Kuwasi Balagoon

If the liberation of New Afrika, and an anarchist revolution didn't happen (and it didn't) in the 70s and 80s in the U.S., it was not due to lack of effort by Kuwasi Balagoon. He never gave up, he never gave in, he never compromised, and he never stopped fighting as hard as he could. An organizer inside the US Army while stationed in Germany, Balagoon started an anti-racist self-defense organization called De Legislators with other black soldiers, in which De Legislators would beat the shit out of white GI's who would gang up on black GI's. When he returned from Germany, he became a tenant organizer in Harlem, where he became radicalized through increasing frustration with exploitative landlords and their state lackeys. He realized then that in order to free his people, the internal colony of New Afrika, relegated to reservations called ghettos, there would have to be revolution.

He joined the Black Panthers, got swept up in the New York 21 case, and then moved on to clandestine armed-struggle with the Black Liberation Army. Balagoon was "arrested for menacing a 270 pound colonial building superintendent with a machete, who physically stopped the delivery of oil to a building [...he] helped organize." Balagoon was not known for serving the jail sentences given to him. On two occaisions, Kuwasi escaped from prison, and on one of those occaisions he returned to the prison later, armed, to free other prisoners. Caught during a shootout after a bank robbery, Kuwasi wrote his best works for use in his trial. He refused to participate in his trial, choosing instead to frame himself as a prisoner of war, and that the criminal court has no jurisdiction against him. He used his opening, closing and sentencing statements, not to plead innocence or attempt to get off with a guilty plea. He used the witness stand as a pulpit from which to preach revolution and the liberation of his people.

Kuwasi Balagoon never compromised. His history is clear, and his rhetoric is crazy: he wanted to take on the full machinery of the state in guerilla armed uprising for the decentralization of wealth and the redistribution of the land. And yet he was the first to put himself on the line to accomplish these goals. If there were 100 Kuwasi Balagoons, they might have done all of that. The other highlight (other than his opening, closing and sentencing statements) for me was the essay "Anarchy Can't Fight Alone" about the necessity of working together to overthrow this imperialist government by any means necessary, and providing concrete examples of how anarchists can provide immediate needs to oppressed people and organize for overthrow.

Kuwasi did everything he could, risked everything he had for his people and the anarchist revolution. When he died in 1986 of AIDS, he left behind a world that desparately needed him and hundreds of others like him. I'll end this review with the words Kuwasi Balagoon used to end his letters:
Love, Power & Peace by Piece… (lisätietoja)