SPEAKER 2 0:00:00 Welcome to yet another exciting episode on Zim Left Radio. Today, it’s my pleasure to welcome to the show Comrade Buka Omole of the Communist Party of Kenya. Comrade Buka, welcome to Zim Left Radio.

SPEAKER 1 0:00:11 Thank you very much, Comrade Gary Kay. I think I got the last session right. That’s correct. And I look forward to having this discussion to do. And the Communist Party of Kenya is always privileged to discuss these issues in a more open way to give another alternative perspective from what is in the mainstream.

SPEAKER 2 0:00:33 Thank you. So I think you are such a high profile figure. And I wouldn’t want you to tell us much about your CV, but it would be good to tell our listeners a little bit about what you do.

SPEAKER 1 0:00:46 Maybe to start you off now, I serve as the, I’m a member of the Central Organizing Committee of the Communist Party of Kenya. I also serve as the National Deputy President of the same party. I also serve as the National Organizing Secretary. I am the one who edits the publication, which is called Itikadi, which is the quarterly publication of the party. And my background is that I come from the student activism. I was part of the student activist movement in the University of Nairobi that, you know, was fighting for them just about after the fall of the dictator Maui in 2002. And thereafter, I also spent 10 years in the factory floor because I am a mechanical engineer. So in that way, I got to engage in the metal, the metal engineering and metal workers association here, which is a quite a vibrant union. And then from my union work, I got to join, first of all, the Communist Party of Kenya was non-existent because of certain laws that actually limited the registration of communist, any organizations with a Marxist ideology in our country. So in what we call a sub-bulsive organizing, I joined Social Democratic Party of Kenya, that later on morphed to the Communist Party of Kenya in practical political life in 2012, when we defeated the reformist or the reactionary elements in the party who were mainly Social Democrats. So the official unavailable party documents happening basically from 2009 to 2010 to unveil the Communist Party of Kenya on a strict vanguard party of the Kenyan working class and on a clear Marxist Leninist line. And then in 2010, the fight for the new constitution came to be that we were actually allowed not just to exist politically, but also within the realm of bourgeois jurisprudence. And it took us again another, from 2010, another nine years to start off the process to unveil the party officially. So our first Congress as the Communist Party of Kenya actually happened in 2019 on 5th of January. And from there, we have been doing quite a bit of overt work to compliment the covert work that has been happening over many years. It’s also important to tell our listeners that the Communist Party of Kenya is a product of many poor and Kenyan workers that have sacrificed themselves in the streets of Nairobi. They have actually been martyred to expand this democratic space. So the Communist Party of Kenya stands totally beyond and no one can claim to own the Communist Party of Kenya, including myself or any other person. So we stand with the Communist Party of Kenya to make sure that at least in the contemporary Kenyan society, we must never forget those people paid the ultimate price to make sure that we are free from the shackles of, you know, colonialism, which was a white minority, imperial British that brutalized majority of the Kenyan people. And even now we have many colonial states, but we have expanded it through fight for reforms to increase the democratic space that we have today. So that is the, I, that is the little introduction I have, but finally I also run the party school. We are the Marxist-Leninist Institute for the Communist Party of Kenya, which I helped to put together and also to disseminate, you know, lectures and discussions through the party school.

SPEAKER 2 0:05:31 Thank you very much, Kormit, and really congratulate you for all the hard work that you have been putting together. We’ve been seeing on social media that I think your movement has been growing. Now, I just want us, you know, to really go back to the basics. So when I was growing up, I was told that communists are bad people. So for example, when they were fighting Nelson Mandela in South Africa, one of the arguments that the apartheid government was making is that Nelson Mandela is a communist. Now, Nelson Mandela was nowhere near communist. In Southern Rhodesia then, and now Zimbabwe, the Smith regime or the colonial government always said to the international world, we are fighting against these terrorist communities in the country. And then I think this is the same applies to some of the wars that we’re raging in Asia, in Vietnam, and they were fighting the communists as well. So my question to you is, as an African, you have now decided to proudly say to yourself, I’m aligning myself with the ideology of communism. Why communism?

SPEAKER 1 0:06:39 Thank you, comrade. First of all, in the history of development of society, there are always forces that are fighting very hard to retain the status quo because they are beneficiaries. They are a privileged few that benefit from that status quo. Remember during the slavery, the people who benefited from that slave system, which was actually an option of capitalism, wanted to retain that system. And they made it look like through propaganda that they had a God given right to actually dominate the world in such an unjust and unfair way. And they use all sorts of things. They use education, they use philosophy to make sure that they anchor that propaganda. Now, after the defeat of the most backward system, which was the monarch system, as we may call it, where the bourgeoisie actually triumphed and we got to get capitalism, taking root mainly in Europe. I think in Paris or in France, it was the most lethal because at least the queens or the kings had to face, they were hanged and they were killed just to make sure that that barbaric system was forgotten in the practical life of the France society. So when capitalism came to be, which at one moment capitalism was a liberating idea, because of the socioeconomic systems that was coming after it. But there are still people who must ensure that capitalism stay and mankind do not develop to the next level. And this brings a very fundamental question that the decisions that are made by man or made by man and woman for that matter, or made by humankind is mainly affected by the circumstances that faces them. And it’s not the free will of human beings because now we have a few minority of the world residents that benefits from capitalism. And they have the power because they have converted the power from the people into financial capital. So that means they have appropriated the majority of the people and then stole that power in form of money. And anybody who wants to challenge the acquisitions of privileges. And the most, in fact, when Marxism was being actually taking root, criticism of capitalism had already been finished. People remember the utopia socialists, which were mainly from French socialism, had already finished the criticism of capitalism. And everybody was in sync that capitalism is not good for the human society. Because even though it has created enormous wealth and broken borders, but it has also created an equivalent, misery, suffering, and savagery on the other pole. So at least at one moment in terms of intellectual discussion, in terms of criticism of what capitalism was, the question now that we are discussing is, what is it that should replace capitalism? And people must know that communism is a very important suffered as an alternative to capitalism because capitalism propaganda has already transferred. That means everybody, in fact, silly people like Fukuyama already wrote the end of history that indeed with finality, capitalism has already won. But even though capitalism has already won, as long as majority of the world cities scouted how to live with dignity, they will continue to pursue an alternative socioeconomic system. So the people who, in fact, they called communism all sorts of bad names to make sure that people do not even, in fact, in the United States is even worse because communism is rejected without interrogating it. People just, you try to interrogate to have discussions with the majority of the residents that have been, I think they have been dangerously brainwashed by the empire that they do not want to interrogate. Even if you tell somebody, okay, fair enough, what do you understand by communism? They start talking about how Stalin manufactured death and the numbers have been increasing from billions to, now I don’t know where their propaganda has reached. But in Europe, there was a different way because in Europe, even the European universities, at least they started to interrogate in even an intellectual way what communism was, what is its tenets? Now, in Africa, apparently, they resist intellectual from Europe and imperialist core, which is the United States, made the uptake of communism in Africa to slow down. Because remember people, the so-called, the father of dialectics, not the so-called, we admire him a lot, Hegel.

SPEAKER 2 0:13:06 Hegel, yeah.

SPEAKER 1 0:13:07 But if you look at Hegel’s sentiments towards the African race, then the people, he actually props the propaganda that Marxism is an alien and in certain racist intellectuals from the West that actually, so you realize that African revolutionaries even took time to uptake communism. Remember our father, Kwame Nkrumah. He went round and round writing about communism and other things. But later on, he came to absolve himself by writing the class travel in Africa. And people sometimes don’t understand that at that time, the white man was dominating the African continent. So everything else was treated by a pinch of salt from the white continent. Remember some people are asking us, why are we fighting when they want to control soil aeration through building gabions? How would you believe that building gabions in the land that you have been actually been expelled from will help you? So in that way, the propaganda was trying to attack the black race that we hate anything progressive. But the actual sense that they don’t take the historical circumstances. So the person, and even Molyneux Julius Nyerere, if you look at him, he tried to escape about scientific socialism. He came up with concept like African socialism. But every time he made an attempt, he was advancing towards socialism. And that is how he wrote what now we call the Arusha Declaration, which is a very popular polemic that we studied quite a lot. But I think the most revolutionary intellectual from the African continent that convinced the majority of us that if socialism is a science, then it is universal. If communism is a science, then it is universal. It cannot be called Dutch socialism or African socialism or American socialism. It’s already a science. And I think the biggest contributor to that debate was the archival of Molyneux Julius Nyerere. I think some of you have read his work, it’s called Comrade Abdourah Muhammad Babb. A.M. Babb. And then another classic that was written by Walter Rodby, which he also studied in the school, is called The Relevant of Marxism in African Liberation War, which for us, they gave us the audacity to approach dialectical and historical materialism as only a methodology and a guide for action, but also gave us the confidence that if we indeed do thorough analysis of our material conditions, both subjective and objective realities that faces the continent, then the most advanced theory that can help us to liberate and unite the African race and the majority of the residents of the continent, which are mainly workers, is scientific socialism. So for me, I could tell you that when we talk about communism, first of all, when we introduced the word communism was an award of the underground, because remember if you are caught reading the communist manifesto, you will be sent to jail. Then now we started to do the mass work within the prisons. Even when we talk to them, the people who hate communism in Kenya are the privileged few. And now we even define and tell them that, of course, we know that you hate communism because the communism challenges the very essence of your privileges in the Kenyan society. So if your hate is really something to go by, then that hate is mutual, because for you, you want to be part of a parasitic class. So that is how we have managed to break the anti-communism wave in our country. And now we can debate it, at least intellectually. And then the second element, maybe before we go to the second question, which is important, Comrade, is the education, because I’ve interrogated the departments of philosophy in my country. And sometimes it is disappointment, because remember in the universities in the West, particularly in Europe, Marxism is taught from its tenets, like any other philosophical thinking. But in African continent, Marxism is not taught from its basis. Marxism is taught by rejecting Marxism. So people say that Marxism actually reduces people to atoms and things. So if you listen to this metaphysist, it’s actually annoying how they, you say they bring things like Marxism is anti-high culture, Marxism want to liquidate the culture, or Marxism is talking about monoculture is an attack of the people’s culture, Marxism is anti-God and all that kind of thing. So for them, they want to ride an attack on Marxism based on silly propaganda and that kind of thing. So what I could tell you that why communism? We are convinced that communism is an inevitable reality that humankind must adjust to, that it will not be formulated in our heads, but in objective reality, and we must continue to build it today.

SPEAKER 2 0:19:09 Thanks comrade. And here I have a couple of follow-up questions. So you see, I think one of the building blocks of at least communism, or at least some of the ideas espoused in the communist manifest was this idea that there’s now a proletariat or a working class. Now, in many African countries, at least in Zimbabwe, we know that most people do not actually have jobs. They have been after structural adjustment, after the structural adjustment program, they were sort of reduced to many of our people are vendors and the majority of our people are peasants. They subsist from small pieces of land, which they were dispossessed. When colonialism came, the land apportionment act literally drove everyone into the native reserves. They were promised that we will take you back. One of the promises that was made to our peasants in Zimbabwe at least was that after the liberation, you’re going to go back to your land. And we are now living in natives reserves now. Many people have forgotten that they need to go back to their land that we’re dispossessed from. So without a working class, how do we do, are Africans supposed to be even thinking of communism, that’s the first bit. The second bit you would say, or Africans even developed the forces of production in Africa, haven’t even developed a sufficient level for them to start thinking about communism. Cause some arguments will say, oh, well, capitalism has to develop to a certain level. So if you look at the industrial revolution, it was really the development in the material or the forces of production to an extent that, well, a higher form of social organization was required. Some would then say, oh no, Africans are still backward. We don’t produce anything. We are, I’m glad that you told me you’re an engineer. These days we are no longer training engineers. My background is in accounting. I had to go to Marxism and Leninism out of my own accord because these I would never have heard in any school or any class. So in many people are accountants, you know. HR managers, they teach them all these other professions where they don’t actually really engage in things. We, you know, making our own things cause really making our own things today in Southern Rhodesia, I think at the site of industrialization they could make their own cars, even though, you know, buying, you know, parts from other places. But today we are importing almost everything. So what would you say to those who say, no, no, the forces of production haven’t even developed sufficiently to get to a point where you could be thinking of a more sophisticated system of social organization. And then there’s the other third branch, which I want you to also address, which says, well, Africans, they are always thinking about other systems. It’s Eurocentric, right? Communism, you say it’s a science, but yeah, well, it’s a science that was developed by flowing from the philosopher of Hercule and then obviously Marx and who turned upside down, et cetera. That’s Eurocentric. It doesn’t apply to us. We have our own way of living as Africans because there’s also other people who keep saying, no, there’s an African culture. So we should think about our own African solution to these problems. And I think if you can talk to some of those points in that’d be really good.

SPEAKER 1 0:22:08 Thank you very much, Comrade. First of all, I’ll start off by saying that Marxism or rather communism is a body of knowledge that the many, many intellectuals, many revolutionaries have continued to enrich them based on their material reality. It must never be seen as a dogma or in actual sense as some static ideology that we must always conform to or like a code that must fit its owner. Because for example, if you look at the era that Marx, Karl Marx actually existed, that was the era of classic capitalism. And if you look at most of his writings, he developed them in the context of classic capitalism. And sometimes when there were even revolutions that were about to happen, Marx even was skeptical about them, but later on he studied them and enriched his literature. For example, if we read about the lessons from the Paris commune, when it all started, Marx was a bit skeptical about it. But when it finally was advancing, Marx was there with his comrades to advance his theory because Marxism must come from the objective reality away from our, away from just our head. So we see that the body of knowledge of Marxism has continued to develop based on circumstances that faces our reality as revolutionary at a given time. Lenin advanced the same theory in the era of imperialism and he advanced Marx’s writings. And sometimes everybody was convinced that the revolution was going to happen in England, but it happened into a backward country, you know, without a sophisticated working class like Russia. So these things needs to be studied quite a bit. And if you look at Stalin, for example, some people do not want to understand that Stalin existed during the era of dictatorship of the proletarians, which was a different circumstance that was facing, you know, Marx and was facing Lenin. And then we go to the giant of the peasant movement, that is Mao Zedong. Yeah. Mao gave us the miracle of the unity between the peasants and the workers. And he developed the contemporary communism that now we look at even the unity between the working class and the rural proletariat. In fact, we could say that in Kenya today, we learn a lot from Comrade Mao, we call him here chairman, because of his lessons about how to unite, to mobilize, you know, a neo-colonial backward country, like Kenya, where the majority of the people are not just jobless, but we have the individualist strata, we have within the individualist strata, we have the revolutionary elements and the reactionary elements. And also we have the rural proletariat, also we have to continue to do a social analysis to make sure that we get the real class that will actually uptake the ideology to advance our processes. So even during the liberation of the war of independence in Africa, look at intellectuals like Amilka Cabral, that advance the relevance of Marxism during the struggle for independence. We can mention quite a few of them, including Samora Michelle, including Thomas Sankara. And even the other African intellectuals that have continued to advance Marxism based on it. So in actual sense, what I will say is that the fact that we do not have a clear working class in a backward settler colony or neo-colonial country like Kenya, our duty is to advance organizations within the revolutionary strata of each and every society. And we must continue to use Marxism to isolate our primary enemy, what we call contradictions. For a fact now, if you look at Kenya, the Communist Party of Kenya has sometimes have to unite with the National Bourgeoisie to confront the comparative Bourgeoisie, who we see as our primary enemy. But how do we do it? For example, when we are fighting about starting industrialization base at home, the National Bourgeoisie here are saying, build Kenya, buy Kenya. But the comparative Bourgeoisie are saying, no, no, no, we cannot produce in Kenya, it is expensive. Let’s buy from abroad. So at that time, we joined the National Bourgeoisie to deflate the national Bourgeoisie. To deflate the comparative Bourgeoisie and make sure that the industries can be formed back at home. And we can see how to form certain strategic alliances. And that is from the knowledge we get from Marxism. So what I will say that Marxism, indeed, we can say that communism will only be a reality when the production forces, the productive forces are advanced and man can produce and change its relationships within the social relations in the production. But that is our duty as revolutionaries. That once we advance and take the most urgent task is to take the instruments of the state and then we have to destroy that state and create the worker states. And then we have to confiscate the wealth of the expropriated, the Bourgeoisie. And only at that time that we can accelerate the process of building the productive forces of our country. And at that time we say now we have started the process of building socialism towards communism. Because communism will not be scored by declaration. Even Cuba is still building socialism towards communism. China is still building socialism towards communism. In fact, China itself do not even call itself a communist or a socialist state either. Because they are aware that for us to be able to implement, to arrive at the inevitable, which is communism, first thing is that we must continue to enhance the conditions of our country. The conditions of our people to live with dignity. So in actual sense, the relevance of communism can be found in any society. Because we will have to know the objective, the final goal of our movement. And then now tactically, without losing sight on the final goal, advance the people. Sometimes we fight for reforms in our country, for example. We are not reformist. But anything that can ameliorate the lives of the poor workers and the poor Kenyan people is worth fighting for. But in the Communist Party of Kenya, I could tell you, comrades, we have a minimum program and a maximum program. In the communist manifesto written by the communist league, Karl Marx and his comrades, you will also realize there’s a minimum program. That minimum program is not taking us to communism. That minimum program is helping us to liquidate and expropriate the bourgeoisie and start the most urgent task of building socialism.

SPEAKER 2 0:30:39 Thanks, comrade, that makes it very clear. And now that you’ve mentioned, you’ve brought up the question of China, I can’t resist asking you about China because in some of the forums that I participate in, at least from a Zimbabwean perspective, after we were slapped with sanctions, which we couldn’t attract a lot of foreign capital and the Chinese came in, they’ve been investing in some of the more urban mines and they’ve been opening up sort of like very small scale operations in some instances, smelting companies for chromium and other mining related industries. And there’ve been some people really on the left, but mainly social Democrats. We have argued that no, the Chinese are the new colonizers and these arguments that the Chinese, they don’t take health and safety seriously, they are very brutal compared to the, there’s often a comparison between the Chinese and maybe the former European colonizers. I don’t know whether that comparison is even necessary or needed. What must be our attitude towards the Chinese is maybe as Africans, because we know I worked in Namibia before, the Chinese were there as well. The Namibians were accusing the Chinese of all sorts of things. They said, no, they’re building all our roads, they’re taking all the money. And indeed the Chinese do come and do a lot of construction work. They do a lot of building industries and they sell commodities, et cetera, et cetera. And definitely that has caused societies to be in conflict. And at least they can say, because some other Chinese employers have been at least brutal to their workers. There’s no doubt that those things have happened, but that’s not to say because they are Chinese. And so, but then what the imperialists have done is really to label and say, oh, look at them, what they are doing now. They are the new colonizers. And so my question to you is, what must be our attitude towards China? And how do you look at China? I don’t think that China is an imperialist country, but what must be our attitude at least towards China?

SPEAKER 1 0:32:36 Thank you, Comrade. First of all, maybe I could put a rider to it. That the attack on China by mainly the people who brutalized the African continent. And they continue to think that Africa is their place. They can do anything. They raped our continent. They robbed us every little humanity that we ever got. These are the same people that now we have known their brutality. Now they came with other softwares to try and tell us that they brought a civilization. So they brought in NGOs here in Nairobi, the so-called civil societies that mainly continue to do nothing, but to sponsor riots against Chinese enterprises and to organize workshops. And they use some terms like our country’s littered by Chinese. So what I could say that we do not need lectures from the West on how we should relate with our brothers and sisters in China. Because they are guilty. They have not even apologized. For example, the British government has never apologized for having murdered, incarcerated people and stolen all sorts of wealth. How can we trust them to tell us who our friends are? So we are not going to accept as the people of Africa to be given conditionalities on who should be our friends. That should be clear to actually the imperialists and their sponsors in the continent. The second thing is that we can criticize China, but not in the racist and the cynical way that the West would like us to do. That is something that they really have to appreciate, that the African people can think for themselves and they have taken lessons from history and they can relate to China and criticize China. The third thing is the strategic role of China in terms of challenging the unipolarity of the United States. That we can never take away from China, that China is standing tall against the dictatorship of the dominance class in the imperial core. They have actually developed to a certain level that they can negotiate, they can talk to the dominance class in the imperial core at a point of sanity, without threats, without preconditions. And we have seen China giving lifelines to socialist experiments that the dominance class in the United States will prefer to be dead now. We have seen China giving a lifeline to the Cuban socialist experience as a trade partner and also Cuba continue to suffer difficult economic embargoes, difficult blockades. But China has defied the dictatorship of the United States to give lifeline to those countries. We’ve seen China giving lifeline to Venezuela, for example, against tyranny, capital, and the United States sponsored them terrorist there. So China has a key role to play in our desire for a multi-polar world. And a multi-polar world is better for those of us who are organizing in the South, those of us who are organizing in the most oppressed society, and those of us who are organizing in the left. So that is the role of China. Now, in terms of the debate, whether China is a communist country or not, I think that China is a communist country. I think we continue to learn every day from China. We want to learn more. We can never say that we are the masters of the Chinese socialist experiment. We want to interrogate the Chinese socialist experiment from knowledge. We want to have open debates with our comrades in China. We have to speak to them. Like, for example, a few months ago, I was in Beijing and I can tell you, comrade, that in Beijing, capital is lying low like an envelope. Capital has no political power. With your money in Beijing, you will never escape jail time if you are corrupt. You will never do anything criminal and think you’re a billionaire, you will not face the law. And that is what I see in China when I visit there, that the capital has lost and the capital is less aggressive. In fact, if I compare the Chinese capital within China and the capital in the Chinese capital in Africa, I think the Chinese capital in China is totally powerless and they have to take directions from the Chinese government. Even if you go to a company in China, you will see they have the CEO’s office and they have the CPC’s office. The CPC’s may text the policies and the CEO must respect the superiority of the CPC for the benefit of the majority. So, and there are other statistics that the West cannot grab from China. For example, it is true that even in terms of the United Nations statistics, CPC has been able to contribute to the rise of uplifting millions of people from extreme poverty. In fact, a good experiment is look at the effect of Chinese capital in Angola, for example, how they have been able to impact the poor people in Angola. So there are certain facts that we must continue to remind the West that when they were in Angola, the poverty, you know, exaggerated. But now when the Chinese capital is there, then we can see that there is development. Remember, every time the West gave us money in form of loans, they gave us conditionalities, they forced us on austerity measures. They told us to lay off our people. They brought in certain, what I call pink economies from World Bank and IMF to be in charge of our banking system here. They told us, you know, what to do in terms of retrenchment programs. They told us less state, you know, the state has no business running business in this country. We have not seen, in fact, the Chinese authority has a clear policy and that policy is noninterference. And they have continued to, you know, to continue to act in that manner. And I could give even more examples. For example, comrade, remember the Chinese capital that arrived in Africa was actually welcomed by both the bourgeoisie and in fact, it was a relief, a sigh of relief. At least I can remember the former president, President Uro Kenyatta saying that at least we will not be lectured anymore by the West about how we run our country. We will not be lectured about this silly liberal democracy. And Kenya in the, particularly in 2013, we made a deliberate policy to turn East. And for those 10 years, Kenya was the best friend or the communist party of China was the best friend of the Chinese people. And we have seen an accelerated infrastructure development. If you come to Nairobi anywhere in our country today, you will see the Chinese footprint. What about the multinationals that were forced by, the Western governments, including Strabberg that had total red tape. They did no meter abroad, but they forced us to pay a hell lot of money. They did consultancy services for 10 years to build a road. So those are the things that we get angry when the West come here to lectures about our relationship with China. Remember there was this propaganda when during the COVID-19 pandemic. And they actually heightened the racist attack on China. And I remember there were few illegal immigrants in China at that time. And China, the CPC said, we have a policy of friendship towards Africa. And if at the moment we’ve never looked for you that you are an illegal immigrant, no. But at the moment is a crisis. We are handling COVID-19. We want you to be quarantined. We want to know where you are. So we must start the process of documenting it. But meanwhile, we also expect you to participate to help us control the national pandemic. I think the CNN went ballistic with it saying that there was discrimination of African people. And finally, I thought that if you are an illegal immigrant in the United States, what will have happened to you? First of all, they will put you in jail. They will humiliate you before they even deport you. There will be no negotiation about any papers. So I think the Chinese policy towards Africa, from the very day when we were fighting for our liberation war, we appreciate the moral and the material support by that were given by the Chinese people. And after all, the African people have a lot of history, historical connections with China. We actually were colonized by the same people. China never made their money through plunder, through war like the West and the United States made their money. China has made their money through the bare hands of the Chinese people. Where have they robbed any money? Which country did they colonize? And even if you look at the United States and their response to Africa, we just want Africa to be left alone to make its decision to fight the wars and to develop. So I could say much about China, but for now I just would like to say that we see a lot of possibilities with the Chinese socialist experiment. And we would want to continue to work with China, at least to help us uplift the majority of the African people from extreme poverty to help us in terms of technology transfer, in terms of industrialization. And even for us, the Communist Party of Kenya, we want to mind even interference as long as that interference is advancing socialism in Africa, as long as that interference is advancing communism. So we hope that that brings some clarity on the attitude of the Communist Party of Kenya towards China.

SPEAKER 2 0:44:28 Wow, yeah, thank you very much. I think such a relief and clarifying things and really highlighting that some of these things that we hear is just plain propaganda, really. Let’s talk about something that you mentioned in your response, immigration. Now, the question of immigration, I’m here in the UK, we often see on TV, they are saying, no, we need to cap the number of migrants coming to our country. We remember Trump was saying these people are coming from shit war countries. It’s almost always an election thing in the West. We need to reduce the number of immigrants. Now, the other side of the coin is that most of us, I’ll give you a very example of myself, really. After completing education, I went and worked in Namibia as an immigrant, also worked in South Africa as an immigrant. I’m now here in the UK, I’m studying here as well, but I could be classified as an immigrant. Oh, thank God people like you, the qualified engineers, didn’t decide to leave Africa because otherwise, we have lots of engineers. I’m sure you have your contemporaries that you know are working in other places, in terms of the skilled workers, really, who could be thinking about solutions to our country. And in the work that I’m doing here in the UK, organizing immigrant care workers, the people I speak to, the comrades, they are really grateful of the opportunity. They actually call it an opportunity to come here and work. And they don’t want to, whenever we say, maybe let’s try to join a trade union, let’s try to organize ourselves. Most of them really are fearful of the consequences that they might be sent back home. And I’ve been thinking about this and thinking, okay, what is the effect of this on, and I also remember when I worked in Dubai as well, I forgot to mention, I used to work with people, lots of people from Kenya, really. We were all immigrants, some were working in the hospitality sector. At the time I was working for Deloitte, and we were all like, there were also some Kenyans there. And I’ve just been thinking about this, where you have someone who has just said that some sort of education is immediately encouraged or sort of finds attraction in leaving. I was working for Deloitte in Zimbabwe. I could find a job working for another Deloitte thing as an accountant. I never really thought of myself as a worker in the strictest sense. I always thought of myself as another layer. And then now when I’m, take for instance, the situation in Zimbabwe, if I can send some few pounds back home, I already start to think of myself at a much higher level than my fellow people who actually don’t have any jobs in Zimbabwe. And I don’t even see the reason why I must be in solidarity with them, because I’m just thinking, oh, well, I might send them a 50 pounds. In Zimbabwe, they’ve been arguing that, no, people in the diaspora must be given a vote because they are the ones who are bringing all their money in terms of diaspora imitancies and all these things. It’s often not really theorized properly. So we often don’t understand whether this is such a good thing and how must be our attitude as communists to this immigration, and how must we build solidarity. I’m telling you, between us who’ve come here and maybe still trying to make a living and those back home, because these struggles are connected. I remember that during the liberation struggle, most people who were actually in exile or in diaspora were organizing with communist parties in Britain to change the conditions back home. And I don’t see much of that happening now. I mean, I can think of the, at this height, the communist part of CPGB, it was a very progressive organization before it was taken over by the trolls. But anyway, I hope you understand what I’m saying, but I’m just thinking, yeah, if you are in the diaspora, you are there, you’re organizing with other communist parties to actually even make the situation at home better instead of just trying to get the one shift to the next and never thinking about why you left your home country in the very first place, and without even thinking about the solidarity that you could be in with your comrades who are still at home and fighting even a much better struggle.

SPEAKER 1 0:48:22 Yeah, thanks, Comrade. Maybe I could also mention something related to immigrants, which is racism, because I want to clarify that there are two types of racism. Sometimes we are told that Chinese people are racist, by the way. But what we want to clarify to our listener is that there is institutionalized racism supported by a system. And there is racism by the system. There is racism by individuals which do not have power. If you look at the United States, racism is institutionalized. There is white privileges in the United States. But in China, even the CPC do not tolerate racism themselves. You may meet an individual Chinese with a racist fact. In actual sense, he has no power to do anything to you. In fact, if he’s found, he’s going to be in jail. So I think that needs to be made different. The second thing is immigrants. You know, nobody wants to go to Europe to face all of that problems in Europe, you know. But the circumstances that faces at home forces people to leave their motherland, their fatherland. But who is the biggest contributor to these circumstances? Are the same governments of the West that continue to blame the African people on the immigrants crisis? For example, if you bomb my country, you kill my mother, you kill my father, you kill my children, and then you leave it in a war-torn country like they did in Libya, and then I appear at your border and you discriminate me that I want to be an immigrant, I want to take to live in your country, I think we should turn off the dominance class in the West that continue to run those governments that if you do not want me to come to your border as an immigrant worker or as a refugee, just don’t bomb my home. You know, don’t steal from my people, don’t corrupt a few people to mismanage my economy. So the biggest problem and the biggest contributor to immigrant crisis is the relationship between the South and the North, which is the exploitative relationship. If the North stops to exploit the South, then the Southern has nothing to go to do in the Western hemisphere, in the Northern hemisphere, for a fact. So the biggest contributor for immigrants is the policy of war and it is the crisis of imperialism in the South. Now, once we come there, then the progressives in the imperial core must then form an alliance between the workers, the immigrant workers and the workers of the imperial court to challenge the imperialism at home. In that way, we can continue to advance. The second thing is this thing that I see even Kenya now, the president, our president now is another imperialist stooge. And then a few months ago, he met the German chancellor here and he was saying, probably we can give you a few people like in 10,000 to go and work in Germany because we value the diaspora remittances because they actually bring foreign exchange to us. But it’s actually just slavery because any country that relies on diaspora remittances and do not care to build an economic base and the economic basis of Africa, we have agriculture, we have agricultural land. The president should be thinking about mechanization of agriculture. Bringing up of light and heavy industries to create jobs for their people and not to sell the people abroad because they cannot provide life with dignity to them. So the failure on this government policy and this within the new colonial state like Kenya, even this government of the minority that continue to dominate us today, it’s too weak to even exploit us completely. So they have to form alliances of exploitation with international bourgeoisie. And mainly, for example, in Kenya, you can see the Batuk, the British army is here not to protect anything but either to protect their stooge here at home in case there is an uprising to overthrow him and also to protect the British interest here. We have seen American building their bases here. There is nothing, it’s just to threaten our sovereignty. So we will say that the rhetoric about diaspora remittances is something not to be proud about. But we should continue to, first of all, highlight that that crisis of immigrants is actually a creation, an artificial creation of the dominance class in the Northern Hemisphere who are determined to continue to extract wealth, to continue to subjugate our economies to just become raw material exporters and to promote consumerism without increasing the productive losses in the South. In fact, within the United Nations, we’ve had several documents that have been implemented, have been not implemented but presented on the relationship between South and North and why it is important to pursue South and South collaboration in terms of helping to address the economy of the South. Now, I could understand, comrade, about the fear of those comrades because they’re not, once you are not a liberated, you are not a liberated human being, you are trained within a colonial system. When I was at the university during activism, the biggest fear was to be expelled from the university as a poor student because they always tell you that when we expel you, you are going to be a hudsmond in your village and they tell you your poor mother and your poor father will die. But until you overcome that fear to be expelled, then you cannot fight for the majority of the citizens. The same time in the working environment, you must overcome the fear of being fired because first of all, now in Kenya, some one-person worker who is underpaid is actually being relied upon by some 11 people. So that means you are working to actually sustain capitalism that early that they are placed without work. You are still working to pay their school fees, to feed them. So what is the point of enslaving yourself and also enslaving several generations to come? At least if you join a union, you are going to put more pressure. And if you are kicked out, you have the union can do some judicial activism, they can put more pressure, they can put more demonstration, they can put sit-ins until you have brought them back. So the idea is to continue to disseminate revolutionary and liberating ideas to the people and telling them that the future, they will build with their own hands. Because for a long time, remember, the militancy of workers in Europe were not there. Somebody wondering why is it now that the French workers are more militant? It wasn’t based that the dominance class in France are not looting as much as they used to loot before in West Africa. So they do not have access to actually bribe the French workers to stop their militants. So if the French workers are making more and more demands, there is no more diamond coming, free flowing from Africa. There is no barbaric looting that is taking place. So they have to think about how do we handle this militancy from the French workers? They have no ideas. They can only face them in violence. They can only face them by propaganda that African people have come to take up your jobs. But time is running out for them. As long as they are not looting as much as they used to loot from the South. And as long as we are making them aware that we will not tolerate any plunder from the African continent, there will even be a bigger crisis between the bourgeoisie in the imperial core and their working class that actually they used to give them free health. But that free health was funded by robbed cocoa, robbed coffee from our motherland. Now they have to tell them, come on, we cannot finance this. And now they’re saying, if you cannot finance this, we keep fighting you. So I think it is inevitable that the change that will take place in the socioeconomic block across the globe will be pushed by the working class, which is the majority. And our responsibility from the African continent is to reach out to our sisters and brothers, our comrades in the imperial core and form strong alliances and make them understand our struggles from the South. And we should also decide to understand their struggles in the North and tell them that the unity of the workers in the imperial core and in the South will deliver a miracle to defeat and give a final blow to the imperialist arrangement of the globe.

SPEAKER 2 0:58:23 Thanks, comrade. And that was, yeah, it really takes us to what I would consider as the final question that I have for you in terms of continental and really international solidarity. So I always sometimes sit and think, okay, we had Kwame Nkrumah, we had Julius, Malimo Julius Niererwe, we had the likes of Robert Mugabe, whichever, whatever you think about these people, but they were a crop of people who understood their material conscience at the time and decided to fight. Today, apart from comrade Buka and a few others, we don’t have many dotted across all of Africa. You could think of, ah, there’s Thomas Sankara, you know, they had these, it was really like, if you look, it’s almost like a crop of people that just really existed for a particular point in time. And then after liberation, we now have many people like now, like billionaires really, Strive Masiwe in Zimbabwe, Zimbabwean billionaire, and many other billionaires that have emerged, I’m just saying, because I’m from Zimbabwe, the president of South Africa is a billionaire. And these are kind of a different crop of people from the revolutions that we had. And, you know, Samura Michelle, for example, was revolutionary or not. And, but now we, now we have people who are kind of interested in, yeah, if it’s me, I want to go and study a degree in accounting and maybe emigrate to some other. Now, so are the opportunities for continental and international solidarity running, running out, and how do we foster them in the work that you do? What do you see as avenues for collaboration? And, you know, which areas do you think we must pursue and to start thinking about, you know, the ideas that you have as the communist part of Kenya, the things that have been successful in your struggles and how you’ve organized yourself. You’ve taught me a long history of struggle against the state and how do we sort of get to a point where, you know, comrades in Kenya, comrades in Uganda and many other places can really start to share ideas and seeing about, because it can, in my view, it can just happen in Zimbabwe alone if, you know, in Kenya it’s not working. So we have kind of, and this is what liberation was all about in my view as well. Once one country got independent Ghana, it sort of kicked off a war series of, you know, independence in other states. Well, maybe whether that was really entirely up to us or it’s because imperialism was in trouble, you know, we can debate that at some point, but I think we cannot discount the fact that, you know, those Africans always thought pan-Africanism in the way they understood it. We might debate about whether it was the best pan-Africanism or whatever, but they never really lost sight of the fact that you can’t, it’s a small country like Zimbabwe, for example, drawn a few borders, you’re reliant on a few mineral products and you know, you can’t really do much. And someone, I was debating with them that they said to me, Africans must actually not really think much about developing if they are still, you know, confined in the borders that were drawn up at the Berlin Conference, because those borders were drawn for particular reasons or, you know, for a particular purpose. And if you’re still thinking in those terms, then we might as well sort of forget development. But I think that that would be a good way to conclude our discussion today.

SPEAKER 1 1:01:38 Yeah, thank you, Comrade. A few remarks that I will make, especially on the development of the society, that at times there is progress in the society. And sometimes there is regression and such are the laws of development. We don’t have a straight line in terms of development. So there is a time in the African continent when the revolutionaries won many. And strangely, Comrade, you know, even after these revolutionaries died, people want you to celebrate Thomas Sankara, but they never want you to say he was a socialist or a communist. They just want to say he loved the liberation of the continent. But at that point, when you talk about Amir Khatra, so they want to remove the revolutionary character of the person and bring him out as an individual, as a superior individual. And sometimes when they say that communism has failed, I ask them, why do you put Thomas Sankara on your doors? Why do you put Joe Slobo? Why do you put Samora Mochel? Why do you add all these songs about them? Where is this capitalist leader in Africa that has been sung along? And capitalist has a way to appropriate revolutionaries and try to make them just a commodity in terms of this, looking at them as a celebrity, to try and delete their radical history in terms of that kind of thing. The second thing, of course, you brought about, we have in our country or in the Communist Party of Kenya, we see our struggle in three areas. One important area for the Communist Party of Kenya, the first struggle is the struggle to reclaim our history, to reclaim our heroes, to stand tall and say, for example, that Dedan Kimatsui was not a terrorist. Dedan Kimatsui was a freedom fighter. He was a true friend of the landless people. So that kind of legacy was taken away from us. And the Communist Party of Kenya has actually made it within its school and within its organization that we will never forget those heroes. And we will never allow our children and our grandchildren to forget about the sacrifices that they made before us. And that is one trajectory of our struggle. The second trajectory of this struggle is the struggle to complete our independence. Because for us, we are not free. We are still a neo-colonial backward state that is being dominated by black imperialist puppets. So we must continue to fight to complete our independence and reclaim the sham independence that was negotiated by the sellouts to expose the home guards and bring the true independence heroes at the center of our struggle. So in that way, we see the Communist Party of Kenya forming various alliances with progressive nationalists. We are forming alliances with the several stratas in the society because we cannot start, you know, constructing socialism now. We must complete and declare Kenya a republic in itself and even carry on the urgent task of liberating our education system. And of course, the third thing is socialism. And the way we see socialism, again, we see it in three levels. We see socialism in a national struggle, in a continental struggle, and in the world stage, where we call the world socialism, internationalism. Because if I’m to start from there, if we are to replace neoliberal globalization, then its anti-racist must be global. And that global, we are calling it globalization, socialist globalization based on mutual friendship and solidarity. So we must never say that we lose the site for our international struggle or lose the site of our continental struggle, even though sometimes we say our national struggle is primacy. But if our national struggle is primacy and the Zimbabwe national struggle is primacy, then we must continue to unite the national struggles within the African continent to give it the continental value. Because in that way, there are only issues that we can negotiate as a continent and not as a small nation. For example, if it come to issues like illegitimate debt, if Kenya, say, want to pay, what will the United States do? They will isolate us. They will bomb us. They will, you know, they will… But if we are negotiating at a continental level, I must say the Communist Party of Kenya was in government, the South African Communist, the Zimbabwean Communist Party, and we are telling the West, this is what we want. We do not want military bases that are imperialist. We want to build our own, you know, force like China is now doing with their national struggles. And in that way, we say that it is important to pursue a national, continental, international struggle. But what makes a difference between Pan-Africanism, because Communist Party of Kenya is a Pan-Africanist organization. We see Pan-Africanism as an objective, but the software that take us to a freely-liberated African African people within and without the continent, it’s scientific socialism. We don’t want to have a continental unity like Europe that is built on the blood of the poor people and stolen wealth from, you know, other countries. We cannot do that. So in that way, we fight for a continental liberation based on scientific socialism. As an internationalist, we must continue to unite as internationalist forces, and we must be in solidarity with all the oppressed people in the world. That is why sometimes people ask us, Comrade, why are you people more concerned about Zionism butchering the Israeli, the Palestinian people? We tell them, for us, we know the pain of colonialism. We can never keep quiet when we see the Israel apartheid regime, you know, robbing people of their livelihood, refusing to give them their own rights to statehood, to self-determination. So our solidarity with all the oppressed people, we give statements here in solidarity of the people of Western Sahara against the colonization of Morocco. We give statements in solidarity with the Zimbabwean and the South African workers. We condemn even actions of other dictatorships of the world. We are always in solidarity with the workers in Venezuela, with the workers in Cuba, because we are clear that this struggle is a global struggle. And we cannot, you know, the Bourgeois intellectuals want to differentiate. They want to compartmentalize our struggle, even on the rights, they still want us, you just organize about the rights of the minority. But you organize about women’s rights, you organize about children’s rights, but they do not want us to see the interconnectedness of these struggles to make sure that we can, you know, form, you know, a bastion, you know, that can actually challenge their hegemony to defeat them. So I would say that from our teachers of Marx, you know, our immortal teachers, Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, Mao, we will want to say that we embrace fully internationalism, we embrace solidarity. In fact, even I could tell you, comrade, why not for solidarity? The Communist Party of Kenya will have suffered a lot. I think the national dominance class here will always want to defund us. They pass very backward laws to prevent us from raising resources. But we have continued to still sell our own merchandise, we have continued to sell books, we have continued to gain from solidarity from individuals from the imperialist core that see a possibility in the Communist Party of Kenya. So we are not just giving to the international solidarity, but Communist Party of Kenya is also a product of internationalism and international solidarity of workers from the imperial core and here back at home.

SPEAKER 2 1:10:47 Comrade Bukawumole, this was such a lesson for me. Thank you very much for really your generosity. You’ve spent almost one and a half hours with me. I really appreciate that. I can only hope that the ideas that you espouse will reach as many people as possible. If some people want to know more about the work that you do and to follow your work closely or to work with you, where can they find you?

SPEAKER 1 1:11:12 We have a very proactive website that is www.communistpartyofkenya.org. I am also, we are also on Twitter. In fact, we are in all social media platforms under the name Communist Party of Kenya or Communist KE. And of course you can also get me at Bukka. At home here I’m known as Biro, which basically means they always scare the oppressors and tell them Bukka is coming. So they gave me the name Biro. So Bukka Biro is my Twitter handle and also Bukka Ngesonwole is my Facebook. After this show probably I could share with you all our handles and we will be happy if you can post them on your podcast and people can learn through. The most interesting people that have actually made us proud is the young people in the party. You know, Comrade, maybe as a final remark, when I was organizing, we used to sing some songs and we thought those songs were very good. But when the young people came to the party, we even tried to record those songs. They were not as attractive, but the young people came with different general music that has kept the communist banner even higher. So our YouTube channel, which is the Communist Party of Kenya has some of the best songs from the underground, which they may not like, where that was my generation. But then there are other young people that have done well in the hip hop and rap music that is trending in the local Kenyan stations and even internationally through our international contacts. So I will provide you with those handles. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER 2 1:13:10 And I can testify to, you know, I also often listen to some of the playlists that you make of the kind of revolutionary music. I find it very, very interesting. And yeah, thank you. Thank you so much. And I will link below the show notes for people to work and all the other bits. And I hope that we will continue working together and can only wish you the very best in the future.

SPEAKER 1 1:13:36 Yeah, thank you, comrades.