Is Umar Johnson the Greatest Pan-Africanist of the 21st Century?
Umar Johnson has been a very perplexing and polarizing figure within the black community. Umar is also someone whom I’ve been critical of in large part because his accomplishments and contributions to the Pan-African movement do not match his ego. Take for example the video below.
In the video, Umar declares himself to be the number one Pan-Africanist of the 21st century. As a Pan-Africanist, this is where I take issue with Umar. Let’s say for the sake of argument that what Umar says is true and that he is the number one Pan-Africanist of this century. What does that mean for our movement? It means that our number one leader is someone who has not only struggled to build a basic institution, but he has no real political organization and no revolutionary program in place.
I am currently teaching at the School of Pan-African Thought. It is an online school, so we do not have the same overhead cost that building a school at a physical location would have, but we do have several African-centered schools throughout the United States. In fact, the New York Times did a story on these schools several years ago. Building a school isn’t easy, but it is possible. Others have done it.
But aside from the school, my biggest issue with Umar is that he’s often missing in action when it comes time to support the struggles of brothers and sisters in other parts of the world. When our brothers and sisters were waging a revolutionary struggle for liberation in Togo in 2017 and 2018, Umar was nowhere to be seen in support of that struggle.
When I think of great Pan-African leaders, men and women who have been my models, I think of Malcolm X who was building with brothers and sisters on the continent. Malcolm also spoke out against American imperialism in the Congo. I think of Funmilayo Kuti, who helped to build several anti-colonial organizations. I think of Walter Rodney whose scholarship got him banned from Jamaica. In Guyana, Rodney joined the Working People’s Alliance to struggle for change.
There are even contemporary Pan-Africanists whom I can point to, such as Edna Roland who was involved in the struggle against dictatorship in Brazil and later became a leading voice of the reparations movement for Africans in the Diaspora. I can point to my sister from Togo, Farida Nabourema, who has not only struggled for political change in Togo, but in other parts of Africa as well.
The problem with Umar’s Pan-Africanism is two-fold. In the first place, it’s mostly rhetorical. Umar has yet to build his school, so his Pan-Africanism is not backed by any real institution. His Pan-Africanism also is not backed by any revolutionary organization either. Kwame Ture spoke about the importance of organization.
The second problem is that Umar’s Pan-Africanism is very American-centered. He equates being the most well-known Pan-Africanist in the online conscious community with being the number one Pan-Africanist in the world. The fact is that the Pan-African movement is a global movement and there are Pan-Africanists who are on the frontlines of very serious revolutionary struggles in their own countries. The same cannot truly be said of Umar, so what then makes him any greater than Pan-African brothers and sisters who have risked their safety and their lives for change?
I don’t criticize Umar simply for the sake of doing so. I am a Pan-Africanist. I want to see a strong and effective Pan-African movement. I am concerned that Umar’s antics over the years has caused some to misunderstand what the movement should be about. To Umar’s credit, he has introduced Pan-Africanism and Garveyism to generations who may have been unfamilar with these concepts. The problem is that Umar is not the best messenger of these concepts. As Pan-Africanists we are confronted with those who oppose Pan-Africanism and those like Umar who make a mockery out of what Pan-Africanism is supposed to represent.
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Dwayne is the author of A Legally Created People.
