SONGA AFRIKA CONCEPT NOTE
Songa Afrika is a pro Afrikan organization focused on the noble cause of uniting Afrikan people around a program of a mass vanguard of the working people to lead the struggle for a culturally reawakened and empowered ( political and economic ) population.
OUR CHALLENGE: The main challenge faced by Afrikans can be grouped into attitude, knowledge, and skills. We are not short of resources. A lot of our resources are benefiting more of foreign global corporations.
Social transformation lies at the heart of conceptions of social change. It implies that at the very least some fundamental changes in societies core institutions such as polity and economy with major implications for relations between social groups or classes and for the means of the creation and distribution of wealth, power and status.
Why is our economy poor?
Economic historian Yash Tandon acknowledges that since the rise of capitalism some 300 years ago, trade has been an act of war between nations. Trade is war. Trade kills – as surely as guns. In the case of Afrika the experience of trade goes even before the rise of capitalism. Slave trade was war against the people of Afrika. To come to more recent times – the last 30 years – trade war has devastated Afrikan economies.
In regard to the high crime rate, Fanon writes that: “The colonized man will manifest this aggressiveness, which has been deposited in his bones, against his own people. This is the period when the niggers beat each other up and the police and magistrates do not know which way to turn when faced with the astonishing waves of crime. All of these patterns of conduct are those of the death reflex, when faced with danger – a suicidal behavior which proves to the settler that these men are not reasonable human beings.”
One major challenge that currently faces the African people is not that of poverty. Neither is it the lack of resources. In the 21st century, the major problem we face as a people is what Bob Marley has referred to as “Mental Slavery”. Bob Marley acknowledged that “none but ourselves can free our minds”.
OUR PROPOSAL: Against this backdrop, we present Songa Afrika as a pro people organization. Revolutionary freedom fighter Kwame Ture acknowledged that “Organization is the weapon of the oppressed.” At Songa Afrika we seek ideological clarity and organizational depth.
The Songa Afrika political party aspires to become the people’s political manifestation of their culture. We are working for a dignified degree of Afrikan sovereignty. Decolonization is part of our agenda.
Like Franz Fanon said: “Decolonization is the meeting of two forces, opposed to each other by their very nature. Their first encounter was marked by violence, and their existence together, that is to say the exploitation of the native by the settler, was carried on by a great array of bayonets and canons.”
OUR APPROACH: We are building leadership which prioritizes the benefits that come with our determination to stand together, struggle together, grow together and unite in order to fight against imperial dictatorship and all other forms of exploitation.