in cahoots with the American CIA. See 'is freedom we making,’ The New Democracy in Grenada (ca. 1981).  

An MPLA  office opens in Luanda, after the signing of a ceasefire agreement ending 13 years and 8 months of armed struggle. One hundred thousand Angolans gather at Luanda airport to greet the official MPLA delegation arriving in Angola. Agostinho Neto, the MPLA President states, “We will not be able to achieve the ideals of unity, democracy and progress unless we are concerned to unite the peasants and workers, those who were most exploited during colo- nialism—and unite them around this ideal—for they are the ones who can best lead this revo- lution.”  

The Lusaka Declaration of Unity brings together Zimbabwe’s liberation movements (namely, ZAPU and ZANU) and the African National Congress. While agreeing to negotiate with the colonialists “on the steps to be taken to achieve independence on the basis of majority rule,” the liberation movements also recognize “the inevitability of continued armed struggle and all other forms of struggle until the total liberation of Zimbabwe” and of Southern Africa in general is achieved.  

The MPLA expels Daniel Chipenda for his involvement in assassination plots against Presi- dent Neto in 1972, 1973 and 1974 and condemns as a fraudulent pretense Chipenda’s opening a Luanda office.  

Prime Minister Forbes Burnham of Guyana serves notice that the U.S.-owned Reynolds Guyana Mines, Ltd. will be nationalized and integrated into the government–owned Guyana Bauxite Company.  

In order to stem the sharp increase in Caribbean emigration to Canada, the Canadian govern- ment announces 22 tighter rules for new émigrés, which making it more difficult for prospective non–white immigrants who do not have jobs waiting for them.  

In Santo Domingo, a 23–person leftist guerrilla unit seizes Ms. Barbara Hutchinson, head of the U.S. Information Service, and holds six other persons hostage in the Venezuelan Consu- late, demanding $1 million and the release by the Dominican Republic of 38 political prisoners. After occupying the consulate for 13 days, the guerrillas’ demands are acceded to and they are offered free passage out of the country.  

General Anastasio Somoza Debayle is returned to the presidency of Nicaragua.  

CIA Director William E. Colby triggers a furor in Congress when he discloses that an expen- diture of $3 million was authorized to stop the Chilean Salvador Allende’s candidacy in 1964 and more than $8 million was authorized to scuttle his election in 1970 and destabilize his government between 1970 and September 1973, when he was overthrown. Documents show that Henry Kissinger, the Secretary of State, favored a limited and totally covert intervention plan.  See Edward Boorstein, Allende’s Chile, an Inside View  (1977).  

In Grenada, Prime Minister Eric Gairy announces that general elections will not be held.  The Prime Minister is responding to a report that the opposition New Jewel Movement is ready to participate in elections if 18–year–olds are enfranchised. Gairy asks for cooperation with his ruling Grenada United Labor Party instead of an election designed “to meet the whims of certain persons whose political ideologies have already been rejected by the electorate.”  

Twenty Latin American and Caribbean nations, including Cuba and Mexico, agree to establish a cartel to fix the price of sugar on the world market.  

About 1,000 Honduran professionals leave the country to work in the United States between 1960 and 1974.  
 

Since the bloody turmoil of Selma, Alabama in 1965, more than 1.5 million African American  Southerners have been added to voter–registration lists. No African Americans held elected office in Alabama twenty years ago. Today the number is almost 200. Fewer than 100 African Americans held public office in the entire South 10 years ago; the total now is more than 1,700.  

Josephine Baker, world–renowned entertainer, dies in France.  

After 18 months of bargaining, the European Common Market agrees to an extensive trade and aid treaty with 46 African, Caribbean, and Pacific countries. Called the Lome Treaty and signed in Lome, Togo, the agreement provides the co–signing ACP nations a $4 billion aid package.  
 

From J.A. Rogers. Your History from the Beginning to the Present (The Pittsburgh Courier     Publishing Co., 1940). Reprinted from the original collection of Heru-Ka Anu, 1983.

Bram Fischer, a white South African, dies in prison while serving a life sentence for his con- sistent and fierce opposition to the racist South African régime in the struggle for the national liberation and social emancipation of all South Africans.  

The U.S. seizes, in a quid–pro–quo action, a Cuban shrimp boat for allegedly fishing in U.S. territorial waters off the Texas coast.  

On the boards of foundations, among judges, trustees of universities and in other places of status, white ethnics have as few token representatives as do American Africans. In Chica- go’s 106 corporations, only 1.9% of 1,341 directors are Italian; 0.3% are Polish; 0.4% are Black; 0.1% are Hispanic. In Pittsburgh, foreign–stock families with annual incomes under $3,500 outnumber the black poor by more than 2 to 1. In the northern urban centers, practi- cally the only whites remaining are Catholics and, in cities like Chicago and Detriot, white Appalachian migrants. Two out of every three persons in Detroit are African or Polish. Newark is divided by Africans, Hispanics, some of whom are also African, and Italians. The African population of the North has increased since 1900 from under one million to more than 10 million.  

The first National Assembly of FRELIMO concludes.  Prime Minister Chissano declares: “We in Mozambique have only one large capital . . . the human capital. And we have land. We will mobilize the human capital and study ways of using the land properly.”  

The U.S. Department of Defense and the government of Puerto Rico announce that unqualified decisions have been made to stop all naval practice–shelling on Culebra Island and on the Culebra cays.  

The Suez Canal officially re–opens for the first time since the Arab–Israeli war of 1967. The Canal reverted to Egypt on March 5 following the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Sinai Peninsula.  

In St. Vincent, the newly elected government of Premier Milton Cato says that the island nation will seek its independence from Britain and align itself with other Caribbean states or stand alone.  

The Angolan liberation movements — MPLA, UNITA AND FNLA — reach a unity accord, find- ing common ground for independence talks with the Portuguese, and declare the Cabinda enclave an “integral and inalienable” part of Angola.  

Loraine J. Beavers attends the University of Datyon for three years learning to teach the handi- capped. The Ohio State Department of Public Welfare rules that the $750 Ohio Instructional Grant Ms. Beavers receives is income and cuts off her family’s ADC (Aid to Dependent Chil- dren) and food stamps allocations. This ruling reflects a national problem.  

At Vaal Reefs, 12,000 African workers strike the gold mines owned by South Africa’s Anglo– American Corporation, the world’s largest gold producer. While gold profits reach record highs, workers continue to resist the inhuman and brutally exploitative conditions of contract migrant labor.  

Yusef Lateef, who has nutured a jazz image consistently his own, celebrates his twentieth anniversary as a premiere musician.  

A Black Muslim movement in Bermuda, led by Brother Byron Philip Hay, advocates racial separatism.  It is estimated that some 2,000 of the island’s 33,000 African population belong to the movement.  

A national march against racism is held in Boston, Massachusetts. The march, which is sponsored by the National Student Coalition Against Racism, is organized in support of Afri- can people’s attempts to desegregate the Boston public schools and to end all racist attacks against African school children.  

The Alvor (Algrave) Agreement is signed by Portugal and the Angolan liberation movements ending 14 years of armed struggle. Setting Angolan independence for November, the agree- ment establishes a transitional government headed by the Portuguese Governor General and a 12–member cabinet of three representatives each from the MPLA, FNLA and UNITA. Admini- strative and military integration of the movements is to precede the election of a Constituent Assembly, which will elect a president to accept transfer of power from Portugal. Angola has a population, as estimated in 1984, of 7,770,000 and a land area of 481,353 square miles.  

A 10–year national survey, “Racial Trends, 1964 to 1974,” is released by the Institute for Social Research, an affiliate of the Univeristy of Michigan. The study shows that whites in greater numbers, an increase from 56% to 75%, support governmental measures taken to protect equal access of African Americans to public accommodations; 87% think African Americans should have the right to live wherever they wish. Previously only 65% of white respondents held this view. On the other hand, the study reports that African Americans do not harbor the same positive perceptions of change in race relations, for there is a drop in the number of African American respondents who say they would prefer to live in an all–white neighborhood. Despite the apparent softening in white attitudes, 50% of the white respondents reported as they did in 1964 that they did not have any African American friends, while less than 25% of all African Americans interviewed stated they have no white friends.  

A general strike by 25,000 workers threatens to disrupt Queen Elizabeth II’s visit to Bermuda. 

After three days of bogus elections in the Ovambo Bantustan, the South West African Peo- ples Organization’s (SWAPO) Executive Committee issues a policy statement in Windhoek reasserting the right of the Namibian people to independence and national sovereignty and warning that “retribution against neo–colonialists and their puppets . . . will be sure and savage.”  

Puerto Rico is reported to have “substantial” deposits of oil just off her northern coast.  

Police Departments in the United States discard their all–male, all–white traditions. In many departments, women now ride patrol. Africans and Hispanics are gradually finding more places in police work. Civilians are taking up technical and service positions, freeing “sworn” officers for more dangerous crime fighting. A survey recently conducted by LEAA (Law En- forcement Assistance Administration) of 16 law enforcement agencies put African officers at 9.9%, and Hispanics at 2.4%. Earlier surveys of the same agencies between 1972 and 1974 showed Africans at 8.2% and Hispanics at 1.6%.  

Daniel “Chappie” James becomes the first African American four–star general in American history. He immediately takes over duties of commander–in–chief of the North American Air Defense Command.  

On the occasion of his 70th birthday, Moses Kotane is awarded Isitwalandwe/Seaparankoe.  

Angela Davis, a Marxist scholar and activist, joins the teaching staff of the Claremont cluster of six colleges. Angered alumni and wealthy benefactors of the richly endowed colleges receive letters from College officials saying Ms. Davis’ $3,000 contract with the Claremont Black Studies Center was “unauthorized and regrettable.” Jimmy Garrett, the Black Studies Center director, who negotiated the contract, is fired eight days later. Six year’s earlier, in 1970, Angela Davis was an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at UCLA. In 1972, after 18 months in jail, she was acquitted of smuggling weapons to George Jackson and his black activist inmate companions, murder and kidnapping in the alleged breakout of George Jackson from the Marin County, California, jail, and the courtroom killing of a judge and three others.  

The Caribbean Publishing and Broadcasting Association commissions a report which con- tends that the Guyana government has curtailed the freedom of the press through its expanded ownership of the media.  

Following an unsuccessful rightwing counter–coup in Portugal, which was backed by General Spinola, the newly formed High Council of the Revolution nationalizes Portuguese banks and insurance companies.  

In a speech to the National Alliance against Racism and Political Repression, Angela Davis describes the United States as “an emerging, massive police state.” She tells more than 1,000 listeners that President Gerald Ford acts in the interests of corporations and not the people. She also says the establishment tries to pit whites against Blacks to keep almost everyone poor.  

Clare Jones is installed as the first African American president of the American Library Asso- ciation. The association is 100 years old.  

Unconfirmed reports in U.S. periodicals have it that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was involved in plots to assassinate Fidel Castro of Cuba, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic and François “Papa Doc” Duvalier of Haiti. CIA Director William E. Colby admits there were such discussions held during his tenure with the Agency, but denies that anything ever came of them.  

Robert F. Williams plans to return to Monroe, North Carolina to face charges for the alleged kidnapping of Bruce Stegall and his wife, Mabel, ending 15 years of “voluntary” exile and evasion that took him to Cuba and China in the 1960s. Williams, the 49–year–old former President of the Republic of New Africa (RNA), announces his decision when the Michigan Supreme Court, after long litigation refuses to block his extradition to North Carolina, which according to Williams, represents “an extension of racial tyranny.” Robert F. Williams had been fighting extradition since returning to the U.S. from abroad in 1969, when he was arrested at the Detroit airport by federal agents.  

Thomas Reed becomes the second African congressman since the days of Reconstruction to be appointed to a major standing committee, when he is named Chairman of the House Public Welfare Committee.  

The top U.S. negotiator for a new Panama Canal treaty, Ellsworth Bunker, says that armed conflict in the Canal Zone is a likely possibility unless Panama is granted a voice in the canal’s operation and defense. He warns that “we no longer can be — nor would we want to be — the only country in the world exercising extra–territoriality on the soil of another country.  

Julia L. Greer becomes the first African female to serve as labor arbitrator when she becomes commissioned with the U.S. Mediation and Arbitration Service.  

Huey P. Newton, the fugitive co–founder of the Black Panther Party, is alive and well and living in Havana after he jumps bail and fails to answer nine charges including one for murder in Oakland, California. Newton’s whereabouts are supposedly learned from Angela Davis.  

American Africans constitute 20% of the population of Boston but wield less political, social and economic influence than their counterparts in other large northen urban centers. This lack of influence is attributed to Boston’s peculiar political history as well as to the disunity among African Americans themselves.  

Victor Perlo publishes The Economics of Racism, USA, a penetrating Marxist study of racism in the realm of economics, which deals with the problems that are central to the development of African people in this period of deep economic and political crises in the U.S.  

Dr. Donna P. Davis is the first black woman physician in the U.S. Navy.  

H. Minton Frances, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, is named to the Air Force Policy Council. It marks the first time that any African representation from the Defense Department’s Equal Opportunity Branch has been able to sit in on high–level Pentagon discussions.  

The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee makes public the fact that the FBI, which regarded “Martin Luther King to be the most dangerous and effective leader in the country,” conducted a six-year campaign to destroy him as a leader of the civil rights movement. Recently released evidence demonstrates that the FBI bugged King’s hotel rooms, participated in a blackmail attempt which King interpreted as a suggestion that he kill himself just before he was to receive the Nobel Prize, and promoted an effort to introduce a replacement for King as a “national Negro leader.” Just 34 days before he was to receive the Nobel Prize in Stockholm, Sweden, King’s wife, Coretta, received an anonymous letter sent by the FBI and a taped recording of one of the FBI’s bugs. The letter read in part: “King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do [it]. You are done. There is but one way out for you.” A March 1968 memorandum, whose stated purpose was “to publicize hypocrisy on the part of Martin Luther King,” raised the possibility that the Bureau may have been instrumental in King’s checking into the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee where he was murdered on April 4, 1968.  

Surinam, on the northern coast of South America, gains its independence from Holland. Suri- nam has 370,000 citizens and a land area of 63,037 square miles. Fearing what Surinam’s new black leadership may have in store for them and apprehensive of the nation’s economic situation, 5,000 Surinamese of Asian extraction flee to Holland monthly.  

François Tombalbaye, President of Chad, is overthrown in a coup d’état. He is succeeded by General Malloum.  

The British High Commission in Trinidad charges that the government of Eric Gairy in Grenada has misappropriated £250,000 from the people’s treasury.  

The Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture to be held in Lagos, Nigeria, is canceled because of the bloodless overthrow of General Gowan’s government by the forces of General Murtala Muhammad. Within six months General Muhammad is assassinated and succeeded by Lieutenant General Olusegun Obasanjo.  

At a national conference of the National Black Political Assembly (NBPA) meeting in Dayton, Ohio, Ron Daniels is re-elected president after winning the acceptance of 175 Assembly dele- gates and over 200 observers, with his strategy for 1976 that favors gathering “the broadest possible spectrum of political philosophies, backgrounds and constituencies who can agree on the Assembly’s principles, goals and objectives, into an independent black political organi- zation.” Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones), whose adherents contest this position, favors a strategy leading to Marxist revolution which would “raise the needs of the working class and oppressed nationalities, oppose the bourgeois parties and bring socialism to the people.” The NBPA also reaffirms running an issues–oriented presidential candidate in 1976 to call atten- tion to the need for radical social change in the United States. No candidate is named, how- ever.  

The United Nations Decolonization Committee, under very strong pressure from the U.S., votes 11 to 9 to put off until 1976 its consideration of a resolution affirming “the inalienable right of the Puerto Rican people to self–determination and independence.”  

The Cape Verde Islands gains its independence from Portuguese colonialism. This nation made up of 15 islands off the West Coast of Africa has a current population, based on 1984 estimates, of 300,000 and a land area of 1,557 square miles. Following elections for the Peo- ple’s Constituent Assembly, PAIGC leadership continues the revolution under the watchwords “Unity and Struggle.”  

Eldridge Cleaver, former Black Panther Party minister of information, is immediately arrested by FBI agents during a pre–arranged surrender, when his plane lands in New York from Paris.  Cleaver had eluded imprisonment for parole violation and assault for seven years. He is hand- cuffed and arraigned at U.S. District Court in Brooklyn and returned to California. Cleaver says “I think a situation exists in the country now where I can have my day in court.” He is also, and for no clear reason, served a subpeona to appear before Senator James O. Eastland’s Senate Judiciary Committee. The Black Panther Party formally disassociates itself and its work programs from Cleaver, stating “his return to the country is not of concern to us beyond the fact that we are interested in guaranteeing . . . that he receives a fair trial.”  

Belize — formerly British Honduras and a predominantly African nation in Central America — asks Great Britain to send additional troops to its army garrison in the self–governing colony, following reports of a military build–up in border regions by neighboring Guatemala, which maintains a claim to the territory. Based on 1984 estimates, Belize has a population of 158,000 and a land area of 8,867 sq uare miles.  

Forty Muslim states unanimously adopt a resolution “to sever their political, cultural and economic relations with Israel and to expel Israel from the United Nations,” in strong defiance of the United States. In her 27–year history, Israel has rejected more than 300 UN resolutions demanding that the Palestinians be allowed to return to their homelands, and calling for the evacuation of Arab lands occupied through Israeli military aggression. The Organization of African Unity (OAU) meeting in Kampala, Uganda, also passes a resolution in support of expelling Israel from the UN General Assembly for foot–dragging on withdrawal and refusal to recognize and deal with the Palestinians. The non–aligned states, when they meet in Lima, Peru, are expected to adopt similar resolutions.  

A minimum of 15 landless peasants are slain in western Honduras further heightening the tension between the nation’s conservative landowners (i.e., latifundistas) and the now highly organized peasant movement.  

According to the Federal Prisoners’ Coalition, prison authorities at the Atlanta and Leaven- worth federal maximum security facilities are distributing an advertisement which reads in part:  “Would you like to be transferred to a minimum security prison where you would have a private room . . . television, access to [y]our own stereo, better food . . . as well as have an opportunity to make $30 a month just for getting high on heroin, amphetamine and morphine?” Such inducements reflect the current status of government–backed experimentation at penal institutions. Behavioral modification activities ranging from psycho–surgery to chemical brain alterations are fully supported by NIMH (National Institute for Mental Health) and some 3,000 psychotherapists, who are conducting experiments on as many as 60,000 subjects in hospi- tals, schools and prisons.  

The Honorable Elijah Muhammad dies at age 77.  

The Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertoriqueña (FALN), which demands the independence of Puerto Rico, takes responsibility for nine simultaneous early–morning bomb- ings at U.S. government buildings, business offices and banks in New York, Chicago and Washington, DC. The FALN terms the bombings part of a “coordinated attack against the Yanqui government and its monopoly capitalist institutions” and reiterates its demand for the release of five jailed Puerto Rican nationalists, convicted of trying to assassinate President Harry Truman and wounding five Congressmen in the 1950s.  

President Idi Amin Dada of Uganda invites U.S. Muslims to attend the OAU Summit Confer- ence in Kampala. The Nation of Islam is represented by Minister Abdul Haleem Farrakhan.  

For the past 10 years, B.F. Goodrich, Colgate–Palmolive, the Container Corporation of Ameri- ca and several other U.S. corporations have been using approximately 6,000 prisoners in Columbia, South America, as cheap labor. The prisoners are paid as little as 45 cents a day for eight hours work, which is 66% less than the Columbian minimum wage of $1.33 per day.  About 75% of these prisoners have never been convicted of a crime.  

Wallace D. Muhammad, the 42–year–old son and successor of the Honorable Elijah Muham- mad, announces, in a major shift of policy and philosophy, that the Nation of Islam will allow whites to become members. Nathaniel Muhammad, Wallace’s brother and minister of the Nation’s Kansas City, Missouri mosque, says that “what was taught yesterday was yester- day’s message. . . . Now we are evolving to where the NOL will be open to all wihtout regard to race, color or creed. . . . There will be no such category as a white muslim or black mus- lim. All will be muslims.” Abdul Haleem Farrakhan, minister of the Harlem mosque, denies that there is or will be a power struggle within the Nation, saying  “we are all happy over the emergence of the Honorable Wallace Muhammad. Our enemies just can’t stand to see a smooth transition. No ill winds will ruffle the shades of this divine Nation. No one among us is high enough to tie the shoelaces of” the Honorable Wallace Muhammad.  

The Nigerian Commissioner of External Affairs, Okoi Arikpo, and Ivory Coast Foreign Minister, Arsene Usher Assouan, issue a joint communique denouncing Ian Smith’s racist régime in Rhodesia (present–day Zimbabwe).  

Panama under the leadership of General Omar Torrijos seeks to recover the Canal Zone from U.S. control. Mexico’s president, Luís Echeverría, stresses that Panama’s sovereignty must be respected. He goes on to say, “The whole of Latin America is expecting a just resolution that should be made rapidly for the complete recovery of the sovereignty of the Panamanian people over the Canal Zone.”  

Dr. Helen Armstead Johnson establishes the Museum of Black Theatre History in New York City’s Chelsea Hotel to demonstrate in part that African Americans gave the American stage its first native theatrical form, minstrelsy. The persistent image of the buffoon created by white minstrels has obscured the real nature of African minstrelsy and the significant contributions of its performances. “It just represents the great irony that is characteristically true of the interrelationship of Blacks and whites in the theatre. So many of the whites learned from Blacks, and yet [whites] made far more money than the originators of the material.”  

ANC representative, Eric Mtshali, says in Kenya that there is no need for independent Africa to send soldiers to assist in the ANC’s struggle against the  apartheid régime in South Africa.  The ANC needs financial, medical, transportation and other types of material assistance.  “We will do the actual job of fighting our oppressors ourselves.” Mtshali stresses that the so–called “detente” South Africa strives to establish in Southern and Central Africa is a transparent “maneuver to deceive the African continent and the world” in general.  

Mexico’s National Minimum Wage Commission increases the minimum wage almost 21%, including a 24% raise in the Mexico City area. The highest level under the new minimum wages will be $7.98 a day in Baja California North; the lowest level, $2.78 a day will apply to Oaxaca in South–Central Mexico.  

California’s Lieutenant Governor, Mervyn Dymally, is cleared of all charges claiming he misused Minority Aid Program funds.  

Guyana recognizes the USSR–supported Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and sends sugar, rice and other foodstuffs.  

Ten years ago, Fisk University was attracting government and foundation money to serve stu- dents representing a sizeable portion of the best American African students in the U.S. Now the 109–year–old university, on the edge of downtown Nashville, is going through a painful examination of its programs and priorities with an eye toward cutting costs. Its dilemma is compounded by a struggle to preserve its proud academic tradition against competition from major white universities for the shrinking pool of high quality African faculty and students.  Recently, Fisk was forced to layoff 11% of its full–time faculty and 40 staff persons. The university further disclosed that all retained employees, faculty and staff alike, will have their salaries cut by 20% and that the institutional operating budget of $10 million will be cut to $7.5 million. Tuition costs have also been scheduled to increase. In 1970 tuition cost $1,510 per year. In 1976 it will be $2,050, which causes Fisk officials to fear pricing themselves out of the market, particularly since the university no longer attracts students primarily from the African middle and upper middle classes. Two years ago, enrollment at Fisk was 1,525.  Currently, it is 1,475; next year it is expected to drop to 1,400.  

From J.A. Rogers. Your History from the Beginning to the Present (The Pittsburgh Courier     Publishing Co., 1940). Reprinted from the original collection of Heru-Ka Anu, 1983.

The graduate schools at Harvard, Yale and Princeton develop plans to increase their enroll- ment of African American students.  

In an effort to halt student unrest, the government of Venezuela suspends classes at the nation’s largest university and closes all secondary schools.  

Portuguese troops, ordered to put an end to factional fighting in Angola, are made “totally responsible” for security. The MPLA orders its forces to cease–fire and negotiate with Portu- gal and Holden Roberto’s FNLA. The FNLA agrees only to negotiations.  

Four revolutionary organizations in Latin America — the ERP of Argentina, MIR of Chile, Tupa- maros of Uruguay and ELN of Bolivia — express their support for the MPLA liberation struggle in Angola.  

Scott Joplin’s opera, Treemonisha, is finally produced on Broadway, some 60 years after he wrote it.  

Grenada faces major economic and political problems while attempting to recover the prestige and funds it lost during the civil unrest of 1973–1974. Prime Minister Eric Gairy and his dicta- torial methods continue to be largely responsible for the island’s woes.  

African artists face an ever–present dilemma in deciding whether their artistic endeavors will be “African” art, which deals with images growing out of the experiences of their people, or “mainstream” art, which is based on the generally accepted aesthetic principles and styles of white America and Europe.  

Jehovah’s Witnesses are persecuted in Malawi for their refusal to participate in politics.  

This year marks the fifth anniversary of the Congressional Black Caucus. The Caucus’ 17 members no longer discuss making the Caucus the top leadership group in the Black Nation, as they once publicly proclaimed. There are few public threats now to work outside the Demo- cratic Party to which all of them belong. They no longer try to handle the problems of any African American who lives inside or outside their districts. It has evolved into quite a different group than its members intended when they first started out. Instead of working to change the nation’s institutions they now seek to use these institutions in the interests of African Ameri- cans. The growing number of African elected officials around the country, and the growing power of many of the Caucus members within the House of Representatives, have given them new and different tools to work with. It has taken a large amount of work and time to end some of the acrimonious personal feuds that grew up in the Caucus over such issues as New York Representative Shirley Chisholm’s try for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972, when only Ronald Dellums gave her enthusiastic support. At the beginning, under the 1970– 1971 leadership of Representative Charles Diggs of Michigan, who was elected to Congress in 1955, the Caucus focused its attention outside of Congress, on digging for facts and setting goals for the nation, on behalf of the “National Black Community” it said it represented.  Representative Louis Stokes of Ohio was elected chairman in 1972. Under his administration the Caucus’ effectiveness was examined and later attempts were initiated to reorganize its staff and goals. Representative Charles Rangel of New York succeeded Stokes as chairman in 1973. In 1974 Walter Fauntroy of Washington, DC is elected chairman.  

Elaine Brown, chairperson of the Black Panther Party, issues a statement at the Democratic National Convention, which states in part that “the Democratic Party has taken a clear turn to the right and has abandoned all the oppressed and disenfranchised people of this country. . . . It is time that black people . . . build a political party of their own.”  Elain Brown is an official delegate to the Convention from California.  

Quincy Troupe, in collaboration with Rainer Schulte, publishes Giant Talk, a 500–page antho- logy of Third World writings by Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Chinua Achebe and a host of others.  

1976  
The South African army invades Angola, where it is soundly defeated by the Angolan armed forces, buttressed by an expeditionary force from Cuba. South Africans beat a hasty retreat into neighboring Namibia, where their destabilization efforts continue.  

Beginning this year, the Guyanese people will have free education at all levels, free distribution of all basic textbooks at government–owned or –aided secondary schools and the advent of co–education in schools now segregated according to sex.  

Jimmy Carter, a Democrat from Georgia, is inaugurated as the 39th U.S. President.  

Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte visit Cuba. While there they mention the difficulties of African Americans to attain “complete citizenship,” and tell the young Afro–Cubans they meet how impressed they are by the “unity” of the Cuban people.  

Patricia Roberts Harris, a Washington, DC attorney and former Dean of Howard University’s Law School, is named Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. She is the first Black and second woman named to President Jimmy Carter’s cabinet. Another African, Andrew Young, is appointed U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Patricia Harris and Andy Young are also members of the Trilateral Commission as are many in Carter’s Cabinet. The Trilateral Commission was formed in 1973 by David Rockefeller and is composed of some 60 “private citizens of Western Europe, Japan, and North America to foster closer cooperation among these three regions on common problems. It seeks to improve public understanding of such problems, to jointly nurture habits and practices of working together among these regions.”  
See Michel Crozier et al., The Crisis of Democracy, a Report on the Governability of Demo- cracies to the Trilateral Commission (1975), and Holly Sklar, ed., Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management (1980). See also Willy Brandt, Chair- man, North–South, A Program for Survival, the Report of the Independent Commission on International Development Issues (1980)  

The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations criticize Mexico’s President Echeverría for his opposition to the Israeli “rescue” of hijacked hostages in Uganda. In a letter to the UN Security Council the Mexican government terms the raid on Entebbe airport a “serious violation” of the UN Charter and a dangerous  precedent.  

The Organization of African Unity (OAU), which had deadlocked on Angola in 1975, responds to South Africa’s invasion by recognizing the MPLA–led People’s Republic of Angola. Later, in December, Angola is admitted to the UN over U.S. objections.  

Eugene B. Redmond publishes his Drumvoices, a critical history of the mission of American African poetry.  

Hasely Crawford becomes the first Trinidadian to win an Olympic Gold Medal when he wins the men’s 100-meter race in Montreal. Jamaica’s Don Quarrie wins a Gold Medal in the 200-meter race and a Silver Medal in the 100-meter.  

Thirteen British and American mercenaries, supported by the U.S. and British governments, are captured in Angola. The Angolan people demand they be sentenced to death. Among the 13 is Costas Georgiou, the former British private and self–styled “Colonel. Callan,” who begs to be shot rather than sent to prison. Also among the defendents are the Americans Gary Acker, Gustavo Marcelo Grillo and Daniel F. Gearhart. During the trial the mercenaries relate how they were recruited through advertisements in the British press; how military equipment was distributed to one group in the crypt of a London church; how police protected them — including those on the police “wanted” list — from inquisitive journalists; and how they were whisked through London’s Heathrow Airport without customs or passport controls as the “Manchester Soccer Football Team.” A second group traveled as a “Welsh choir.”  

The Pretoria régime in South Africa is convinced that the only way to retain their wealth and privileges is by establishing “Bantustans” — homelands set aside on 13% of South Africa’s territory for Africans who constitute more than 81% of the population. These so–called homelands have limited self–government and fraudulent “independence.” The word “Bantustan” derives from Bantu (the name used to refer to a linguistic group of African peoples in central and southern Africa. Since the word Bantu has a pejorative connotation, Azanians prefer to refer themselves as simply Black). Refer to Map 19 to see the scattered locations and irregular shapes of these reserves in the eastern half of the republic. The names of the ten Bantustans, the provinces in which they are located, and the people who are automatic “citizens” of them are:     

José Lezama Lima, the Cuban poet and author of Paridiso, dies in Havana at age 65. He was, together with Nicolas Guillén and Alejo Carpentier, among the Cuban writers best known outside his nation.  

The Soweto Uprising takes place in South Africa when school children refuse to be forced to study Afrikaans, the language of their oppressors, and boycott school. Approximately 1,000 students are massacred in Soweto alone, and hundreds more are killed in other parts of the country during the ensuing months of nationwide resistance.  

In Britain, two million Asians, West Indians and Africans are concencentrated in London and the industrial cities of Birmingham, Coventry, Manchester and Leeds. Resentment against them has built up in a wobbly economy where jobs are scarce. Anger directed at whites, especially white policemen, is on the verge of bursting into a long hot summer of racial violence. Unemployment among young Blacks is approximately 20%, twice the rate for young whites. Scottland Yard reports that young Blacks committed 80% of a tripled crime rate in which 85% of the victims were white.  

The Jamaican and Cuban governments deny reports begun in a Managua, Nicaragua newspa- per that Jamaica is being used as a conduit for arms being shipped from Cuba to the Sandi- nista guerrillas in Nicaragua.  

Sociobiology becomes the new rage of the social sciences. Sociobiology is the study of the biological and genetic basis of animals’ social behavior in order to “speculate about the influ- ence of genes on a variety of forms of human behavior, including male dominance and homo- sexuality.” Some “have condemned sociobiology ‘as an attempt to justify geneticly the sexist, racist and elitist status quo in human society.’” To support their theories, sociobiologists “use studies of animal behavior — particularly that of ‘social’ animals such as bees, wasps, fish and non–human mammals that live cooperatively in groups. Some also use data from primitive hunter-gatherer societies to try to identify basic traits shared by humans and other primates, including apes and monkeys, which may help shape human social behavior” (The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 6, 1976).  

The first general elections in Grenada since independence in 1974 are held. Prime Minister Eric Gairy’s Grenada United Labor Party wins 13 of 15 seats in the House of Representa- tives.  

Paul Robeson dies on January 23. He writes in his book Here I Stand (1971) . . .    

“On many occasions I have publicly expressed my belief in the principles of scientific socialism, my deep conviction that for all mankind a socialist society represents an advance to a higher stage of life — that it is a form of society which is economically, socially, culturally, and ethically superior to a system based upon production for private profit. History shows that the processes of social change have nothing in common with silly notions about ‘plots’ and ‘conspiracies.’ The development of human society — from tribalism to feudalism, to capitalism, to socialism — is brought about by the needs and aspira-  tions of mankind for a better life. Today we see that hundreds of millions of people — a majority of the world’s population — are living in socialist countries or are moving in a socialist direction, and that newly emancipated nations of Asia and Africa are seriously considering the question as to which economic system is the better for them to adopt. Some of their most outstanding leaders argue that the best road to their peoples’ goals is through a socialist development and they point to the advances made by the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China and other socialist countries as proof of their contention.”  

The unemployment rate for African youth, 16–20 years of age, continues to increase. In 1955, it was 15.8%, compared with 10.3% for white teenagers.  In 1965, it was 26.4% compared with 13.4% for whites. In 1973, it was 30.2%, compared with 12.6% for white youth.  Currently, it is 40.3%, compared with 16.1% for whites in the same age group.  

The Seattle Times reports that two white men, representing Phoenix Associates, Arvada, Colorado, with the aliases “Duke” and “Rommel,” place ads in Seattle–area newspapers in an effort to recruit mercenaries between the ages 18–30 who are anti-communists or who seek money and adventure fighting against the Zimbabwean liberation army — ZANU-PF — in Rhodesia.  

In a $37 million damage suit against the FBI, federal agent, Joseph Furrer, who headed the FBI’s investigation of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), invokes the Fifth Amendment 80 times during his testimony. See Cathy Perkus, ed., COINTELPRO: The FBI’s Secret War on Political Freedom (1975).  

At least 24 African and other Third World nations withdraw from the Summer Olympics in a dramatic protest against New Zealand’s rugby team playing in South Africa. The boycotting countries are: Tanzania, Somalia, Madagascar, Mauritius, Gambia, Nigeria, Algeria, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, the Republic of the Congo (present-day Zaire), Zambia, Egypt, the Central African Republic, Gabon, Ghana, Libya, Niger, Sudan, Togo, Upper Volta (present-day Burki- na Faso), Iraq, Cameroon and Guyana.  

During a demonstration demanding open housing, a white mob attacks African American marchers in southwest Chicago’s Marquette Park. Twenty–eight persons are injured.  

Huey P. Newton publishes his Revolutionary Suicide, in which he writes: “Jail is an odd place to find freedom, but that was the place I first found mine.”  

“The Agency for International Development signed a contract with the African-American Scholars Council for a major report on the future of Zimbabwe and Namibia. The AASC was founded for the purpose of channeling government research contracts to black American scholars. It provided the ideal vehicle for the AID at the time. For the AASC could at once marshall scholarly resources and involve the black American community in the development of Mr. Kissinger’s policy of ‘enlightened assistance’ to emerging countries in southern Africa. . . . [The] $340,000 . . . contract called for the hiring of six senior academics for six months and for a total of 84 man–months of work. The bulk of the money, $222,000, was not for direct salaries but for consultants and subcontracts. . . . The AID selected Dr. Samuel Adams, former deputy chief of the AID Africa Bureau, to head the project within the African-American Scholars Council. . . . Three academics from the white university establishment were selected as the principal directors of research for the project. The first was Robert Rotberg of MIT, who was to undertake the overall political analysis. Elliot Berg of the University of Michigan was selected to direct the necessary economic research. Stewart North of the University of Houston was to analyze the human resource issues in the study.  The first strange feature of the project became evident almost immediately.  AID had meant to involve the black American community in the study.  With the exception of Dr. Adams, however, the principal researchers were all white. . . . Other aspects of the project were controversial from the beginning. . . . Some critics therefore asked whether the real purpose of the AASC project was to find the means of bypassing the liberation movements and therefore subverting the liberation struggle itself. This view was reinforced by the failure of the AID and the AASC to enlist the participa- tion of representatives of the Zimbabwean and Namibian people in the work of the project” (James Turner and Sean Gervasi, “The American Economic Future in Southern Africa:  An Analysis of an Agency for International Development Study on Zimbabwe and Namibia,” Jour- nal of Southern African Affairs, January 1978).  

A total of 7,282 Jamaicans and 3,430 Guyanese settle in Canada, accounting for most of the Caribbean emigration to that nation. Compared with 1975, the new figures represent an 11% reduction in the case of Jamaican immigrants entering Canada, and a 22% drop for Guya- nese.  

1977  
Ethel Waters, stage and screen star, who made her debut in "Plantation Revue of 1924" and who captured the hearts of millions with her earthy spiritual and blues renditions of "Stormy Weather" and "Am I Blue," dies at the age of 80. She was the first woman ever to sing W.C. Handy’s St. Louis Blues.  

Zanzibar’s Afro–Shirazi Party (ASP) and the mainland Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) merge to form the Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM). The National Assembly approves a permanent constitution, replacing the interim constitution in force since 1964. In that year the two former sovereign states, Tanganyika and Zanzibar, united to form Tanzania, only four months after Zanzibar became independent from Britain, and three months after the island’s minority Arab rulers were ousted in a bloody coup. Zanzibar, which included the sister Island of Pemba, had its president under the terms of the union constitution, while Tanganyika dissolved itself in favor of complete union in 1964, a decision Zanzibar could not make then, cit- ing domestic challenges.  

Fannie Lou Hamer, a one–time sharecropper and leader of the civil rights struggle, dies. It is estimated that more than 1,600 people jam the Ruleville Central High School gymnasium to attend her memorial service. United Nations Ambassador, Andrew Young, eulogizes that “none of us would have been where we are now, had Fannie Lou Hamer not been here then.”  

Grenada, which needs better airport facilities than those available at the small Pearls Airport located in the northeastern sector of the island, begins negotiations with the World Bank for funds to construct an international airport capable of servicing large commerical jet aircraft.  The Pearls facility can currently handle only limited–passenger small prop and jet aircraft.  

The Nicaraguan administration of General Anastasio Somoza Debayle vehemently denies a charge leveled by Amnesty International, the London–based human rights organization, that it has extensive evidence that Nicaragua’s security forces have carried out mass abductions, torture and killing of peasants.  

The U.S. State Department says that 97 of 101 Haitian peasants who arrived at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo, Cuba, in a sinking boat, have been flown back to Haiti. The U.S. State Department says it learned from interviewing the 97 Haitians that they left for economic reasons. The four others who remain at Guantánamo will possibly be declared political refugees. The U.S. government claims they were assured by Haitian government officials that no reprisals would be made against the returnees.  

Sir W. Alexander Bustamante, “the Lion of the Caribbean,” dies at his Irish Town residence in Jamaica at age 93.  Bustamante was a national hero of Jamaica, the founder of the island’s Labor Party, the founder and president–for–life of the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union, the first Chief Minister of Jamaica and the island’s first Prime Minister. The son of a planter, Robert Constantine Clarke, and his wife, Mary Wilson, Bustamante left Jamaica in 1905 and traveled in Latin America, Cuba, the United States, Spain and Canada. He served as a police inspector in Havana and worked in the U.S. with the New York Bond and Share Company. He returned to Jamaica in 1934, where he soon became active in public affairs. Lady Bustamante, whom he wed in 1963, survives him. A flamboyant crusader, he was dubbed “the Lion of the Caribbean” because of his imposing stature and charismatic appeal. He led Jamaica’s move to secede from the West Indies Federation in 1961.  

Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista National Liberation Front, joined for the first time by non–Marxist opponents of the Somoza régime, begins a major new drive against President Anastasio Somoza, whose family has ruled the country for 41 years. The guerrillas even receive aid from the conservative sector of the populace.    

Officials in the Netherlands Antilles say they have discovered a plan in Aruba, an island off the coast of Venezuela, to use systematic civil disobedience and even a plane–hijacking to secede from the six–island federation, which includes Bonaire and Curaçao.  

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) strongly denies a report published in the Decem- ber issue of Penthouse that the CIA undertook a destablization program in Jamaica in 1976, including several abortive attempts to assassinate Prime Minister Michael Manley. The report, “Murder as Usual,” was written by Ernest Volkman and John Cummings, both reporters for Newsday, a major New York–area daily. They write that the CIA began a covert program to undermine the Jamaican economy following an unsuccessful ultimatum to Mr. Manley. Later, in 1975, Henry Kissinger, the U.S. Secretary of State at the time, is among other things  alledged to have pressured Mr. Manley to stop being so friendly toward Fidel Castro’s Cuba.  

Riots involving over 30,000 persons sweep Managua, Nicaragua, before and after the funeral of Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Cardenal, who was assassinated in the downtown section of the city.  Mr. Chamorro was the outspoken editor and owner of La Prensa, and a long–time foe of the Somoza family’s dictatorship.  

1978  
Political changes occuring in Iran threaten South Africa’s oil supply. Shell, British Petroleum, French–owned Total, Mobil, Caltex (Standard Oil of California and Texaco), and Exxon are the majors which operate in both South Africa and Iran. The new Iranian prime minister and the formerly exiled religious leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, have pledged that their country will no longer sell oil and its by–products to South Africa. Just where South Africa will get the 90% of its oil supply previously coming from Iran is not known, for the Arab and African oil producers have observed a near–complete boycott of South Africa since 1973.  

The African World is shocked and confused when it learns that an entire community of deeply religious African people of all ages, apparently at the bidding of a psychopathic white minis- ter, commit mass suicide. One writer gives the following explanation for the tragedy . . .  

“The deeper Joseph Holsinger probes the Jonestown massacre of  911 men, women and children, the more convinced he is they were victims of a CIA ‘Mkul- tra’ mind control operation gone berserk. . . . The State Department version of the massacre is that the inhabitants voluntarily swallowed  potassium cyanide  in an act of mass ‘revolutionary suicide.’ . . . In testimony last year . . . Hol- singer charged that the CIA was deeply involved in Jonestown, adding ‘that operation was specifically designed to support the government of Prime Minister Forbes Burnham, and there are credible reports that it included covert support for Jim Jones as an ally of Forbes Burnham.’ The testimony Holsinger gave . . . behind closed doors has never been released, but in a[n] . . . interview he [said] his suspicions were first aroused by the findings of Dr. Leslie Mootoo, chief medical examiner of Guyana, that the majority of the bodies of the victims bore the blistered puncture marks of hypodermic needles on their backs or upper arms where they could not have reached themselves. These were clearly vic- tims of murder, not suicide. When 83 infants and scores more children are added to the fatality count, all of them murdered, the total reaches more than 700 murder victims. . . . [The] behavior modification program . . . grew out of the CIA’s Mkultra program that went on for 20 years. The Carter Administration claimed Mkultra was terminated in 1963. . . . Holsinger pointed out that Jones employed all the techniques developed by the CIA in Mkultra — mind altering drugs, forced labor, deprivation of sleep, isolation, low energy diets, group confrontation and other tactics of intimidation, breaking up of marriages, spying and informing on each other to impose a ‘zombie’–like mental state on the victims. . . . The ultimate aim of the brain washing . . . was to erase a person’s normal moral principles so that he can be programmed to commit criminal acts, murder or suicide, ‘to do something completely alien to his nature.’ With its isolated jungle location Jonestown was ideally situated for carrying out an Mkul- tra experiment in its most drastic form. . . . Jonestown was equipped with a modern hospital overseen by a Dr. Lawrence Schact who accumulated a vast stockpile of hallucinogenic drugs including 11,000 doses of Thorazine, Valium, Demorol, Qaalude, morphine, sodium pentothol (truth serum) and chloral hy- drate (a knockout drug). . . . Those who challenged Jones’ increasingly psycho- tic rule were forcibly administered massive doses of these drugs. . . . When you look at the pattern of Jim Jones’ activities and realize that it adds up to his being a government agent all along, you can see how this massacre could take place. . . . Another suspicious fact is Jones’ pose as a champion of race equality . . . ‘If Jones was such an anti–racist, why was his inner circle of closest advisers and confidantes all white?’ Why was Jones able to ingratiate himself on a first name basis with a large number of high ranking officials — Democratic Party politicians ranging from First Lady Rosalyn Carter to members of the John Birch Society [a right–wing organization] in California? The State Department refused to take measures to rescue the people of Jonestown for months despite repeated, fearful appeals by relatives that their children were being brainwashed, physically abused, sexually molested, and held against their will.  Legal affida- vits . . . were rebuffed by the State Department which issued reports whitewash- ing  the Jonestown  operation. . . . They  withheld . . . all information about the stockpile of 170 rifles and automatic weapons Jones had accumulated. . . . After the last of the 911 bodies had been airlifted from Guyana and the inevitable Con- gressional investigation had begun, the State Department finally admitted it had a file of 900 documents on Jonestown. Those documents, still unrevealed, may hold the secret of Jonestown. In his book, White Night, [John Peer] Nugent wrote of Guyana: ‘It  is a sensitive listening  post for the United States . . . an influential center of Caribbean politics, an ideal place for collecting intelligence on . . . nearly 30 countries  in this volatile region.’ It  is also . . . a center for decades of CIA ‘destabilization.’ Nugent added, ‘The CIA funnelled $1,000,000 into Guyana during the 1960s to pay for strikes, riots, and general unrest’ to destabilize the progressive government of Prime Minister Cheddi Jagan and to open the way for the election of their hand–picked candidate, Forbes Burnham” (Tim Wheeler, “Jonestown and the CIA,” World Magazine, 1979).

Police in Miami, Florida, pick up 33 Haitians who say they were set ashore at Cape Florida lighthouse by a Bahamian fishing boat. The round–up brings to 850 the minimum number of Haitians that U.S. officials estimate have landed illegally in South Florida since the beginning of the year.  

At a meeting in December, the Board of Trustees of Michigan State University gives the go– ahead to the sale of stocks in 14 corporations doing business in South Africa. The sale, origi- nally proposed at a meeting in March, comes after contacts with 17 corporations, representing $8.5 million of the university’s total $30 million portfolio. One company, A.H. Robbins, gives assurances that it intends to withdraw from South Africa, and is exempted from the MSU action. Some five universities and colleges have taken similar action in the past two years, but only the University of Wisconsin’s divestment of almost $10 million is comparable in scale.  Two universities, Oregon State and Miami, reversed divestment decisions last year in the wake of corporate reaction, and MSU officials anticipate a drop in corporate contributions to the university from Dow Chemical and other affected firms.  

Dominica, the Caribbean island which currently has associated status with Britain, becomes independent. Based on 1984 estimates, the island has a population of 74,000 and a land area of 290 square miles.  

Guinea’s President Sékou Touré, whose defiant attitude towards Western powers in the 1960s won him acclaim throughout Africa, does a good deal of traveling to upgrade his image inter- nationally.  To help demonstrate his seriousness, he releases a number of political prisoners.  President Touré also accuses the West of hypocrisy on the question of human rights, assert- ing that individual rights must be subordinated to the needs of the society when the two come into conflict.  

Dr. John Yudkin, a professor at London Hospital Medical College publishes a study on the purchase, use and promotion of drugs in Tanzania. In this study he reports that . . .  

“One child in three dies by the age of five in many parts of the world — probably the most significant fact about Third World health we have to consider. In Britain, the mortality in the first five years of life is about 1 in 50. Many of these children die of infectious diseases which we call ‘tropical diseases,’ like malaria. They also die of diseases that we do not think of necessarily as tropical, like measles and diarrhea. . . . Having said that infectious diseases claim many lives in the poor countries, it is not surprising to find that in many parts of the Third World 20–50% of the total health budget is spent on drugs. In Britain only 10% of the health budget goes for drugs. . . . Certain drugs are necessary for health service.  There are maybe 20 drugs that are essential for saving lives. On that list might be penicillin, chloroquin, water and electrolytes for children who are dehydrated with diarrhea, iron tablets, tetracycline, and maybe tetrachlor ethylene for hook worm. These are simple drugs that have the potential for saving lives. . . . But this isn’t the sort of drug that is being bought by many developing countries. In Tanzania, for example, between 30–50% of the budget goes to- wards drugs which are used not for curing but for relieving symptoms: painkillers, anti-diarrheal drugs, tranquillizers and sedatives. . . . Of the drugs used in Tanzanian government hospitals and health units, 93% were imported, 85% originating from Western Europe and the United States [in 1975]. . . . In Tanzania there are 147 drug company representatives for 600 doctors — one representative for four doctors. Proportionately, there are five times as many drug representatives in Tanzania as there are in Britain. . . . The drug industry spends one and [a] quarter times as much each year on promotion as the government does on educating the nation’s doctors. . . . Many drug companies take advantage of their control over the supply of information, frequently promoting hazardous drugs for a range of indications [i.e., uses] wider than normal for developed countries and omitting side–effects in promotional literature and package inserts. Few Third World nations have legislation which would make  the issue of false or misleading  information illegal. . . . In African M.I.M.S. [Monthly Index of Medical Specialties, November 1977] 31 preparations containing [Aminopyrine and Ipyrone, which when used have a mortality rate of 1 in 200], are recommended as analgesics for minor conditions. Package inserts claim that they have a ‘wide margin of safety.’ Their use is recommended for sprains, headaches, toothaches, gynecological pain, and 15 or 20 other indications. Anabolic steroids may produce stunting of growth, irreversible virilization — changes of external genitalia and hair growth — in girls, and liver tumors. They are used in Britain to treat renal failure, terminal malignant disease, and aplastic anemia. They are not recommended for use by children before puberty. In African M.I.M.S., however, they are promoted as treatment for malnutrition, weightloss, exhaustion states, ‘excessive fatigu- ability’ in school children, and as appetite stimulants. Methadone is included in African M.I.M.S. as a cough suppressant. . . . In Tanzania there are about 600 drugs on the list put out by Central Medical Stores for purchasing. For 46 of these drugs supplies sufficient for at least five years have been bought. Four Western European companies produce 24 drugs on the Central Medical Stores list, and 16 of these 24 have been massively overpurchased. . . . The shelf-life of these products average two years. About $1.2 million worth of drugs will have to be thrown away by the Tanzanian Central Medidcal Stores at the  end of the two-year  period. . . . Enough of a cancer treatment drug used very infrequently in Tanzania has been bought for 21 years, and insulin, which in Tanzania has a shelf-life of only 6 months, has been purchased in quantities sufficient for five years. . . . This is not just in Tanzania . . . There is one drug representative for every three doctors in Mexico and much of South America, compared to 1 in 20 in Britain and 1 in 12 in the United States. Overclaiming the efficacy of drugs and playing down the side-effects of contra-indications is very common. . . . In Tanzania, for many illnesses, the traditional healer is consulted first.  Of patients who receive Western medical care, about two-thirds are seen in dispensaries. . . . Only a third of all consultations take place in hospitals.  But over 75% of the drug budget goes to hospitals and only 14% goes to dispensaries. . . . With the adoption of cheaper generic alternatives instead of proprietary prepartions, . . . Tanzania’s annual drug budget could be reduced by £ l.47m ($3.4m), or nearly 30% of the total. . . . In many parts of the world, the hospitals which exist now were built by the colonial governments for the care of the [Europeans] working in the colonies, who lived in the urban areas. These hospitals now serve their successors who remain in the developing countries, rather than the whole population. Members of the governments receive adequate health care because they are urban-based people protected from the diseases of poverty which kill many of their compatriots” (“Africa’s Costly Overdose,” Africa News, September 7, 1979).  

Members of the outlawed Sandinista National Liberation Front, who are led by Edén Pastora, daringly seize the National Palace in Managua, Nicaragua, and take hostages, including 40 parlia- mentarians and a government minister. The guerrillas ask for a $10 million ransom, the release of over 900 political prisoners and planes to fly themselves and the released prisoners out of the country. Forty hours later, the guerrillas fly out of Managua airport along with 73 political prisoners who are freed as part of their demands. After the political prisoners are flown to Panama, Venezuela and Mexico, the hostages are released unharmed.  

1979  
President Daniel arap Moi grants amnesty to all political detainees in Kenya, including three former members of Parliament, as a part of the celebration of Kenya’s 15th year of indepen- dence from British colonialism. All of those freed were detained by the late President Jomo Kenyatta for speaking out against abuses by government officials. Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, former head of the literature department at the University of Nairobi, is among those political detain- ees released. Ngugi, however, does not return to the university whose authorities ignore his request for reinstatement despite repeated efforts on his behalf by the University Academic Staff Union.
 

 YOUR HISTORY

From J.A. Rogers. Your History from the Beginning to the Present (Pittsburgh       Courier Publishing Co., 1940). From the original collection of Heru-Ka Anu,      1983.

A recently established Zairois opposition group warns President Mobutu Sese Seko that he can suffer the same fate as the Shah of Iran — ouster by his own people. The Organization for the Liberation of Congo-Kinshasa (OLC) says it maintains contact with two other groups, the Action Movement (MARC) and the Congolese National Liberation Front (FLNC), which led the Shaba uprisings in 1977 and 1978.  

Three large New York banks agree to make loans to finance housing construction for urban Blacks in South Africa. The loans, totalling $33.3 million, are made to the Urban Foundation, a private business organization set up after the 1976 uprisings in Soweto and other townships.  The South African government will for the first time allow urban Blacks who meet certain strict conditions to acquire homes on a 99–year lease. They cannot, however, hold title to the land, and they have to register as citizens of their designated tribal “Bantustans” to qualify.  

Mozambique, Tanzania, Morocco and Somalia are among 15 Third World nations that now have agreements with Iraq to ease the pinch of fuel cost increases. Under the agreements, these countries purchase Iraqi oil but need not immediately pay the full price. Iraq has provided each with an interest–free, long–term loan equal to 1978’s price increases.  

After 177 years of British colonial rule, St. Lucia gains its independence. The island nation has a current population, based on a 1984 estimate, of 120,000 and a land area of 238 square miles.  St. Lucia lies two–thirds of the way down the arc of the Lesser Antilles, between Martinique and St. Vincent.  

Robert Mugabe, leader of the ZANU faction of the Patriotic Front of Zimbabwe, says victory is near. He says that ZANU has carried the burden of most of the fighting but that he does not expect to fight a civil war with the other component of the Front, ZAPU, led by Joshua Nkomo.  

A 59–page guide to setting up housekeeping in South Africa has provoked a storm of black South African protests. The stars–and–stripes covered booklet, “An American in South Africa,” is distributed by the American consulate. The booklet was compiled by the American Women’s Club, whose president defends the publication as being necessary to explain South Africa’s laws and customs, and to prevent Americans from being taken advantage of by their African servants.  

American activists concerned with Africa issues schedule numerous anti–apartheid demon- strations. The majority of these actions focus on U.S. economic links with South Africa and include the organized withdrawal of accounts from banks that loan to South Africa. The activists also call upon universities and other institutions to divest themselves of stock in firms with South African interests. These anti–apartheid protests are increasingly being linked to political campaigns targeting racism in the U.S.  

Diplomats and others leaving Bangui report an assassination attempt against Central African Emperor Jean Bedel Bokassa. The Emperor escapes unhurt although his car is hit by subma- chinegun fire. Unrest continues in the country following the suppression of student–initiated demonstrations during which at least a dozen and perhaps as many as 1,000 people are killed.  

French sports authorities, facing the threat of expulsion from the Olympics because of contacts with South Africa, cancel a women’s golf tour of that nation.  

South Africa’s foreign minister, Roelof (Pik) Botha, calls the Deputy U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Donald McHenry, one of “the enemies of South Africa.” It is thought by some observers that Pretoria has now decided not to go along with the UN plan for holding elections in South Africa–controlled Namibia, in which negotiations McHeny played a major role. The fascist government also ignores international pleadings from the UN Security Council and proceeds with the execution of Solomon Mahlangu, a member of the outlawed African National Con- gress.  

The OAU Defense Commission draws up plans for an Inter–African Defense Force. General Taye Tilahun, Ethiopian Minister of Defense, explains the urgency of the proposal stressing that “Defense of the front–line states is imperative at this point in history . . . [as] the twin task of liberating the remaining pockets of colonialism, apartheid, and racism in Africa.”  

UNESCO accepts Kiswahili as the 20th official international language in which it will publish materials. Kiswahili is the most widely understood of the sub-Saharan African languages, and proposals from nations as far apart as Zambia and Nigeria have suggested that Africa adopt Kiswahili as a Pan-African language. In a continent with over 1,200 local languages, the spread of a single African language is seen as a facilitator of the long-cherished goal of unity and much more Afrocentric than English or French. Kiswahili is the official language of Tanzania and is widely spoken and understood in as many as eight East, Central and Southern African nations.  

The Dutch Southern Africa Committee, which, during Angola’s war for independence, organized a highly effective boycott of Angolan coffee, launches a campaign to get the British–Dutch multinational Shell Oil to take the initiative in cutting off oil to South Africa.  Joining with other groups, the Committee holds meetings throughout the Netherlands, raising funds for the southern African liberation movements, (e.g., SWAPO, ANC and the Patriotic Front). The Committee also has called for an effective oil embargo on South Africa.  

Faced with damaging economic reprisals by Arab states for signing a peace treaty with Israel, Egypt is looking increasingly to the United States for help. Besides breaking formal diplomatic relations with the Egyptian government, Saudi Arabia revokes its decision to give Egypt $525 million for the purchase of 50 American F–5E fighters. The Saudis had already announced that they would pull out and possibly force the closing of the Cairo–based Arab Industrial Organization, which manufactures arms.  

In Georgetown, Guyana, the governing PNC Party headquarters, which also houses the national election records, the Ministry of National Mobilization, and the headquarters of the Guyana Sugar Company are burned. These fires take place approximately one week after the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) announces it will enter candidates in the next general election. In the wake of these fires several scholars of international reputation — Walter Rodney, Africanist, scholar, author and lecturer; Maurice Odle, director, Institute for Develop- ment Studies, University of Guyana; Omawale, former lecturer at the University of Guyana; and Rupert Roopnarine — are arrested and detained by the police.  Following a court hearing at which Rodney, Omawale and Roopnarine are formally charged with arson, a demonstration by the WPA is met with violence from a counter–demonstration by a pro–PNC group, the House of Israel Cult. During the mêlée, soldiers of the Guyanese Defense Force use bayonets against the peaceful WPA demonstrators. The violence surrounding the demonstration appears to have been the work of the House of Israel, one of several religious cults that have been given official sponsorship by the Burnham government and have been used as a weapon for committing armed violence against the political opposition in Guyana. The leader of the House of Israel is an American African, David Hill (Rabbi E.E. Washington), who first sought refuge in Algeria following a felony conviction in Cleveland, Ohio. Following his expulsion from Algeria, he and several members of his cult settle in Guyana. The House of Israel is another religious cult, like Jim Jones’s People’s Temple, which finds a haven in Guyana under Forbes Burnham because of their financial contributions to the PNC and their willingness to do the PNC’s dirty work. The political context in which the recent events have unfolded may be understood in part with reference to ethnic issues which constitute a central cleavage in the Guyanese body politic. East Indians in Guyana are in a numerical majority and have their own party, the People’s Progressive Party (PPP). Burnham’s ruling party, the PNC, is, in reality, a minority party representing only the Afro–Guyanese segment of the population. The strategy of proportional representation was introduced by the British and supported by the CIA, and is the means by which Burnham was able to defeat Cheddi Jagan in the 1964 elections. As a result, Burnham’s illegitimate political ascent with the full backing of the CIA in the early years, requires him to resort to more and more electoral manipulations to retain power. At the core of the current political upheavals in Guyana is the fact that Forbes Burnham came to power on the basis of CIA foreign intrigue and intervention. The WPA emerges in reaction to the hardening of ethnic lines, and is a truly non–racial political movement which offers the only non–racist and progressive altenative to the Guyanese people. Eusi Kwayana, one of the leaders of the WPA, was attacked during a WPA rally in Buxton, just prior to the fires. Kwayana is the leading Afro–Guyanese nationalist in the country, but despite his background as a black power leader, he deserts Burnham because of the clear bankruptcy of the Burnham leadership. ASCRIA (Association for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa) and an Indian group led by Moses Bhagwan make up the nucleus of the WPA. The WPA is seen as a signi- ficant breakaway from past racial politics in Guyana and the most serious impetus for a Guyanese nation grounded on socialist transformation.  
 

From J.A. Rogers. Your History from the Beginning to the Present (The Pittsburgh Courier Publishing Co.,      1940). Reprinted by the original collection of Heru-Ka Anu, 1983.

An investigating team of the American Psychiatric Association says that black patients suffer filthy living conditions and grossly inadequate care at South African mental institutions, condi- tions that have led to needless deaths.  

The third conference on “national reconciliation” in Chad takes place in Lagos, Nigeria, with all six of Chad’s neighbors in attendance — and without representatives of the national union government now in office in N’Djamena, the Chadian capital. The six nations describe the current government as “unacceptable,” and set a deadline for all factions in the conflict to reach a new agreement.  

South African heavyweight boxer Kallie Knoetze is no match for John Tate of Knoxville, Tennessee, when the two fight under World Boxing Association auspices in Mmabathol, Bophuthatswana, South Africa. But the bout is a success for South Africa’s effort to break out of its sports isolation in boxing. Staging the Tate–Knoetze bout in Bophuthatswana, which has been declared a so–called “independent” bantustan by South Africa, is also a bid for wider world recognition of South Africa’s independent homelands policy.  

Joseph Chesson, Liberia’s new minister of justice, promises to make security so tight that “nobody will be fool enough to fire a firecracker.” Chesson’s remarks are addressed particu- larly to the issue of security for visiting heads of state at the OAU summit meeting scheduled for Liberia. Some observers believe the crackdown on internal political opposition will be stepped up as well.  

A Rwandan court acquits only one defendent in the trial of 12 Belgians charged with plotting to enter Zaire to fight against its president, Mobutu Sese Seko. The other 11 receive jail terms ranging from one to nine years.  

Rhodesia’s all–white appeals court rules that the country’s new Shona president — an appointee of Prime Minister Muzorewa — does not have the power to review death sentences passed under martial law. The ruling contradicts a lower court decision that grants the presi- dent’s office the authority to review such cases and leaves that power with the white–domin- ated combined operations headquarters.  

Seychelles president Albert René threatens to close down the American satellite–tracking station based there. (The U.S. signed a contract for the tracking station with René’s prede- cessor, who was overthrown in 1977.) René also favors the closing of a U.S. base on the island of Diego García (now under British control) and the return of that island to Mauritius.  

South African forays into Angola are on the upswing, with major cross-border raids. South African officials claim that 12 guerrillas of the Namibian independence movement SWAPO are killed during “hot pursuit” actions into Angola. SWAPO reports that the South Africans bombed a school for refugee children at Jiva, an Angolan town near the Namibian border, kil- ling 11 persons.  

Hilla Limann emerges the winner in a run–off presidential election in Ghana, defeating Victor Owusu of the Popular Front. Limann’s party, the People’s National Party, controls 71 of 140 parliamentary seats when the new civilian government is installed.  

Ahmed Ben Bella, former president of Algeria and a leader of that country’s war of indepen- dence from France, is released from house arrest 14 years after he was ousted by Houari Boumedienne. Ben Bella, who was also imprisoned by the French before Algerian indepen- dence in 1962, is a leader in the pan–Arab, African unity, and non–aligned movements. His release had been sought by other prominent world leaders, including Fidel Castro and Marshal Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia.  

Angolan officials report that the South African military drops 130 tons of bombs on southern Angola during the first six months of this year. The government also reports that their defense forces shoot down seven South African aircraft (four Mirages and three Canberras) during the same period.  

The president of Guinea, Sékou Touré, who last visited the U.S. at the invitation of President John F. Kennedy in 1962, tours the country, stopping first in Washington, DC, where he meets with President Carter and attends a luncheon hosted by Mayor Marion Barry. During a press conference he tells reporters his country’s relations with the Soviet Union remain excellent. And he brushes aside criticism of Cuban troops present in Africa, saying sovereign countries have a right to seek help in their own defense. He also expresses satisfaction that the OAU has adopted his resolution for a Pan–African peace force, for once established, Afri- can states will not have to rely on foreign powers for protection and there will be no justifica- tion for the presence of Cuban troops on the continent.  

Ten persons, including several former Togolese officials, are sentenced to  death for conspiring to assassinate President Eyadema and seize power in 1977. Eight of the alledged conspira- tors are not in custody and are, therefore, convicted in absentia. The plotters were exposed when American and British officials tipped off the Togolese government about the presence in the country of a mercenary force that had been hired to carry out the coup.  It is claimed the plotters arranged for the cooperation of Ghana which was at that time headed by General Acheampong. The ten plotters are later pardoned.  

Officials at the Libyan port of Benghazi seize a shipment of American–made military equipment bound for Lebanon on the U.S.–owned vessel Prucilla U. Before permitting the ship to sail on to Beirut, the Libyans confiscate four armored personnel carriers that are being delivered to the Lebanese government. Authorities in Benghazi say the vehicles represent “articles of war,” which fact violates Libyan laws.  

Because Lucio Lara, number two man in Angola’s ruling party, is out of the country, Angolan President Agostinho Neto leaves the number three person, José Eduardo dos Santos, in charge when he leaves for medical treatment. When Neto dies later in the year, dos Santos becomes the interim president. The final decision on leadership of the nation is to be made by the 44–person Central Committee later.  

Guinean citizens living in exile in France claim that President Sékou Touré violated his pro- mise of an amnesty for political opponents. The exiles say that about 20 Guineans who have been lured home from France have now been arrested. Guinean officals admit apprehending some of the returnees whom they accuse of continuing to conspire against the government.  

José Eduardo dos Santos is chosen by the Central Committee of Angola’s ruling MPLA Labor Party as head of both the party and the government, succeeding Agostinho Neto. The 37–year–old dos Santos, who has  studied in the USSR, joined the MPLA in 1961 and fought with the Movement’s guerrillas in Cabinda province. An economist with a specialty in petro- leum, dos Santos is considered an intellectual with flexible ideas. He was very close to the late President Neto.  

Fifteen hundred Kenyan university students march through the streets of Nairobi to protest the decision by the Executive Committee of the ruling KANU party to once again exclude from the upcoming elections Oginga Odinga and four other former members of the banned Kenya People’s Union.  

The banned Pan-Africanist Congress of South Africa names Vusumzi Make as its new chair- man and expels P.K. Leballo, its former leader, who had a “tendency to take unilateral decisions.”  In Tanzania, 18 persons go on trial for the killing of David Sibeko, another PAC official.  

African workers in several areas of South Africa’s Natal Province stage a boycott of bus trans- portation to protest fare increases. The most violent protests occur in Port Shepstone, where roadblocks are set up with large rocks and burning tires. At nearby Marburg Manufacturing Company more than 950 black workers hold a sit-down strike when the company refuses to consider wage hikes to cover the fare increases on the buses. More than 300 workers storm the factory and are finally dispersed when police use tear gas. In other KwaZulu areas, buses are reported to be running at only 40% of capacity. Even after the Ezakheni Transport Company rolls back its fare hikes to old levels, workers refuse to ride the buses.  

Jonas Savimbi, president of UNITA, an Angolan counter–revolutionary movment, and a  lackey of South Africa and the U.S., spends two days in New York addressing the Council on Foreign Relations and the Council on Religion and International Affairs. These talks are followed by three days in Washington, DC, where he speaks at programs sponsored by Georgetown Uni- versity’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Social Democrats-USA and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.  Savimbi’s movement, which fought control of Angola by the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) in 1975-1976, has car- ried on a terroristic struggle to destabilize and topple the legitimate Angolan government with military and logistical support from South African troops in Namibia. His visit to the U.S. coincides with stepped-up South African attacks on southern Angola and bears witness to the United States’ complicity.  

James Mange, one of 12 defendants in a trial for treason in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, is sentenced to death. The 11 others receive long prison terms. All of them are given an addition- al year in prison for contempt of court, when they refuse to participate in trial proceedings, singing African nationalist songs from the special glass–enclosed dock where they are con- fined in the courtroom. The defendants are not charged with killings, nor with acting together as a group, but with participating in a plot to overthrow the government by force, and with undergoing guerrilla training abroad under the auspices of the banned African National Congress. Mange is apparently singled out for the death penalty because of his leadership role in the courtroom protests.  

In an ironic twist of history, members of the Basotho Congress Party (BCP) on the run from Lesotho police seek refuge in South Africa. In 1970, South Africa–backed Prime Minister Leabua Jonathan held onto power even though his party lost the election to the BCP. Now, the Lesotho government accuses South Africa of aiding BCP infiltration, which has resulted in a series of bombings and sabotage attempts. Lesotho remains economically dependent on South Africa, but Jonathan has ruffled his powerful neighbor by adding Lesotho’s voice to anti–apartheid declarations in international forums.  

Albert Bongo, Gabonese head of state, purchases a Beverly Hills mansion for $1.7 million.  Bongo’s daughters attend nearby UCLA, and the six-bedroom house, which is decorated for an additional $300,000, serves as their “home away from home.” The Gabonese leader has had the reputation for extravagance for some time, pouring more that $700 million into preparations for the 1977 OAU summit meeting in Libreville, the nation’s capital. The average annual income for citizens of this tiny West African oil-producing nation is $2,600.  

After extensive testimony in its favor, Illinois House Bill 1256 passes its first hurdle, the Finan- cial Institutions Subcommittee. The bill bars the state from using Illinois banks that loan to South Africa. First National Bank of Chicago and Continental Illinois National Bank, which have loaned South Africa $500 million since 1972, are affected. They currently hold some $60–80 million in state funds.  The effort in the state legislature is backed by a coalition that includes trade unionists, churches, civil rights and Africa support groups.  

1980  
There are 26,488,218 American Africans residing in the United States or 11.69% of the total population. Between 1970 and 1980, the black population increased 17.3%. Blacks constitute more than 20% of the population in seven states: Mississippi, 35%; South Carolina, 30%; Louisiana, 29%; Georgia, 27%; Alabama, 26% Maryland, 23%; and North Carolina, 22%. Twelve states have black populations of one million or more, an increase of three more states — Michigan, Ohio, and Virginia — since 1970. New York has the largest black population of any city, 1,784,337. Chicago’s black population is the next largest with 1,197,000, followed by Detroit with 758,939; Philadelphia with 638,878 and Los Angeles with 505,210.  

In Rhodesia, Joshua Nkomo, leader of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU), returns home to an enthusiastic welcome by a crowd of some 150,000 in a township outside Salis- bury (present–day Harare). Robert Mugabe, leader of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and Nkomo’s partner in the Patriotic Front, is still in Mozambique, however; the pros- pects of his early return are dampened by rapidly deteriorating relations between ZANU and the British governor Lord Soames.  

The traditional large African migration in the U.S. from the South to points North and West appeared to end in the 1970s. Between 1975 and 1980, about 415,000 Africans moved to the South, whereas, only about 220,000 left, thereby reversing the long–standing African exodus from the South. The proportion of the total African population residing in the South is 50%, the same as it was in 1970.  

The presidents of Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya meet in Arusha, Tanzania, the first such gathering in nine years. Before Idi Amin’s rise to power, the summit had been a standard part of the functioning of the now–defunct East African Community. A major topic still before the three presidents is the division of the assets and liabilities of the Community. The Tanzanian government insists that the matter be cleared up before it reopens its border with Kenya, which has been closed since 1977.  

The Progressive Alliance of Liberia (PAL) wins its court battle to register as an opposition political party, the Progressive People’s Party. In 1979 a demonstration organized by PAL escalates into a violent confrontation after police open fire on the crowds. Since then PAL charges the True Whig Party (TWP) government with engaging in a continuous campaign of harassment, including attempted assassinations of PAL members. The TWP, until now Liberia’s only legal political group, was formed over 100 years ago by former American slaves who colonized parts of the country, and these Americo-Liberians still dominate the government.  

Angela Davis runs for vice president on the Communist Party ticket.  

When the oil supertanker Salem goes down off Dakar, Senegal, in one of the deepest trenches in the Atlantic Ocean, the oil slick is far smaller than that expected for a cargo of 193,132 tons of crude oil, insured for over $56 million. A Tunsian crewman who was among the 25 rescued by a British ship, charges that the vessel was deliberately sunk after its cargo had been offloaded in Durban, South Africa. Lloyd’s of London, which underwrote most of the $80 million insurance on the ship and its cargo, is conducting an investigation. Shell Oil Inter- national of London, owner of the oil, files a claim for $57.5 million against an unidentified company in South Africa.  

Zaire’s President Mobutu Sese Seko makes a two–hour speech which dashes hopes of further liberalization within the present government. “As long as I live,” states the president– for–life, “I will not authorize the creation of another party.” The only legal party at present is the Popular Movement of the Revolution (MPR), which is headed by Mobutu himself.  
 

From J. A. Rogers. Your History from the Beginning to the Present (The Pittsburgh Courier Publishing Co., 1940). From the original collection of Heru-Ka Anu, 1983.

In the U.S., 60% of the African population lives in central cities, an increase of 13% during the 1970s, but a sharp drop from the 32% increase recorded during the 1960s. Although a majori- ty of Blacks still reside in central cities, the African population outside central cities grows by 43% during the 1970s. Currently, Africans comprise only 6% of the total population outside central cities.  

The American oil company TEXACO comes under heavy criticism in Nigeria for what the governor of Rivers State terms the “worst case of oil pollution in Nigeria’s history.” While the extent of the damage is being investigated, unofficial estimates say the spillage from a blow- out spreads some 250,000 barrels of oil over an area encompassing 102 villages and about 500,000 people.  TEXACO does not report the incident until after local villages complain to authorities. The Rivers State government puts aside some $1.6 million for emergency relief, and TEXACO is asked to contribute as much as $150 million in compensation.  

Andrew Pulley runs again for president of the United States on the Socialist Workers Party ticket. His first try for the presidency was in 1972.  

Unable to get advanced weapons from the West, Zambia purchases 16 MiG 21s from the Soviet Union. The deal, worth some $90 million, is said to be on tough terms — with 20% up front and seven years for full payment at normal commercial interest rates. Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda chooses to make the dramatic boost in defense spending despite a difficult internal economic situation after the nation finds itself virtually defenseless against Rhodesian and South African incursions. Over 200 Zambian air force pilots and ground crew have been training already to man the new planes, which are equal to the Mirages used by South Africa.  

Zimbabwe, the former British colony known as Southern Rhodesia (later, when Northern Rhodesia becomes Zambia, it is referred to simply as Rhodesia), gains its full independence from white–settler control after many years of armed struggle. Presently, based on 1984 estimates, Zimbabwe has a population of 8,325,000 and a land area of 150,873 square miles.  

A series of ostensibly unrelated disturbances in Senegal fuel speculation that President Léo- pold Senghor and his Socialist Party are headed for serious political turmoil. Trouble first flares up in the southern region of Casamance, where protests at Dgignabo High School in Zuiginchor lead to a demonstration in which one youth is killed by police. A sympathy strike by university students in Dakar triggers a confrontation with the gendarmerie. Followers of Ahmed Niasse, who demands that Senegal become an Islamic republic, claim responsibility for burning down a hotel in Zuiginchor. About the same time, police confiscate at the border more than a thousand cassette tapes of a Niasse press conference in Paris.  

More than 37 members of the newly–formed People’s Progressive Party of Liberia (PPP) are rounded up and charged with sedition and treason. Reports say PPP chairman Baccus Matthews had called for a general strike to force the resignation of President William Tolbert and the collapse of the ruling True Whig Party (TWP) government. Officials charge that the PPP members were planning to bomb the nation’s telecommunications system and the Ministry of Information. The government also claims to have photographs and tapes from wiretapped phones at the PPP headquarters which prove the opposition party planned to overthrow the government.  

Ronald Reagan, a Republican from California, is elected the 40th U.S. President. Under his stewardship, there reemerges in the national personality all of those character traits that portray the United States as continuing to be racist, sexist, imperialistic and insensitive to the collective will of the American people.  

Ford Motor Company in South Africa has in the past won praise for implementation of reform proposals (known as the “Sullivan Principles”) that were formulated for U.S. companies opera- ting in that country. Ford even gives in to black union demands and accepts the re-employ- ment of workers who went out on strike because of discrimination by whites. The South African Institute of Race Relations, however, in a report commissioned by Ford itself, says the auto manufacturer’s practices “make a mockery of the aspirations of the ‘Sullivan Principles.’”  The stated aim of equal and fair employment, charges the report, “is being implemented with a notable lack of enthusiasm.” The United States government and its institutions, particularly those in the private sector, like their counterparts in the avowedly racist Republic of South Afri- ca, are not acting any more affirmatively.  

Income for all African families in the U.S. continues to lag behind that of the general popula- tion. Black married–couple families register a 6.9% gain in real median income between 1971 and 1981, improving from $18,370 to $19,620.  Comparable figures for white married–couple families are $25,130 in 1971 and $25,470 in 1981.  

African American leaders are furious at White House plans for a conference on Africa, which grows out of suggestions black leaders made at a Washington meeting with Secretary of State Cyrus Vance in 1979. At that time they proposed a White House meeting on Southern Africa, particularly to address the then–unsettled issue of Zimbabwe and the continuing pro- blems in Namibia and South Africa. The White House’s planned conference expands on the original proposal by including the entire African continent. This decision and subsequent planning, moreover, involve none of those black leaders who made the suggestion to Vance at the State Department (e.g., Randall Robinson, director of TransAfrica, the black American lobbying group). Robinson, who calls the planned gathering an “all–white White House confer- ence,” says he and others intend to seek either postponement or adequate representation of blacks on the conference agenda. The only Black currently on the conference program is Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson.  

To protest Citibank’s investment policies in South Africa, several religious agencies announce the withdrawal of accounts totaling more than $6.5 million from the banking giant. The National Council of Churches, Union Theological Seminary, and the U.S. office of the World Council of Churches join forces in taking the action. According to NCC President William Howard, Jr., “Citibank is apartheid’s firmest financial friend in the U.S. It is America’s major lender to South Africa; it is the only U.S. bank with branches in South Africa; and it is presently assisting South African corporations who want to invest in the U.S.” In addition to the account withdraw- als, several Roman Catholic orders and Protestant agencies will no longer buy Citibank bonds or certificates of deposit.  

Although the Sierra Leone government, under Siaka Stevens, has been stressing its role in reconciliation with students at the nation’s universities, violence breaks out in Freetown, the capital. Increases in the cost of public transportation, linked to that of gasoline, are said to be the cause of the disorder. Violence erupts when students erect barricades in the streets of the capital and harry taxi and bus drivers who raised their fares. A climate of severe tension dominates the schools and universities of Freetown.  

African Americans in the experienced civilian labor force are concentrated in three summary occupational groupings: 27% are operators, fabricators, and laborers; 24% are in sales, tech- nical, and administrative support; and 23% are in service occupations. Africans are overrepre- sented in certain occupations (e.g., Africans comprise about 10% of the total civilian labor force, however, they constitute 14% of all operators, fabricators, and laborers and 18% of all service workers).  In contrast, Africans are underrepresented in managerial and professional specialty occupations (6%), and technical, sales, and administrative support occupations (8%).  

A march of over 8,000 so–called “Coloured” schoolchildren in a Johannesburg suburb ends in violence when South African police blockade the march route and attack the students with bludgeons and tear gas.  Several students are injured. More than 100,000 schoolchildren, most of them “Coloured” and between the ages of 13–18, have been boycotting classes to protest the racially segregated education policy of the South African government. The demon- strations begin in Cape Town, where the majority of South Africa’s “Coloured” population lives.  The action is joined later by students in Pretoria and Johannesburg, as well as in other areas of the country. Several thousand “Coloured” students from universities, and some African and Indian students, also join the protests.  

The number of African Americans 3 to 34 years old attending school increases by approximately one-half million, from 7.8 to 8.4 million. Enrollment for Blacks increased from 1970 to 1977, but has declined since 1977. Enrollment has also dropped for whites, falling from 51.7 million in 1970 to 48.2 million in 1981. About one million black students 18 to 34 years old are enrolled in college in 1980, double the number enrolled in 1970. Most of the increase takes place during the early 1970s. Black enrollment in colleges constitutes about 11% of the college population as compared to 7% in 1970. The number of black females enrolled in college (628,000) continues to outnumber black males (505,000).  

Nigerian President Alhaji Shehu Shagari announces in a nationally broadcast speech the suspension of the board of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), and he sends on compulsory leave several senior officials of the Corporation over the disappearance of more than $4 billion from company accounts. Some $2.8 billion naira, representing 28% of Nigeria’s total annual oil revenue, was found to be missing in 1979 following an audit of the NNPC books ordered by the outgoing military government. Auditors also found that the NNPC records had not been properly kept for about five years. Shagari’s action comes after weeks of public outrage and protests by trade union and student groups over the missing billions. Inves- tigations reveal that the money has been “inadvertantly” paid into a private account of the London-based Midland Bank International but has since been paid back into an NNPC account in London.  

Mali President Moussa Traore has been trying unsuccessfully to put down student unrest since 1979, when students shut down upper level schools to protest against new entrance exams for professional training that make it more difficult to qualify for civil service jobs.  Young demonstrators are involved in several confrontations with government forces, the most violent of which occurs in Bamako, the capital, where soldiers charge the protesters with bayonets and open fire, reportedly killing at least 15 young people. The death of Abdul Karim Camara, Secretary General of the National Union of Pupils and Students, while in police custody, spurs an Amnesty International investigation of alleged torture.  

Thozamile Botha, a leading activist in the Port Elizabeth Black Civic Organization (PEBCO), escapes from South Africa to Lesotho, after he and three other PEBCO leaders are served with banning orders, which effectively prevent them from holding jobs or being with more than one person at a time.  

In the U.S., the fertility level for black females declines 27%, from 3.1 births per woman in 1970 to 2.3 per woman in 1980. Among white women, the decline is also 27%, but from 2.4 births per woman to 1.7 births per woman during the same period. The overall level of child-bearing is considerably higher among black women than white women at all ages, with the magnitude of the black-white fertility differential being the greatest at the youngest ages.  Black women 18 and 19 years old have a fertility rate of 139 births per 1,000, about two times the rate of white women of a similar age, 72 per 1,000.  

Niger President Seynmi Kountche marks the sixth anniversary of the supreme Military Coun- cil’s rise to power by announcing the release of former President Hamani Diori, who was jailed at the time of the April 1974 coup. At the same time the Kountche government also releases Djibo Bakary, head of the banned Sawaba Party.  

Dr. Walter Rodney, noted Africanist, activist and leader of the opposition Working People’s Alliance (WPA) in Guyana, is killed in Georgetown when a bomb explodes and wrecks the car in which he is riding. Rodney is the third senior member of the party to die violently during the year. Police take Rodney’s younger brother, Edward, who was in the car when the bomb went off, into custody. After teaching at the University of Dar–es–Salaam in Tanzania and publish- ing several scholarly studies, Walter Rodney returned to Guyana, where he became the leader of the WPA (see 1979 above). Shortly before his death, Rodney declined to take up a post offered him by Robert Mugabe, the new Prime Minister of Zimbabwe, who cited Rodney’s long–standing commitment to the struggle in Guyana.  

Attorneys for Richard Moore, a former leader of the New York chapter of the Black Panther Party, receive under the Freedom of Information Act documents describing FBI activities to discredit the Black Panther Party. These documents show that the Federal Bureau of Inves- tigation tried to use black journalists, anonymous telephone calls and forged letters to disrupt the New York chapter of the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s and early 1970s, according to documents in the FBI’s files. Even though these documents concentrate on the Black Pan- ther Party’s New York office, it must be remembered that the Bureau’s counter–intelligence program — COINTELPRO — ranged across the nation. In this period of the Bureau’s activi- ties, 19 Black Panthers were killed by law–enforcement authorities or by one another in inter- nal feuds. Some of the documents were meant to counter support for the Panthers among Jews, for in 1970 J. Edgar Hoover authorized his agents in New York to send letters critical of the group to guests at a Black Panther fund–raising party and “that New York sign this letter with an anonymous name with additional phraseology such as ‘A Concerned and Loyal Jew,’ or other similar phraseology.” In 1973 Richard Moore was convicted of the attempted murder of two police officers and sentenced to 25 years to life. Now 36 and still in prison, Moore has filed a civil suit against the FBI, former President Richard M. Nixon, former Attorney General John N. Mitchell and other federal officials of the era, charging that they framed him for the attack on the police officers. In his suit he asks for $750,000 in damages, a judgment declar- ing the activities of COINTELPRO illegal and an injunction to prevent the Bureau and the New York Police Department from harassing him. See Murray Kempton, The Briar Patch: The Peo- ple of the State of New York v. Lumumba Shakur et al (1973) for a dispassionate account of another FBI attempt to “frame” the Black Panther Party.  
 

From J.A. Rogers. Your History From the Beginning to the Present (The Pittsburgh       Courier Publishing Co., 1940) Reprinted from the original collection of Heru-Ka Anu,      1983.

Prime Minister Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe meets with Minister of Home Affairs, Joshua Nkomo and former Prime Minister Ian Smith, a white settler, in an effort to defuse growing tensions which increasingly threaten the future of the new country. While the meeting takes place, fighting breaks out between Nkomo and Mugabe partisans in Harare (formerly Salisbury), the Zimbawean capital. Many of Zimbabwe’s whites, for their part, are upset by the deteriorating relations between Zimbabwe and South Africa.  

Five opposition groups, pledged to the overthrow of the Mobutu régime, announce in Belgium the formation of a united front to be known as the Council for the Liberation of Congo-Kinsha- sa. The Council says it will attempt to convince Mobutu’s Western backers to withdraw their support. The Congo National Liberaton Front (FNLC) and the People’s Revolutionary Party (PRP) are among the members of the new grouping.  

Sir Seretse Khama, who was elected President of Botswana in 1965 and led his nation to independence from Britain in 1966, is suffering from an incurable illness and deteriorating rapidly.  Khama, a diabetic, had a pacemaker installed in 1976 and is also suffering from liver complications.  

In a move to bolster relations with Africa, the Brazilian Foreign Minister, Ramiro Saraiva Guerreiro, visits Tanzania, Zambia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Angola.  During these visits he stresses the potential for greater cooperation in many fields between each of the African front–line states and Brazil.  

President Luîs Cabral of Guinea–Bissau also holds talks with Brazilian leader João Figueiredo during an official visit to Brazil, the first ever by the president of a Portuguese–speaking Afri- can state.  

The Kenyan government denies the U.S. permission to conduct military exercises at their newly–acquired facilities at Mombasa. The U.S. effort is blocked by Nairobi for fear that heightened U.S. military presence will cause political difficulties for the Kenyan government.  After months of secret discussions, the U.S. and Kenya announce an agreement which helps to build U.S. military power in the Persian Gulf area by providing access to Kenya’s air and naval installations.  In exchange the Kenyans receive economic and military aid.  

Zanzibari President Aboud Jumbe announces that the government has “thwarted a coup attempt at the eleventh hour.”  At least 16 persons are known to have been arrested. None are prominent military or political figures, but four are from a wealthy Arab business family. Since the mid-1960s the Zanzibari government has been taking steps to limit the political and economic influence of the Arab community.  

Ten Western Michigan University faculty members and students go on trial for disturbing the peace. Their arrests come during a public trustees’ meeting when 100 people protest against the university’s continued ties to banks and corporations that continue to do business in South Africa. The trial marks another phase in the three-year-long divestment struggle at the Kalamazoo campus where, despite widespread community support, students and faculty have yet to convince the university to cut its ties to South Africa. The protesters are later acquitted when testimony determines that the trustees caused the disturbance which led to the arrests by denying the accused the right to free speech. This decision provides a precedent for citizens who question the investment of public funds in South Africa.  

In the ideological debate over the applicability of Marxism to the African context, proponents of a Marxist view of “scientific socialism” have countered charges of “importing foreign ideologies” with the argument that Marxist principles of analysis are applicable anywhere, regardless of their geographical origin. Now, there is a new angle to the dispute. Herbert Vilakazi, a black South African sociologist/anthropologist who teaches at Essex County College in New Jersey, writes in the Monthly Review that according to racial criteria used by the common person in the U.S., Karl Marx himself would likely be classified as black. Vilakazi cites contemporary descriptions of Marx’s “swarthy” complexion and his nickname, “the Moor,” as part of an argument that, in fact, the 19th-century revolutionary thinker did probably have some “African”  ancestry. Vilakazi elaborates the circumstantial evidence and stresses the arbitrariness of modern “racial” categories. He goes on to document the interaction of European and African population groups throughout recorded history. Though the numbers may have been small, he contends, there has always been an African presence in Europe. In particular, the Jewish- Arab culture which dominated much of southern Europe during part of the Middle Ages had a significant black component among its population. Vilakazi concludes that the popular image of an all-white Europe is one of the effects of racism on modern thought. See also J.A. Rogers, Nature Knows No Color-Line (1952) and Sex and Race, 3 Vols. (1967).  

Thirty–five countries as well as international organizations have been invited by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to consider granting additional assistance to 25 African states which are seriously threatened by famine. The 25 countries are Angola, Cameroon, Cape Verde, the Central African Republic, Chad, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, the Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Senegal, Somalia, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.  

Amnesty International publishes a report accusing the Zaire government of major human rights violations. According to the report, Amnesty International doctors examined 60 former prison- ers whose bodies showed signs of torture. Amnesty also charges that more than 100 stu- dents have been detained following protests over food and living conditions. The students have been held without trial, and the organizaton alleges that at least five students have been shot by security police.  

Ugandan soldiers recapture with assistance from Tanzanian troops  the West Nile capital of Arua. According to government sources, the invasion by troops loyal to former President Idi Amin Dada began when these troops entered Uganda from refuges in the Sudan and Zaire.  Before the advance is halted, the invading troops kill a number of civilians and capture several towns. Uganda accuses Saudi Arabia of financing the pro–Amin troops — a charge categorically denied by the Saudis, of course.  

Kenyans are angered when a U.S. sailor, Frank Sunstrom, accused of killing a Kenyan woman in Mombasa is convicted of a reduced charge of manslaughter, fined only $70 and allowed to return to his ship. Members of the Kenya Parliament question whether the U.S. government pressured the judge, who is white, to render a lighter verdict on the white defen- dant. In response to demands for a retrial, Attorney General James Karugu expresses his dismay over the verdict but says Kenyan law prohibits a retrial on the same charges. The sailor admits to killing Monicah Njeri, a prostitute, in a drunken argument over how much she should be paid.  

The tiny West African Republic of the Gambia breaks off relations with Libya and calls in Senegalese troops to help defend against what it charges is the threat of invasion by Libyan agents. In Dakar, Senegalese President Léopold Senghor reports that the Libyan threat to the Gambia is merely the latest in a series of destabilization efforts that have affected his government and the leadership of neighboring Mauritania.  Senghor broke off relations with Libya earlier after anti-government sabotage is mounted allegedly by Libyan-backed Islamic fundamentalists.  

The South African Press Agency reports that clashes between police and demonstrators leave several dead and an undetermined number of others wounded in Port Elizabeth, the hub of South Africa’s auto manufacturing industry. The incidents are the most bloody since the nationwide uprisings by Azanians (i.e., black South Africans) in 1976.  

Sabata Dalindyebo, former paramount chief of the Tembu people and leader of the Transkei opposition Democratic Progressive Party, appears in Lusaka, Zambia, with Oliver R. Tambo, President-General of the African National Congress, and pledges his support for the liberation group.  Sabata fled his nominally-independent South African “homeland” of the Transkei several months earlier.  

The National Black Independent Political Party (NBIPP) is formed in Philadelphia on November 21, when more than 2,000 African Americans gather to construct the Party’s charter. An independent black party was discussed, argued, and attempted in some local areas since it was first asked for by Richard Allen in 1830. The Party’s roots are in the National Black Political Convention held in 1972 in Gary, Indiana, out of which grew the National Black Political Assembly.  At the fourth annual convention of the Assembly, held in August of this year in New Orleans, the Reverend Ben Chavis offered a resolution, which was passed, calling for the creation of an independent black political party within 90 days.     

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