The Black Panthers Party in Spain Chapter XXI Abuy Nfubea

                      

The Black Panthers Party in Spain 

Chapter XXI

Abuy Nfubea

Following the death of Malcolm X and as a strategy to guarantee the right to vote for the Black farmers murdered by the KKK, Kwame Touré, Willy Ricks, and other members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) created the Black Panther Party in 1965 in Loudness County, Alabama. In 1966, in Oakland, California, two students, Bobby and Huey, from Merritt College, belonging to the African Studies Association and the Revolutionary Action Movement (ARM), created the Black Panther Party (BPP) for self-defense. Two years later, Eldridge Cleaver inaugurated the international section of the Black Panthers in Algeria, on African soil. In London, the British Black Panthers (BBP) was founded in the summer of 1971 by Obi Egbuna, Darcus Howe, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Olive Morris. In India, the predominantly Black lower castes, linked to the organization of social struggle against the caste system, created the Dalit Panthers in India on May 29, 1972. The founders were Namdeo Dhasal and J. V. Pawar, with an anti-Brahmin socialist ideology. Aboriginal (Black) Denis Walker and Sam Watson created the Australian Black Panther Party (ABPP) in Brisbane, Australia, on January 8, 1972. In 1971, other children of non-white Jewish migrants—Saadia Marciano, Charlie Biton, and Revel Alberger—victims of Ashkenazi racism, created the Black Panther Movement in Israel. In the Bahamas, the Vanguard National and Socialist Party was a minor political party founded in 1971 by a splinter group from the youth wing of the Progressive Liberal Party, inspired by the Black Panther Party in the United States. During the Franco regime, the Basque journalist Chivite Blanco published an article about the Black Panthers in the Spanish magazine Rumbo in 1970. That same year, a Black Panther leader visited the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) campus from California. In 1982, two Black women who had been sexually assaulted in Móstoles Villafontana founded the Black Panthers feminist collective. In 1987, the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded in Dallas, Texas, by Aaron Michaels, a former radio producer and community activist. He established the first official chapter of the New Black Panther Party after hearing Michael McGee speak on a radio program he had produced; he was drawn to the militant rhetoric of the Black Power ideology. Former Nation of Islam (NOI) minister Khalid Abdul Muhammad served as National President from the late 1990s until his death in 2001. The NBPP is currently led by Nzingha and Malik Zulu Shabazz. In 1988, politically influenced by the work of the Black Panthers in Chile, several MCs, DJs, and breakdancers—including Lalo and Meneses—formed the rap group Panteras Negras (Black Panthers) in the ghettos of Santiago. These individuals, immersed in social, socialist, and anti-racist struggles of the working class, the Mapuche movement, and the fight for freedoms, were involved in these movements. In 1996, the Pinochet dictatorship and the Carabineros (Chilean police), supported by the State Defense Council, issued an arrest warrant for the group's leader, Eduardo Meneses, accusing him of slander, libel, and incitement to violence. He went into hiding. In Alcalá de Henares, Spain, as a splinter group of Free Mandela and influenced by the hip-hop of the Rolling Stones nightclub and the campus of the Labor University, brotherhoods like Simplemente Hermanos, Los Colours, and other fighters against Nazi terrorism—Serafin, Enrique, Tomy, Siale, and Abuy—created the FOJAH Panther Movement with the manifesto: "Black Panthers, no aggression without a response, organize and fight," which spread to major cities: Zaragoza, Valencia, Madrid, Barcelona, ​​Burela, León, Gijón, and others. In 2002 in Madrid, following the Omowale trial, members of the FOJAH Panther Movement, Yast, Larry, and Marta, launched the Manifesto for Afro-Spanishness, split off, and founded the Black Panthers Association (APN), which dissolved in 2014. In April 2010, Kemi Seba founded the New Black Panther Party in Paris, France.

WHATS HAPPENED IN SPAIN?

 Tired of the tepid response from traditional Guinean political parties, the Black Panthers organization, better known as FOJAH, was founded under Franco's regime. For some, they are the armed wing of the political struggle for the independence of the Black nation. Understanding the objective history of the Black Panthers and the origins of Pan-Africanist Black nationalism requires going back to April 1973, when, during the transition to democracy, the opposition in Guinea stormed the embassy. They occupied the building and created an assembly. The ambassador fled and had to negotiate with Fernando Morán, who would later become Minister of Foreign Affairs. Following the coup by Suárez and Obiang, Omar Bongo and the CFA franc against Macías during those turbulent times amidst the turmoil of the transition and the Second Vatican Council, following the assassination of Carrero Blanco, Guinean organizations, which had been bastions of national Catholicism and Francoism, such as the Afro-Spanish Circle, began to shift towards Pan-Africanism with a strong Marxist dialectic and the influence of Black liberation theology in Spain. Groups deeply committed to the cause emerged, including the ANRD, MOLIFUGE, and the Maoist URGE (Revoluctionary Union of Equatorial Guinea), prepared for the violence of revolutionary action and the use of armed struggle with guerrillas in Cameroon. After the transition progressed, EquatorialGuineans were declared stateless and had their national identity cards revoked. With the consolidation of democracy and the Suarez Law, which abolished reserved matters, King Juan Carlos allied himself with Obiang, imposing a systematic abandonment of Guineans who lost all privileges and were expelled from the collective consciousness with the first immigration law. With Spain's entry into the European Union approaching, the state passed numerous laws that effectively againts Africans mading Black people enemies of the state, as exemplified by the 500th anniversary Cristopher Colombus celebration: Encounter Between Two Worlds (Withes and indigenous) but no Africans. This would become a wound that would solidify a strong rejection of racism among various second-generation of Guineans. This rejection of racism and submission led them to break with the ideology of Martin Luther King Jr. and embrace Cheick Anta Diop and Malcolm X, which would nourish the future founders of the Black Panthers, who would witness this process unfold. The embryo of the Panthers was truly born in 1980 when a small group of students began to unify the discourses of the Black right, led by Florentino Ekomo of Eyakure, and the left, represented by MOLIFUGE, along with Pan-Africanist and Catholic sectors identified with black theologian of James Cohen and Bodipo Malumba.  In retaliation for the assassination of Benjamin Moloise killed by Apartheid regimen, they stormed the South African embassy and created a manifesto in defense of the Free Mandela movement. Fed up with the Spanish State's passivity in the face of racist terrorism from the far-right and authoritarianism, they decided to create a clandestine cell within liberation theology circles, centered around readings from the Stones nightclub and the magazines Africa and Sango. This coincided with the visit to Madrid of Nobel laureate in Literature, the Nigerian Wole Soyinka, whose lecture is believed to have sparked a confrontation between two factions: the so-called Sengorists (Mbadiang, Ndempawai and Luis Beltran) and the Pan-Africanists, including section (Ndong Abeso, Mbuyi Kabunda, Marcelino Bondjale and the poetis Rakel Ilombe). At the same time, a split occurred within the Nuestra Señora de África university College residence hall among African intellectuals linked to the African Student Movement, the PSEUG (studient University promotion), and Maleva Association.

STUDIENTS STRIKES

 From 1987 onwards, following student demonstrations and strikes, numerous Black students experienced numerous episodes of repression and political activism. The initial core of this movement was the feminist collective Black Panthers, which originated in the Villafontana neighborhood of Móstoles. The assault and occupation of the South African embassy marked the culmination of the radicalization of the lumpenproletariat sectors immersed in the hip-hop movement. Among its founders were Javier Siale, Serafín Ondo Afana, Antonio Olo Ándeme, Juan Utrero, Enrique Okenve, and Abuy Nfubea, all young Guineans educated in Catholic boarding schools. This group gradually grew from its original nine members to 103 by 1989. After several years of merging with other Afro-Brazilian youth groups close to hip-hop and imbued with the ideas of Malcolm X and Winnie Madikizela, such as Simplemente Hermanos, Los Bra, Radical Black Power, and Los Colours, the organization was formally re-established at the university. The Black Panthers (FOJAH) was founded in Alcalá in 1990. Just a year later, by 1992, the organization already had over 180 members. Among other factors, the main driving force behind the Black Panthers' growth was Nazi terrorism, political hip-hop from groups like Public Enemy, and grassroots Church sectors that introduced the Free Mandela movement to Spain. Other contributing groups included the Christian cultural movement CIDAF, the magazine Mundo Negros (Black World), and organizations like Joan José Tamayo of the CAO (Catholic Workers' Action), local parishes, and the political movement of Catholic Workers' Action (Acción Católica Obrera) or the African chaplaincy. The organization, spearheaded by the Basque missionary priest Assier Garmendia, a former advisor to Tomas Sankara in Burkiana Faso, served as a training ground and cadre for militants. The Spanish branch of the new Black Panther Party, also known as F0JAH, was created in 1988 in the Madrid town of Móstoles as part of the legacy of the student strikes popularly known as "El Cojo Manteca" (The Lame Manteca). However, its organizational origins lie in 1983 with the feminist organization Black Panthers, founded by two Black women from Equatorial Guinea who had suffered sexual assault in the Villa Fontana neighborhood. This was a topic of conversation in my home, and my family participated in the committee.

KILL FEAR

Black youth and the African community lived in terror under the constant violence, threats, and attacks of Nazi skinhead groups. They killed Lucrecia, Dombele, Murab, etc. Faced with the growing impunity for terrorist violence in the streets against the Black community and the silence of political, academic, and police institutions, some Black students and young people began to follow Winnie Madikizela's political line, calling for retaliation against racism and joining the violent strikes that white students were staging throughout Spain. This was crucial because it was here, in the late 1980s, that young Black people began to participate in the riots and acts of resistance that characterized the student movement in the city during a time of social and political tensions. This street struggle was a strategy of action that developed in the strikes from the late 1980s onward, and more specifically to counteract the effects. At the end of the strikes, these Afro groups would be crucial for the organization of a strategy to confront the impunity of Nazi terrorism as an autonomous base. These groups, which later identified themselves as brotherhoods, intervened in the streets and the Black community. Specifically, they acted against Nazi targets, certain racist organizations, etc., with the aim of keeping alive and constant the spirit of resistance against the attacks against the Black community. This, together with Malcolm X and radical hip-hop, decisively affected their thinking, their lives, their attitudes, and African culture, as well as a collective consciousness and memory whose period marked an entire generation. These groups, by managing nightclubs and reggae venues, DJs, and hip-hop clubs, maintained control of street space in the first half of the 1990s, when Mandela was released and the Free Mandela Movement dissolved, and the Conference was launched. "If you're afraid, don't come. Don't get overwhelmed: organize and fight." These groups, known as brotherhoods, had as their central mission to kill fear. And although at first they were spontaneous, without coordination, they had an disproportionate importance in the consolidation and expansion of the Black Panthers party in Spain because from 1991 onwards they acted in a disciplined and complementary manner with the leadership of the Black Panthers' central committee, which broadened the political landscape for Black youth.