7 February 2002
interview
Washington, DC — Transafrica is selling its elegant building in Washington, DC. The money will help breathe new life into the organization which, its new president, Bill Fletcher has acknowledged, is broke and in debt. The organization plans to use some of the sale money to purchase a modest facility "somewhere" in Washington, DC, says Fletcher. "We are looking." The current building "is not a movement building. It demands silence. I want a messy building, a movement building, a building where you can see people working, using the building for various campaigns we plan to mount."
Fletcher, a long-time labor union activist and one of the organizers of the Black Radical Congress says he is "retooling" Transafrica for the 21st century. In an interview with AllAfrica.com's Charles Cobb Jr. he described his plans to center Transafrica's work around organizing for "Global Justice" and education. Excerpts:
You took over as President of Transafrica at the end of last year. Many people want to know just where you plan to take the organization. Have you been surprised by what you've found as you have settled in?
The best way I can answer your question is to say that we are rebuilding and retooling Transafrica Forum. Although I knew that this would be a rebuilding operation, I did not realize how much work I was actually being confronted with. We have put out a request for contributions, donations to Transafrica Forum. We are short of cash there's no secret behind that, and we're in a process of selling the building. When we sell the building we anticipate that we will be able to stabilize our situation and actually go forward and do some exciting work.
In the sense of this being a rebuilding operation, are you only talking about cash and dollars here or are you talking about constituency as well? Transafrica has not been particularly visible for many years and if I'm right, Washington D.C. is the only city with a Transafrica chapter.
First of all I think that it is important to understand that there are two organizations This is something that has been confusing. There is Transafrica, Inc. and Transafrica Forum. And I'm the President of both. Transafrica Forum is a nonprofit tax exempt and Transafrica, Inc is nonprofit but not tax exempt. Transafrica, Inc had about 14 chapters around the country at one point. There is one left. But let me go to the gist of your question. Transafrica has not been visible for quite some time. So the rebuilding that I am talking about is both financial and programmatic. We need to have at the financial level, a steady income stream which we haven't had. We have depended on the generosity of certain individuals who have made various contributions to this organization but we don't have what you could call a steady stream. It ends up being emergency funds. No organization can sustain itself over the long run without some sort of income stream. So, we have to change that. And that was one of the reasons I put out a request last week to the 5,000 people that are on our listserv, saying, "Look we need some help." And we've gotten great responses; people have been very generous. People have sent whatever they could afford - ten dollars, a hundred dollars.
The other part of the rebuilding is programmatic. And that is not simply "rebuilding," it's retooling and reshaping the organization. I'm looking for Transafrica Forum to be more of an organizing center and educational center. I see Transafrica Forum as being an organization which, in cooperation with other organizations, watches and campaigns around major issues facing the [African] Diaspora. So there are programs we are currently doing that we want to continue. We have guests coming here who do book signings and give public addresses; all that's very important. But I'm saying that we need to go beyond that. We need to have organizers. We need to hire organizers who are out building campaigns, talking with regular people in Black America about the issues facing the Diaspora, whether it's HIV/AIDS in Africa and Brazil, or whether it's issues of economic development, structural adjustment programs, runaway shops that leave the United States and go into the Caribbean or Latin America and the impact it has on us here are well as the countries they are going to. These are the issues that we need to be talking to people about.
There's a wide range of possible issues here. What would your priorities be?
The possibilities that I'm suggesting to the board...
This would be a new board?
At this point it's the existing board of Transafrica Forum but there may be new people who come on. That's one of the issues that's in front of the board. We're going to have a retreat in March and we're going to be talking about that. The programmatic issues that are confronting us that I'm putting forward are: Global Justice, and I'll explain that in a second, support for labor movements in Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America, building a student and youth component to our work, and continuing the work Transafrica has done in the past around normalization of relations with Cuba.
Now when I talk of Global Justice, there's a number of things there. And this is ideal for coalition work with other organizations. Global Justice is one of the terms that describes the response to globalization. It is talking about the fact that the character of globalization is not simply the globalize d economy. It's the dominance of the multi-national corporations and international financial institutions. It's the blackmail that those institutions have used against countries in the global South - in Latin America, Asia and Africa - to dictate to those countries the developmental path that they should follow. It's not just about easy access on telephones. It's also about who is wired to the Internet and who is not. It's about trade policies that undermine the ability of countries in to global South to develop fairly and fully. So, "Global Justice" is responding to those injustices that I am describing. I am saying that Transafrica needs to be a part of that. And that we haven't been - not centrally. And when you look at the rise of this thing that people call the global justice movement, whether it's demonstrations like in Seattle in 1999, Quebec, Genoa - we need to have more of a Black presence; not only among the participants, but also in leading, shaping that movement. I'm saying that that's something that Transafrica Forum should be about.
Doesn't this in some ways represent a fairly significant shift for Transafrica in the sense that Transafrica started out with the intention of being a lobbying organization for Africa and the Caribbean and it was mainly focused on shaping opinion and generating influence here in Washington, D.C. - Capitol Hill, the Congress, the State Department - among people who were making decisions that affected African and Caribbean countries? Now you're talking about what seems to be a grassroots organizing institution.
Yes it is. But it builds on what has been done. The lobbying that was done, primarily by Transafrica, Inc., I think was very, very important. However, I'd like to say that our greatest lobby is Black America. It's not what we do on the Hill, or what some lobbyists do on the Hill. It's whether issues resonate within Black America and how Black America responds. In order to implement this we have to be very grassroots oriented - there has to be grassroots education and grassroots organizing. We need to be talking with out people about HIV/AIDS not simply in terms of the number of people dying, but also the impact that it has on the economies of Africa. We need to be talking with our people about structural adjustment and what does that mean in terms of economic development in Africa. We need to be talking with our folks about the companies that close down in Chicago or Cleveland or Detroit and move to the Caribbean or move to Latin America. What does that mean? What happens to those communities in the United States, but also what happens where those companies relocate? What happens to the communities there? So yes, that is a different orientation, but it's what I think we need in the 21st century.
Also, the shape of the issues are different. You know, when the antiapartheid struggle was re ignited in the United States in the 1980s, it wasn't just Transafrica doing that. There were all kinds of organizations that had been working for years around the issue of Southern Africa. When that movement caught fire the enemy was very clear and it was clearly evil. We're in a situation now where our opponents often look like us. They are not visibly controlled by outsiders. They have in some cases aligned with institutions and corporations which do not have the best interests of our people at heart. So the race aspect, the colonial aspect is more complicated. We are dealing with neocolonialism as opposed to the blatant old colonialism. We're dealing with leaders in some countries that were at the forefront of national liberation but have now caved in. We're dealing with a situation here in the United States in which Africa and the Caribbean have been marginalized, where the discussions that now seem to be taking place about Africa are more about military issues and defense issues and security issues as opposed to developmental issues. I think that means we need a different kind of Transafrica Forum.
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