Originally posted on asmsupporters
My name is Matthew Willis, a former member of the African People’s Solidarity Committee (APSC), an organization of white people working under the leadership of Omali Yeshitela and African People’s Socialist Party (APSP). I was a member of APSC and or the Uhuru Solidarity Movement from 1992 until I was unjustifiably expelled in 2008 and banished from all Uhuru work.
A week ago, the Uhuru Movement published an article containing propaganda attacking my comrade, Chernoh Alpha M. Bah, the leader of the African Socialist Movement (ASM) in Sierra Leone. Because I have been invited and accepted the invitation to carry out some work in support of the ASM and because I made a comment challenging an unprovoked attack Penny Hess made against Chernoh on facebook, I was also attacked in the article.
I am therefore writing this response to present my perspective in the current contradictions between myself and the Uhuru Movement, defend my name and character as well my right to support genuine expressions of African liberation as I understand them, rather than be libeled for such activity.
Like others have expressed, I have no way of knowing the ins and outs of the problems between the African Socialist Movement under the leadership of Chernoh Alpha M. Bah and the African People’s Socialist Party of Omali Yeshitela. I must state upfront that nothing stated in the article convinces me that Chernoh Alpha M. Bah is a neocolonialist. I will therefore continue to extend my support and solidarity to Chernoh Alpha M. Bah and the efforts of the ASM in Sierra Leone.
Having stated this position, however, I also have to respond to the two sections of the article that are directed against me, which I do have firsthand knowledge of.
The first section deals with my so-called having “left” the Uhuru Solidarity Movement, and secondly a comment I made to Penny Hess on facebook over a month ago.
Regarding the first question, I did not in 2008 neither do I today unite with the reasons advanced for why I was kicked out of the Uhuru Solidarity Movement. The fact is that I did not “leave the Uhuru Solidarity Movement.” I was banished from it as if I were a criminal. Furthermore, I have a hundred percent disunity with what happened. Nor do I unite with the ugly and unfair assessment of my work and character in the article in question and in some of the comments which were used to uphold it.
There is the suggestion that I refused to make a self-criticism for struggles people had against me. In the case of my expulsion from the Uhuru Movement there was no process available for self-criticism whatsoever. How can I be self-critical for “refusing to carry out even the simplest of tasks” when everyone knew that I carried out tasks of all degrees of complexity every single day? I dedicated my entire time working for the Uhuru Solidarity Movement, on a light week I clocked twenty hours of volunteer tasks while holding a full time job. How can this be called “doing nothing”? How can I address the charge that “criticism means nothing to him” when I am voluntarily attending meetings where the primary agenda item is to criticize me? How can I be self-critical when being falsely charged as a “sexual predator”? That is not a “criticism.” It is a criminal charge! Comparing me to rapists and child molesters makes even less sense when the criticizer also has expected me to work side by side alone with an African woman in a kitchen scrubbing dishes every Saturday afternoon for several years – up to the very week before I was banished. Why would they ask someone they thought to be a sex predator to do this?
When these and many more “criticisms” are rattled at someone in rapid succession in sweeping absolutes, that’s not an honest process for the purposes of developing comrades. A case was being prepared to justify any action that was to be taken against me.
But the fact of the matter is that I was kicked out of the Uhuru Movement because I made a criticism of APSC based on their decision to change the agenda of a meeting in February of 2008. The change of agenda was carried out in an unprincipled way and I “dared to struggle, dared to win” against the commandist onslaught that ensued thereafter.
A day or so leading up to this meeting, I was informed that the agenda had been changed. What was going to be about summing up the National Solidarity Conference that had recently occurred, including 2008 recruitment goals after a dismal failure to meet them in 2007, was now to sum up a struggle which had erupted in Oakland around the annual pie selling campaign.
I was told this had now become the pertinent thing for us to focus on, and Penny Hess had written a paper on it that needed to be the primary thing we would be addressing. When the paper was handed out and read — I had asked to have it before the meeting so I could read on my own and come prepared but was refused — we started our Uhuru tradition of everyone in the room taking turns saying how we personally united with the words that had been handed down.
While I knew disagreements were not tolerated in these situations I wasn’t feeling good about the paper. I felt our failure to meet our recruitment goal of coming anywhere close to getting two hundred new people volunteering in 2007 — a goal we’d set year-after-year, and then fail to come remotely close to achieving year-after-year — was the most pertinent thing, at least in St. Petersburg, Florida. This wasn’t addressed in the paper we had read and neither was it discussed deeply in the National Conference. There was need for thorough discussion on that in my opinion and I said as much.
The APSC thought that my position here was outrageous and insolent and so they misrepresented my position on the issue to be me struggling that “white people can’t be won.” This was completely ridiculous and anyone who knew me at the time who isn’t a liar or completely brainwashed could never agree I would ever state or struggle for this.
How can I say white people can’t be won when everyone in the room was white and we were all “won” to varying degrees? And two, for all my many contradictions and imperfections, I had a personal strong history of “winning” white people to participate in the Uhuru Movement. If I believed this was impossible, how did I do it regularly?
Nevertheless, in the days that followed many emails were exchanged about this incident. The mischaracterizations of my position were deepened and the struggle was now about me. “How dare I be critical of a paper Penny Hess wrote, rather than use it as an opportunity to be self-critical?” was one argument I recall. Well, I continued to try to hold my ground and struggle against the mischaracterizations of what I had said. I attempted to rely on the process of democratic centralism, which the Uhuru Movement claims to uphold, to defend my position. The emails grew in number and length, more people were copied into the discussion and many people had things to say. The actual content of the struggle was less and less the issue and more and more the issue was all the ways I had proven myself a white nationalist over the years. Other emails came from myself and others speaking against, or at least questioning those accusations.
This culminated in a long email from Penny Hess representing the APSC position, a tirade claiming that my 16 years in the Uhuru Movement had proven me a white nationalist of the highest order. Every paragraph was a new charge against me. Some of these charges seemed completely fabricated; if there was truth to them, I had never heard them raised before. Others were based on what seemed like any legitimate or partially-legitimate struggle anyone could remember having with me over the years where I had been working daily within the Uhuru Movement. All of these “criticisms” were brought to the forefront like they had occurred yesterday and given equal weight. Like the language of the article, every charge was worded in the most inflammatory and extreme way.
I had no way to respond and I feared – as it proved correctly – that the stage was being set to kick me out of the movement all together. At the time I was deeply indoctrinated, and terrified that I wouldn’t be allowed to part of the Uhuru Movement which had been the most important thing in my adult life. I am embarrassed to admit that my entire self-esteem at the time was tied to the perception of me by APSP and their group which sums up the individuals who offer white support for them, the APSC.
However, the next day Chairman Omali Yeshitela circulated an email calling for cessation of all struggles inside APSC and the Uhuru Movement regarding me until the Party had the opportunity to sum them up in a meeting, which would be coming soon.
I was totally relieved and elated. In my mind, my Dear Leader Omali Yeshitela would come in, weigh in on everything and set everything straight. Whether I was correct or incorrect in my position, I knew “The Chairman,” who I had complete faith in, would never agree that the loathsome criminal described in Penny’s paper was a fair description of me. Would he?
I kept this faith even when Kitty Reilly, another leading member of APSC called me up while I was at work the very day after Omali Yeshitela’s email-call for “cessation of struggle” was circulated. She blatantly struggled with me, including letting me know I had been completely expelled from the all Uhuru Solidarity Movement work, even the humblest of tasks. This is a fate reserved only for the worst criminals in the eyes of the movement. Wasn’t a decision like that supposed of occur after the Party meeting and not before? Nevertheless, I was naïve enough to believe she had violated the Party’s edict, rather than recognizing right then what was truly going on. (I sent her an email documenting this matter. I have this email archived, along with all other emails described in this response, available to all interested.)
I maintained my faith that I was in store for something honest and objective, even as the days got closer to “the meeting” and no one from the Party bothered to contacted me directly in the process of formulating their position on this struggle which was now focused on myself.
What a fool I was to trust in that process. While I spent the next week respecting the call and refraining from communications on my struggle, effectively isolated, APSC was freely organizing, meeting and preparing for “the meeting” that was coming. “The Meeting” was really an opportunity for the most revered top Party leaders to publicly endorse the vicious paper that Penny Hess had written about me. While three comrades also bravely expressed principled disunity in the face of the intimidating process, in the end, APSC “won.” Too many who knew me and my character in the meeting were cowed and/or brainwashed. They said nothing, or worse, took their turn to prove loyalty and stick the knife further into my character assassination with falsehoods. I was ejected with my head hung low, banished and shunned.
I state again that I had and have complete and utter disdain and disunity with the process of my expulsion and subsequent shunning. Any so-called “revolutionary” who has first-hand experience with the aforementioned process and considers it legitimate is entirely repulsive to me and should be to any freedom(uhuru) loving person. However I mention something finally on this. I had made a personal commitment about a donation I planned to make to the APSP when I learned I was to receive a small inheritance after my father’s passing in April of 2007, just weeks before the fiasco of my expulsion occurred.
When the money came in, I sent $1000 directly to Omali Yeshitela for him to disseminate to the Uhuru Movement as he saw fit. I was on the fence about doing this after all that had happened, but Dave “Redbeard” Rearden – who made an objective comment about me recently in the comment thread of the article, and who is being urged in another message by Joel Hamburger to join the call for my isolation and condemnation – struggled and won me to live up to my commitment to material solidarity. In spite of all the horrible falsehoods that were said and written about me by APSC and their rulers he argued: “Have you been doing solidarity work based on whether APSC likes you or hates you? Or because, you stand in solidarity with African liberation?”
Why would I have come through on this if I were as loathsome and shady a force as being portrayed in the article? I’m sure APSC has some interesting theories on this.
After that, with the exception of privately participating in a few call-ins I’ve learned about on Uhuru mass emails over the years that ensued, that was my last act of direct, material solidarity to the African People’s Socialist Party and Uhuru Movement.
Like Redbeard reminded me with the donation, while I had been kicked out of the Uhuru Solidarity Movement and summed up by APSC as a terrible white nationalist to be shunned by all, the things that had motivated me to be in the Uhuru Solidarity Movement and APSC still remained with me. I still believe in reparations to the African community. I still believe that African people were one colonized people throughout the world and that I have a responsibility to support their struggle to be free.
Therefore I began connecting with other organizations and individuals – some of them Uhuru ex-patriots. There are many of us no longer associated with the Uhuru Movement, but still trying to do right by the world.
This process led me to reunite with Iyapo Ngina Bandele who I knew through the Uhuru Movement. After the “Free Ajumu” campaign was abandoned by InPDUM, she requested my support on Free Ajamu Bandele and the NAPPA organization while he was still in prison. I was happy to provide. Then Ajamu got out of prison and I met him in person and he also encouraged my support in the BSAN work that he was building in Tampa. In my estimation he is a revolutionary of the the highest caliber and I am honored to be associated with him. More recently I have been asked to join the effort to build an International Support Committee for Chernoh Alpha M Bah’s work to build the African Socialist Movement. I have the utmost respect for all three of these comrades and am honored and appreciate the opportunities they provide me to show support and solidarity.
Regarding my associations with Chernoh Alpha M. Bah and the African Socialist Movement, I worked on Chernoh’s campaign through Uhuru in 2006 and 2007. I met him during that time and have no reason to think him anything other than a genuine revolutionary leader in the African Liberation Struggle as he was presented to me as back then by the Uhuru Movement. I was aware that there was a separation between Chernoh and the Uhuru Movement in recent years, but the details of this where not something I had knowledge of before reading this article. But, based on the profoundly negative circumstances of my own separation with the Uhuru Movement — and that of many others I know — the fact that Chernoh and the Uhuru Movement were no longer working together did nothing to sway my opinion of him or his work.
It seems that five years after unfairly shunning me from their movement, I was not only expected to uncritically unite with their position on him, but also to have known and accepted it even before it as even issued!
In the same article where they raise these struggles for the first time publicly, they use them to condemn me for supporting him. And thus, I find my name smeared on an article right under Chernoh Alpha M. Bah, in two lengthy sections, on their website.
Anyway. About a month ago, I noticed several comments from APSC leader Penny Hess on Chernoh Alpha M Bah’s facebook page. In these comments, she alleged that Chernoh Bah was a neocolonialist based on a press release he issued calling on the United Nations to bring monitors into Sierra Leone for the upcoming elections there.
From what I read, he made this call based on the threat of political violence he anticipated coming from the current rulers of the country. The APSP, Uhuru Movement and Penny Hess say Chernoh Alpha M. Bah called on a UN military force to “protect investments.” Rather than rely on paraphrasing, anyone who wants to read the press release in question can do so on Chernoh Alpha M. Bah´s facebook page and see how they understand what was written.
This was the first time I ever saw any public criticism of Chernoh Bah or his work coming from an Uhuru Movement member or organization, let alone alleging him to be a neocolonialist, let alone from a white solidarity member of Uhuru. Whatever else, Penny Hess, the Chairwoman of APSC, demonstrated obscene white-nationalist arrogance as a privileged North American to lead the Uhuru Movement charge against an Chernoh Alpha M Bah. The fact that the APSP has offered no public criticism to Penny Hess for this offensive outburst speaks volumes.
As a fellow white person struggling to align myself in solidarity with African liberation, I felt politically obligated to post this response:
“Malcolm X utilized the UN when it suited his strategic purposes. So did Che Guevara and Fidel. So does Hugo Chavez. So does Evo Morales. So does Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Marcus Garvey strategized with the KKK. The Uhuru Movement regularly runs its leaders to be elected as mayors inside US cities. What is different here?” (Screenshot available here)
My words have been twisted in all sorts of ways in the article, titled with the bizarre allegation that I am “attacking African leaders to protect Chernoh” with the statement. However to anyone with reading comprehension skills (which of course requires a brain that maintains critical reasoning capacity and uhuru subordinates have handed theirs over to their dear leaders), my point is obvious and straight-forward: other revolutionary leaders have utilized imperialist institutions, the UN and others, to secure their strategic interests. What is different here? It’s a question. If you have a good answer, then answer it please.
Based on who I was dealing with, I suppose I knew a simple objective response or even sharp retort would be too much to hope for. However, I wasn’t expecting this wild, twenty-two paragraph tirade against me, painting me as Chernoh Bah’s opportunist white nationalist henchman, relieving all the shit from 2008, replete with renewed allegations of me being a “sexual predator” (slimily associated with the weird phrase “battery of women,” a thinly-veiled word-game to insinuate that I have physically assaulted women!)
Regarding this “sexual predator” charge (which is the main thing which makes this libel a criminal offense against me), it is entirely based on the white, bourgeois feminist, lesbian separatist political roots that dominate the leadership of the APSC which have gone on unchecked since its inception in 1976.*
These reactionary politics are the primary issue with the gender and sexual orientation demographic in APSC. 35-40 years after its inception, the African People’s Solidarity Committee boasts a membership of 4 or so men in its ranks. Maybe 3. The rest of us have been bludgeoned out. APSC considers it a contradiction when white heterosexual men won’t undergo some kind of voluntary political castration as part of the terms for agreeing with their line. Whether or not some 90s girlfriend of Joel Hamburger thinks I hit on her at a party 20 years ago, no sane person who knows me would ever consider me a sexual predator.
However, this time these allegations are not only presented before the faithful of the Uhuru Solidarity Movement as it was in 2008. But now published on their website. Perhaps they have also dedicated some of their newsprint to this libel and it now rots in bundles in a shed somewhere in St. Petersburg Florida, like 99% of the rest of the newsprint the APSP produces.
But that’s how it is. I’ve failed to join in the Uhuru Movement´s enthusiastic reviling of my character and reputation in 2008. Years later, rather than just disappearing into nothing, I helped to set up a wordpress blog for the African Socialist Movement and made some graphics for them — in the face of the yet-unmade criticism that the Uhuru Movement had of them and their leader, no less. Lastly I made a facebook comment challenging the allegation that Chernoh is a neocolonialist made by another white person. My punishment for all of this is a nasty, libelous article on their website dredging up the painful chapter of my ouster from the Uhuru Soldarity Movement once again.
After sixteen years of my life spent dedicated to the Uhuru Movement, it’s unfortunate that we couldn’t have parted more amicably and respectfully. But that was not my doing or choice.
I deeply appreciate everyone who has spoken out for my character in response to the article. It is a gut-wrenching process, I know. Even writing this lengthy response and bracing myself for the next round of bile is exhausting and heartbreaking. But I appreciate you not succumbing to intimidation and rather having the fortitude and principle to speak your mind. I am honored by you and you inspire me to do the same.
I also thank the many who have contacted me personally after reading the article to offer support and take exception and outrage to the way I have been characterized. This attempt to marginalize, libel/slander and silence me has only backfired.
I call on all white people to seek out and support expressions of African Liberation by African People on their terms, and to find legitimate vehicles to transform our capitalism-based, parasitic relationship to Africa into something principled and progressive. No single organization owns this process. This is the struggle that led me to be a part of the Uhuru Movement for so long. Uhuru was the group that introduced me to these politics and I appreciate them for doing so, even in the face of vicious defamation by them. This same struggle leads me into political solidarity and work-based relationships with comrades Oriya, Ajamu and Chernoh Alpha M Bah and their organizations — comrades who don’t hate me for failing to goose-step to their satisfaction.
I have a vague hope that the egos and whims of the various personalities on the stage of uhuru leadership prove less important to their small tribe of faithfuls than the goals we all claim to be fighting for. In a commandist dynamic, those who are doing the commanding are no more or less guilty than those allowing themselves to be commanded. But this is no longer my problem. I have freed myself from Uhuru’s bully tactics.
I now move on with my life which will include principled support for Chernoh Alpha M Bah and the African Socialist Movement. I have personally boycotted from my consciousness all propaganda from Uhuru “News” or any other instrument of the Uhuru Movement. The next thing I will voluntarily read or hear from them is a self-criticism for this whole situation. Until such time, I have nothing else to contribute to this matter.
Source: http://asmsupporters.wordpress.com/2012/05/30/matthews-response/
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