Making Black Lives Matter from Togo to the United States

Making Black Lives Matter from Togo to the United States
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.
“We have been denied of our basic human rights. The only right we are allowed to have in Togo is the right to die and today we have chosen to use that right to die for our country if need be.”-Farida Nabourema

“We have been denied of our basic human rights. The only right we are allowed to have in Togo is the right to die and today we have chosen to use that right to die for our country if need be.”

-Farida Nabourema

Malcolm X once explained: “And by the colonial powers of Europe having complete control over Africa, they projected the image of Africa negatively. They projected Africa always in a negative light: jungles, savages, cannibals, nothing civilized. Why then naturally it was so negative until it was negative to you and me, and you and I began to hate it. We didn’t want anybody telling us anything about Africa, much less calling us Africans.” Malcolm’s words are still relevant today. Africa is still depicted in a negative light in the media and this has the effect of alienating African Americans from our ancestral homeland.

The few times that Africa is given any attention by the mainstream American media it is typically stories of poverty, warfare, dictatorship, corruption, disease, famine, oppression, and suffering. Those things are all issues that continue to plague Africa today, but the problem with this narrative that the media tends to paint of Africa is that it highlights the challenges that Africa faces while also giving little attention to the individuals who are working to confront those challenges. For example, the current revolution that is being fought in Togo is given relatively little media coverage in America, but the struggle that is being waged there is a struggle that I think African Americans should be aware of and stand in solidarity with because in many ways the demands of the Black people of Togo reflect the demands made by organizations such as Black Lives Matter. What are seeing in recent years is that Black people in Togo, the United States, and the rest of the world are beginning to rise up and confront the injustices that face us.

Togo is currently under the domination of a dictatorial regime that has been in power since the 1960s. Gnassingbé Eyadéma came to power in 1967 following a military coup. Gnassingbé Eyadéma, who was previously a soldier in the French army, was also involved in the 1963 coup that resulted in the assassination of Sylvanus Olympio. The 1963 coup would be the first of many military coups that occurred in post-colonial Africa. Gnassingbé Eyadéma’s regime was a very violent and oppressive one which jailed and assassinated many political opponents. Perhaps the best-known example of this was the assassination of Tavio Amorin in 1992. When Gnassingbé Eyadéma died in 2005, his son Faure Gnassingbé came into power and he continued his father’s repressive rule.

One of the most internationally recognized activists to emerge out of Togo’s recent struggle against dictatorship is Farida Nabourema. Farida comes from a family of political activists in Togo. Her father was jailed and tortured on numerous occasions for standing against the repressive regime in Togo. It was her father’s activism that got Farida involved in the fight for democracy there. Through her writings and videos Farida has worked to expose the dictatorship in Togo and to bring international attention to the struggle of the Togolese people.

Farida’s activism has made her a target of the government’s repression. She has been subjected to a number of threats from the government, especially following video footage that she released showing how poor living conditions in Togo were. The footage showed the dilapidated condition of schools and hospitals in Togo. In one of the schools the children were forced to use cinderblocks as tables. Farida felt that doing this was necessary to expose the conditions in Togo given that the government of Togo was attempting to cover this up. The government responded by sending police officers from house to house in Togo to find Farida. The government threats have forced Farida to go into hiding in West Africa.

In the past uprisings and other forms of resistance were typically suppressed through violence, but the people of Togo have decided that they have had enough. This time no amount of arrests, killings, and tortures are silencing the people of Togo, who are demanding that Faure must go. This movement is in some ways a continuation of a trend that we have seen in West Africa. In 2014 a mass uprising in Burkina Faso forced the dictator there to step down and the Gambia recently elected a new president after enduring more than two decades of Yahya Jammeh’s dictatorship there. These struggles to establish a free and democratic Africa are not well-known known in America given the scant mainstream media coverage that Africa receives, which is why it is important for African Americans and others in the African diaspora to utilize whatever platforms we have available to help publicize the struggles of the people of Africa and to assist their struggles in any way that we can.

We also have to recognize, as Malcolm X recognized, that the struggles of people of African descent are a global struggle. In the United States the Black Lives Matter movement developed in response to the killings and unjust treatment of African Americans. The struggles that African Americans face are one aspect of the larger global struggle of African people and it is for this reason that those of us in the United States must broaden our worldview and understand what is happening in African countries like Togo. If we are serious about ensuring that Black lives matter then we must ensure that those lives matter everywhere, whether those Black lives are in Togo or in the United States.

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot