Statement from Monsour prepared for Pan-African Summer School, a political education event organized by the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (A-APRP) and the All-African Women’s Revolutionary Union (A-AWRU).
[00:00:00]
I greet everyone under the sound of my voice, with the revolutionary greeting of the New Afrikan Independence Movement [NAIM]: free the land, by any means necessary. I greet you all in this manner because it ensures that our focus and our work remains centered on where it should be, and that is the land and those who through legacies of genocide, neocolonialism, and imperialism have been dispossessed of this land.
[00:00:33]
My name is Monsour Owolabi and I speak to you today from the confines of one of Texas’s sites of counterinsurgency that are otherwise called prisons. I’m a political prisoner, a member of the New Afrikan Liberation Collective [NALC], and the field marshal for Texas’s Prison Lives Matter [PLM] formation, a united front of some of the leading political prisoners in occupied Turtle Island. I want to thank the comrades of the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party [A-APRP] for the opportunity—and share some of my thoughts on African political prisoners and the struggle for liberation.
[00:01:15]
So—there’s a common—now it’s common—saying that people have kinda borrowed from the Palestinian national liberation struggle, on which they say that “prisoners are the compass of our struggle,” and I love this saying, but I think that sometimes it is—misused, right? By us, over here—and the reason as to why is because very few organizing spaces actually center prisoners—political prisoners or otherwise, right? So—and I think the reason comes back to a miscalculation in class analysis and social dynamics, right? So I want to talk a little about that in the short time that I have with you.
[00:02:14]
So—contrary to popular belief, I think that a lot of predominate classes under American imperialism are bought off, right? Bought off by the privileges, and the ‘carrot’, if you will, that are dangling in front of them by living in the seat of empire. Because of this, the tip of our spear, so to speak, has kind of been dulled, right? So prisoners, although they are a vacillating class, or can be a vacillating class, which means revolutionary or sometimes very reactionary, right? And surely, they must commit a certain level of class suicide by choosing to be revolutionary and not necessarily aspire to higher levels of assimilation, or aspire to criminality for that matter either, okay?
[00:03:22]
So assuming one as a prisoner has done all this—what occurs and what we see in the prison is that there is a tradition of revolutionary nationalist ideology, right? Pan-Africanist ideology, that is, or Soulaan, from the early twentieth century all the way ‘til the contemporary moment, right? So while on the outside, you know, there’s a—we are basically starting from scratch at the masses of our people, in terms of trying to facilitate national identity, right? Trying to facilitate national identity, you know, to forward national liberation.
[00:04:13]
Whereas on the inside, there’s never ceased to be revolutionary and nationalist presence on the inside of prisons, okay? That should be kindled—by our outside comrades, like those of the Party and others, okay, and because—it should be kindled and centered because prisoners are not just prisoners, but have their fingers on the pulse, so to speak, of what’s going on a lot of times, on the grassroots level. Particularly with those who are apolitical, particularly with those who may even be backwards in terms of ideology and commitment, right? How else do we reach the element except for through those that they can identify with, right?
[00:05:11]
So this kind of minimizes the schisms that we see in a lot of organizing spaces where we have this high capacity of intellectuals and petite bourgeoisie elements, right? Who tend to divide—a lot of times—between them and the communities in which they are trying to organize, right? It’s seen as a certain charity, right? Okay—and the reason is because a lot of times there is no genuine grassroots connection between organizers and people of the community, right?
[00:05:51]
Prisoners are in-between, right? Particularly when they get out of prison, but in order for them to get out of prison—and get out of prison as a fully developed cadre that is able to be a change agent in these movement spaces, they have to be cultivated here, in prison, underground, where the war for the New Afrikan mind is being fought day in and day out.
[00:06:20]
And it is my hope that organizations like the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party will continue to support and join in the efforts of Prison Lives Matter Texas [PLM-TX], and national Prison Lives Matter [PLM]—and organizing this class, and cultivating the revolutionary potential of this class. With that being said, I’m signing off. All power to the people, free the land!
[00:06:52]
[recording ends]
