Book Forum Editor, Roberto Sirvent, interviews Onyesonwu Chatoyer about her political organizing and work as a writer and editor.
Roberto Sirvent: Since our last interview, you’ve continued to do important work with the All-African People's Revolutionary Party (A-APRP). Aside from being elected to the Central Committee of the A-APRP in early 2023 and joining the newly formed Western Hemisphere Regional Coordinating Council of the A-APRP, you’re also helping to build the Florida organizing area of the A-APRP’s U.S. chapter. How do you see your local organizing work (e.g. in Florida) being connected to the internationalist organizing work you’re involved in (e.g. building global solidarity movements)?
Onyesonwu Chatoyer: I think one of the most significant propaganda coups of the Western ruling class has been to convince people living with the United States that their domestic issues are completed disconnected from the global context that the US empire dominates. Like most of the population in the world’s most malignant entity really believe that their lives and destinies exist in complete isolation from those of rest of the planet. Meanwhile the people we put in office, the government we pay taxes to, the corporations and media whose output we consume, have this incredibly dark sided cultural, political, and economic hegemonic hold over almost the entirety of the earth’s population. EVERYBODY is forced to deal with the consequences of this shit and meanwhile we’ve been taught not to give a damn about anything beyond our immediate bubbles. It’s really bananas when you think about it.
One of the primary tasks of revolutionaries in the US has got to be snapping people out of that. We must help people develop an understanding of the far-reaching implications of so-called domestic politics. We must help them think critically about the issues they’re seeing in their communities – police terrorism, gentrification, an ongoing completely unaddressed mass casualty event of a pandemic – and expose their connections to the global system of imperialism. Our people have to learn to not just see the cog immediately in front of them but the entirety of the machine we have to destroy.
I think Florida is a place where those domestic and global connections are remarkably clear. It’s basically the northern Caribbean. It’s diasporas from nations ravaged by imperialism who’ve emigrated from across the Western hemisphere, trapped together on a land base which is inexorably sinking into the ocean, living through a profound cost of living, housing and employment crisis. And the people in power here, rather than dealing with or even acknowledging on a basic level this reality, are choosing to fight the most reactionary possible cracker culture war. Going for every marginalized community possible: banning books, banning pronouns, mandating the teaching of revisionist colonialist imperialist history, peddling vaccine denial, and shipping planes and buses full of refugees all over the United States. The contradictions are clear. What is needed is political education on a mass and systematic basis within the context of revolutionary organizations that can help people recognize the shenanigans and understand their ability to move collectively to stop this madness. Florida is winnable. The demographics are on the side of the revolution. We just need the masses conscious and organized.
So this first year in Florida for me has been spent building A-APRP work study circles across the state, recruiting organizers we have been working in coalition with to participate in the next contingent of the Venceremos Brigade, and organizing seminars, webinars, workshops, and any kind of educational space we can to help people understand the connection between what’s happening in Pine Hills, Orlando, what’s happening in Haiti, and what’s happening in Niger.
As a key editorial team member of Hood Communist, what role has your team’s publication played in combatting the Zionist propaganda from U.S. corporate media outlets in recent months? How does the anti-colonial struggle against Israel’s ongoing genocide and occupation in Palestine connect to Black revolutionary movements around the globe?
Hood Communist, like our respective political homes the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party, the All-African Women’s Revolutionary Union, and the Black Alliance for Peace, has been anti-Zionist from its inception. There has never been a moment where we questioned the necessity of a struggle to smash Zionism. There has never been a moment where we questioned our alignment with the Palestinian national liberation struggle. We are united on that and always have been. That unity has made it very easy to have decisive and clear editorial position against Israel and against Zionist propaganda for the entirety of our existence, including after the Al Aqsa Flood, even when other publications have capitulated to lies demonizing the resistance.
Our opposition to Zionism is about solidarity with Palestine and all peoples struggling against settler-colonialism and imperialism. But our opposition to Zionism is also about Israel’s crimes against the African revolution. Crimes like its complicity in the theft of African resources and the exploitation of African land and labor, its alignment with enemies of Africa like the US empire, apartheid South Africa, and the reactionary settler government of Rhodesia, and its pattern and practice of arming, funding, and training the military and police forces of far right wing governments all over the world who then turn around and use those Zionist provided skills and equipment to repress African, indigenous, and working class movements. We’re Africans against Zionism because Zionism is against Africa and Africans. Of course, we’re going to uplift and align with the people – Palestinians – who are on the front lines taking that beast down. A victory in Palestine is a victory for Africa and Africans.
You’re currently on the National Coordinating Committee of the Venceremos Brigade. Can you please share how you became involved with them and why solidarity with the Cuban people is so important for U.S. anti-imperial organizing today?
My time organizing with the Venceremos Brigade began when I participated in its 50th contingent to Cuba in 2019. On the last day a brilliant revolutionary African woman sat next to me on the bus, asked me for my sun moon and rising signs, and asked if I wanted to help build the next brigade. There was no possible way I could say no. It wasn’t just her impeccable one-on-one skills that brought me on board though. I was profoundly transformed by that first trip to Cuba.
Coming from the context of the United States into a revolutionary socialist society where the people where the conscious architects of their own destiny was incredibly powerful to experience. The dignity and uprightness of that population! The clarity with which they could discuss, critique, and debate their revolution and the organization of their state! The pride with which they regarded their struggle and what they had built! To be among a people who had succeeded in liberating themselves convinced me more than anything I’d ever learned that revolution was not only possible, but it was in every way preferable to the hell we’re currently living through. It convinced me that if Cubans could liberate themselves, we could do it too and that the world we could build would be better.
It was also really clarifying to be in an anti-imperialist nation and to hear how they discussed nations demonized in the US like Russia, China, Palestine, Iran, and Venezuela. I remember a few months after the brigade returned from Cuba, the coup that deposed Evo Morales was unfolding in Bolivia. The Cuban comrades I had been able to maintain connection with were clear about the role of imperialism and what it meant for the nation and the region if the masses of people in Bolivia could not overturn the intervention. But when I turned to forces in the US left, I found them debating Morales’ personal moral failings – holding them up as evidence that the coup while not ideal, was ultimately for the best. I realized then how lost in the imperialist sauce even the most “conscious” forces in the US are. I never stopped realizing it after that. Cuba does that for you. Going there and coming back provides clarity about just how disconnected from material reality US political discourse is.
Participating in the Brigade for just two weeks provided me with several years’ worth of political growth. It is a remarkable opportunity for leadership development and political education and the building of political maturity. Getting as many US organizers as possible to participate in work-based solidarity delegations to Cuba would produce a qualitative leap forward in the organizing of movements for justice in the US and to the global movement to end the US blockade and US attacks against the Cuban revolution.
2024 is, as you know, an election year. Since you organize and support so many spaces dedicated to political education, how do you help ensure that electoral politics doesn’t distract your communities from larger goals of building power and revolutionary consciousness?
This used to be much more difficult work! 2024 feels like a new moment in terms of pushing people beyond electoral politics as a strategy. We already know that many eligible voters in the US do not engage in the electoral process. While the Democrats make a lot of hay out of scolding and demonizing those people, if you’re a revolutionary or radical organizer you know those non-voters have been making a rational political decision this whole time. They recognize the system is rigged and they are declining to participate. That is a clear positive sign of consciousness. Now what we’re seeing in 2024, after the Biden administration made it exceptionally clear that they will arm and fund a colonizer carrying out a heavily documented genocide, is an increasing number of people not just declining to participate, but actively taking organized action against the incumbent president. That “uncommitted” campaign in Minnesota was remarkable. The Abandon Democrats campaigns that an increasing number of Palestinian organizations nationwide are launching are remarkable. This is a new much more mainstream phase of anti-electoralism. Now it’s not just the far left, but grassroots forces representing colonized peoples resisting imperialism that are abandoning the so-called lesser evil. As revolutionaries we have to seize this moment by helping people understand the alternatives that they themselves can build. Abandon Democrats YES. And then what? We build independent political power together. We build parties, organizations, and institutions that we control. We define and carry out our own strategies for transforming our communities. We save ourselves.
Speaking of political education: would you mind sharing some of the movements, mentors, writers, and organizers that have played a significant role in shaping your revolutionary consciousness?
Ahjamu Umi, the cadre that recruited me into the A-APRP. Current co-host of the Our Ancestors Voices program alongside his daughter and A-APRP/AAWRU member Shukura Umi.
The national liberation struggle in Guinea Bissau led by the PAIGC. And Amilcar Cabral, Teodora Gomes, and Carmen Perriera, revolutionaries within that struggle. I’ve learned a lot from their approach to struggling against patriarchy while also fighting an armed anti-colonial struggle. Also from their approach to building international support from their movement – without compromising - using bodies like the United Nations.
The Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro, and the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP) – their statecraft, their internationalism, their approach to principled solidarity.
The previous generations of Venceremos Brigade leadership, including the leaders who recruited me. For how they have held the legacy and history of the brigade but also helped it transform in the ways it needed to last for 52 years. Also for the current modern day culture of the brigade and its practices of deep humanism, connection, queerness, and empathy.
ZANU-PF – for their armed struggle that defeated settler-colonialism in Zimbabwe and their (successful!) land reclamation program. Also from their response to sanctions and how they’ve reconstructed Zimbabwe’s economy after decades of attacks.
Onyesonwu Chatoyer is an organizer with the All African People's Revolutionary Party and the All African Women's Revolutionary Union, an editor with Hood Communist, and member of the National Coordinating Committee for the Venceremos Brigade, the oldest Cuba solidarity delegation in the US.
Roberto Sirvent is Editor of the Black Agenda Report Book Forum
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