Tanzania, Africa: A Panther in Arusha
When the ngoma (talkingdrum) beat sounded, the two men opened the tap and let the freshwater fill a large gourd. The significance of the gesture, marking the inauguration of a community water project, was only outweighed by the significance of the meeting between these men, both of whom elderly men of a powerful stature – one with greying dreadlocks and the other with his head shaved bald.It had been more than 30 years since Pete O’Neal and Geronimo ji Jagga had last met, then as members of the Black Panther Party in the United States. Since those politically-charged days, when the Black Panthers took up arms to defend the rights of African-Americans, Jagga had been wrongly imprisoned for 26 years for a murder he did not commit; O’Neal had been exiled, living as a fugitive in Tanzania to this day. Both had been provocative leaders in the Black Panthers, O’Neal being the chairman of the party’s Kansas City chapter from 1968-70 and Jagga heading the chapter in Los Angeles. Last August, the former Black Panther leaders joined forces again and rejoiced with some 150 Tanzanians in celebration of a new water tap just outside O’Neal’s home in Imbaseni village near Arusha. Spouting water after a borehole was drilled, the tap will provide a reliable water supply to many families in the area who now have to walk several miles daily to meet their daily water needs. The site is also home to the United African-American Community Centre (UAACC), which O’Neal founded in 1990 and which offers a number of free arts, language and computer courses for Tanzanians in the area. O’Neal and company also engage in student exchanges, whereby Tanzanians go to the US for short education courses and young African-Americans come to Tanzania.
Through the UAACC, O’Neal headed the water project along with the
support of Jagga’s Africa development group, the Kuji Foundation.
"Everything we do here in Tanzania is a refined version of what we were
doing in the late 1960s with the Panthers," O’Neal says. "Geronimo
and I
have been through a hell of a lot since those days. But that hasn’t
deterred us from trying to impact individual lives and hope that we’re
making some kind of contribution to the larger picture. "Besides reflecting a momentous period of American history, the story of
Pete O’Neal recounts the relatively unknown history of African-Americans
in Tanzania. On the eve of the Sixth Pan African Conference in Dar in
1974, the population of African-Americans residing in Tanzania was
estimated at 700-800. The numbers would soon dwindle, however, after an
incident that is known today as the Big Bust.Felix "Pete" O’Neal Jr was born in 1940 and grew up in Kansas City,
Missouri, on the city’s historic 12th Street, once home to many of the
greatest blues and jazz artistes of all time such as Charlie Parker,
Count Basie, Big Joe Turner and Mary Lou Williams. After becoming a self-professed "street hustler" as a young man,
O’Neal turned his life around when he heard a speech by the founders of the
Black Panther Party, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, in Oakland,
California. "Man, I can’t say this well enough: when I became a member of the Black
Panther Party, it saved my life. I was on the edge of an abyss at that
point. If I had fallen in, I would never have got out," O’Neal recalls "I am in debt to the revolutionary concept of the Panthers. I live that
concept here in Tanzania. I need that belief structure to survive. And
I'm not letting it go for you, for anybody else, for exile, for the
police, for nothing. "Espousing a Marxist-Leninist philosophy and the need for revolution to
end the persecution of African-Americans, the Black Panther Party had
chapters in 48 states and won wide international support in the late
1960s. They also enacted several social programmes to help the poor and
needy in their communities. The former head of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) J. Edgar
Hoover, once labeled them "the greatest threat to the internal security
of the United States." Taking heed, the FBI initiated a now notorious
campaign (cointelpro)
to undermine the party through informants and covert, sometimes
illegal, activities .In 1968, O’Neal became the head of the Black Panthers in Kansas City and
quickly attracted the attention of the media and law enforcement
officials with his controversial remarks and actions. To a national
television audience, he once declared that he would like to "shoot his
way into the House of Representatives" and "take the head" of a
high-ranking politician. He also accused the Kansas City Police Chief at the time of
funneling guns to right-wing organizations, and he later disrupted US Senate
hearing over the matter, claiming the Senate committee had disregarded
valid evidence that he had obtained. Shortly after the hearing, he was arrested for carrying an illegal
shotgun across state lines and convicted and sentenced to four years in
prison in 1970. While out on bail awaiting appeal, he overheard a police
officer say that the only way O’Neal was going to leave prison was in a
coffin, implying that the police could have him killed while in custody.
O’Neal believed him and, along with his wife, fled to Algeria, via
Sweden, with fake passports obtained from New York City Revolutionaries.
"Three weeks to the day after that hearing, they came back and got me. There’s no doubt in my mind that the government wanted me to go down after I raised hell at the Senate hearing," O’Neal says. "And what did they get me on? They got me on a gun charge that was so bogus that it was pathetic. "To this day, O’Neal maintains that he did not carry the shotgun across the state line that divides Kansas City between Kansas and Missouri. He says a friend of his had taken the gun from his house, crossed the line and was then arrested. "I said I didn’t carry that gun across state line. Man, I carried more guns across that state line than you can count. I have had police friends carry guns for me. You see, Kansas City is one town divided by a state line. The cops actually sold the gun and FBI had to get the gun from someone else, so they could arrest me! "Pete and Charlotte arrived in Dar in 1972, after spending two years in Algiers. At that time, Tanzania was a haven for African-American activists and revolutionaries of every breed – from Malcolm X to Che Guevera to Tanzania’s homegrown revolutionary, Mohammed Babu. Several other Black Panthers also visited or resided in the country. As freedom movements in Mozambique and all across Southern Africa, began to flare, Tanzania became a hub of Pan-African activity. O’Neal estimates that the African-American population peaked at around 800 or so in 1974. Since those heady days, O’Neal’s home near Arusha has also been a gathering point for African-Americans living or traveling in the country. "There was a huge population. It was amazing," O’Neal recalls. "There was an excitement here. There were so many African-Americans here and everybody had at least some kind of vague sense of revolution. They definitely felt Pan-Africanism. And everybody wanted to be a part. You had your cultural nationalists. You had your Pan-Africanists. Old Garveyites. Here’s a bit of trivia, too: There has always been a larger presence of African-Americans in Tanzania who are from around the Kansas City area, whether back in the day when there were 800, or today, when there are less than 50, because the Tanzania ambassador to the US went to the University of Kansas to make a speech in the 1960s, welcoming African-Americans to participate in nation-building at home. "In many ways, the departure of the African-American community from the nation coincides with the plummeting Tanzanian economy in the late 1970s. However, a single, little documented event, which has popularly become known as the Big Bust, sparked the exodus.
On Friday, May 24, 1974, two young African-Americans passed through Dar port
Customs with a six-tonne container full of machinery and various
goods that had arrived on a ship from New York City .The two had intended to take the goods to Kirongwe village, Mara, as a
part of a nation-building skills project. As Customs officials inspected
the containers, however, they apparently discovered several guns and
bullets that had not been declared on the manifest.
According to the government-run Kiswahili daily newspaper, Uhuru, dated May 28, 1974, the Americans were immediately detained for interrogation."So here come Americans bringing in these things and bureaucrats and
security officials immediately jumped to the conclusion that the
African-Americans in Tanzania were a fifth column working for the CIA to
overthrow the Tanzanian government!" O’Neal explains. "This seed of doubt was planted into the minds of a few people. It went
way up to the top. And it became the idea that there could be an
aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean. So, they busted people. They
started busting a lot of people. Just about every African-American was
under house arrest or they were in jail and in detention. "O’Neal’s account of the events is supported by a book titled Guns and
Gandhi in Africa by Bill Sutherland. An African-American and once a
personal friend of the late Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, Sutherland had
worked with the Tanzanian government since the mid-1960s, often acting
as a liaison between the government and the African-American community
in the country. As he tells it, he personally spoke with the president and the former
vice-president Rashid Kawawa to try to resolve the situation. There was
also an outcry in the US for the release of the prisoners. As June and July wore on, however, African-Americans continued to be
incarcerated, placed under house arrest, shuffled and interrogated
between prisons in Arusha and Dar ."If any African-American had a gun around, or even a walkie-talkie, they
were imprisoned," Sutherland writes in the book. "It was quite a tragic moment. Tanzania had represented, for the
African-American community, what Cuba represented for the left in
general: a sign of hope and possibility. After these incidents, there
was tremendous disillusionment. "After about four months, no further evidence was discovered to support
the CIA collusion theory and all of the African-American prisoners were
released, in part due to an effort by Kawawa. Nyerere never made any further comment on the incident, other than
saying that he felt his security forces had overreacted. Sutherland
points to the division within the Tanganyika African National Union(Tanu) at the time over the presence and nation-building work of
African-Americans in the country.
While Nyerere and several other politicians welcomed African-Americans,
a number of Tanu officials were outwardly resentful of their work,
believing it unbalanced the nation’s power structure.Other accounts maintain that certain Tanu officials orchestrated the Big
Bust as a means of diverting attention away from the historic Sixth Pan African Congress, which began just three weeks after the
first African-Americans were arrested at the port. One thing is definite: shortly after the Big Bust,
many African-Americans started to leave the
country ."Yeah, soon thereafter the exodus started," O’Neal says. "And
you compact that situation with the war with Idi Amin and the falling economy; by the early 1980s, nearly everybody was ready to leave.
"Back at the UAACC compound in Imbaseni village, O’Neal strolls past a
mural of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Artwork and colorful murals decorate many of the walls in the small,
sloping compound, some of them designed by the celebrated artist, Pete's wife Charlotte O’Neal. Old photos adorn other walls, including a couple
of Pete and Charlotte wearing the Panther signature outfit of black leather jackets and gloves, sunglasses and berets and bearing rifles.
"This is not the Tanzania of old. And revolutionary spirit, it no longer
exists," O’Neal laments. "But I am hopeful that the foundation that was laid when that spirit was
at its highest will serve Tanzania well. Although it’s changing, it is still an island of stability in a sea of turmoil.
"Not only has O’Neal never stepped on a plane since he arrived in
Tanzania in 1972, he rarely leaves Imbaseni village.
"My longest journey is to Arusha town and back," he says. "I have
been an isolationist in the extreme. I don't travel. I've become phobic. But that’s not because I'm not afraid of anyone bothering me. I don't
think the US government is even thinking of me these days, pressing for
extradition or anything. Nobody is looking to arrest me. More than likely, they are saying, ‘Please don't let this man back into the
United States because it would be an embarrassment to put an old man like me in
jail.’ And they would. "If O’Neal attempted to return to the US, he would be facing up to 15years in prison. He is currently engaged in a federal appeals case
to over turn his conviction. In the past, a number of his appeals have been
turned down, as he sees it not because of their lack of merit
but because of his fugitive status. When his late father, Felix O’Neal Sr visited him in the late 1980s, he
was held and interrogated upon his return to the US, because the FBI at first believed they had finally captured the Black Panther fugitive.
In 1997, when Charlotte O’Neal’s mother passed away, agents flooded
the Kansas City airport, anticipating Pete’s return. Can I see myself ever going back to Kansas City? I’ve asked myself
that a thousand times. I don’t know how to answer. I can’t even envision it.
To go back there now would be a culture shock that I don’t know if
I could handle. Let’s get one thing straight: I am not sitting here planning to return to the US. I don’t know anything about the
United States. There are Tanzanians that know more about it than I do. What
would I do if I went back to the States? I am 62 years old. My life
here has a meaning. There, I would go and probably hold on to Charlotte’s
shirt tail all the time.
"O’Neal remains determined to fight his conviction, contending that even if he never returns to the US, he wants to put right a wrong that was done to him.
"The government lied, they connived, and they conspired, like they did to bring down so many of the Panthers. I am going to make them pay for
it," he says. "I’m going to fight to the last day. And if I prevail,
as believe I will, I am going to sue and make them pay. I am going to build some more water holes and do some more community projects around
Arusha. "As with Geronimo ji Jagga, who finally walked out of prison in 1997after taking 26 years to overturn his FBI-framed murder conviction,
a Panther’s revolutionary spirit never dies.
