Скачать или смотреть Kwame Ture on Pan-Africanism, Imperialism, and African Liberation

Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) speaks on the lessons learned from the African liberation struggles of the 1960s. Drawing on his experiences as a former leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a member of the Black Panther Party, and later a leading figure in the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (A-APRP), Ture analyzes the successes, failures, and enduring challenges of anti-colonial and Pan-African movements. This talk was filmed at the University of Chicago on February 18, 1989.

Kwame Ture situates African American struggle within a global African and anti-imperialist context by rejecting the idea that Black oppression in the United States is a unique or isolated phenomenon. Instead, he argues that African people in the U.S., Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America are all subjected to the same global system of imperialism, merely expressed in different forms. For Ture, racism is not the root problem but a tool used by imperial powers to divide, exploit, and control African labor and resources worldwide.

He emphasizes that the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, and modern neo-colonialism form a single historical process. Enslavement in the Americas, colonial rule in Africa, and economic dependency in post-independence nations are not separate chapters, but interconnected strategies used to extract wealth from African people while denying them political and economic power. Thus, African Americans are not simply a “minority” seeking civil rights within the U.S.; they are part of a colonized African world population whose liberation is tied to global power structures.

Ture also stresses that victories in one location are fragile if imperialism remains intact elsewhere. He points to African nations that achieved formal independence in the 1960s yet remained economically controlled by former colonial powers through debt, foreign corporations, and military influence. Likewise, gains made by African Americans through civil rights legislation did not dismantle the underlying economic system that continues to produce inequality, incarceration, and political marginalization. In this way, he draws a direct parallel between neo-colonial Africa and post-civil-rights Black America.

By framing Africa, the Caribbean, and the African diaspora as one political reality, Ture advances Pan-Africanism not as cultural pride but as a strategic necessity. He argues that only coordinated international struggle—shared ideology, shared organization, and shared purpose—can confront a global enemy. Isolated national movements, no matter how heroic, are vulnerable to co-optation, repression, or economic strangulation. Liberation, in his view, must therefore be international, anti-capitalist, and consciously Pan-African.

Ultimately, this perspective challenges students and activists to rethink identity, borders, and struggle itself. Ture is not calling for sympathy across the diaspora, but for political unity rooted in material analysis. To understand oneself as African, in his formulation, is to understand one’s position in a global system of power—and to recognize that freedom for any part of the African world is inseparable from freedom for all.

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