Seeking Asylum

By Darren Guy

Bankole and Aisha are two African-Americans who were forced to flee the USA because their freedom, and possibly their lives were under threat.

They were fighting for social justice in their communities. Aisha was a Music School Teacher, who had taken the Charlottesville, Virginia Public Schools and the US department of education to court. The case had been filed on behalf of African American children, who said Aisha had suffered racial abuse at the school during her time there, after three years they won the case. But both Aisha & Bankole, a political activist, researcher and community worker, felt that despite the fact that they had never been convicted of any offence, the American authorities and in particular the notorious ‘COINTELPR0’ the FBI unit, set up by J Edgar Hoover was closing in on them. And that they like many other politically involved black people, would end up behind bars, on a trumped up charge. They firstly fled to Canada, but found every attempt to re-establish their lives, was thwarted. Jobs they would be accepted for would suddenly end with no explanation. Eventually they were told, despite presenting 4000 pages of evidence and expert testimony, by the Canadian authorities, that their claim for political refugee status was denied, and they were given three weeks to find somewhere else to live (they could not even transit though the US) desperate - they chose Sweden.

Aisha and Bankole were touring the UK recently, telling their stories. Bankole was promoting his second book ‘ ExiledOne Volume 2:1’, while Aisha was performing her traditional brand of classic African-American music (Soul, Blues & Jazz).

Bankole and Aisha are people without a home, travelling, it would seem, on an endless journey - hopefully one day to somewhere they could call home. I managed to encourage Bankole to talk with me, the evening before he left Liverpool. To move on to their endless journey (destination unknown).

Well the machine is set, it’s late I know you have a long journey tomorrow, so I won't keep you.

No, keep me as long as you want, I’m not real sleepy.

How did you become a political refugee from the USA?

Well, a) for a long time I tried to think for myself, and b) I was born in the middle of the century, amidst uprisings, huge social upheavals; changes. I guess I just had some ideals as a young person, that African people in the US should have the same rights as whites and anyone else in the world. To qualify that I mean I’m not talking about assimilation and integration I’m talking about human rights to self-determination. People should have a choice; they should have the human right to choose what their life should be like.

You were saying to me a few days ago about the situation in the USA and that the police were going to fit you up. Could you explain?

Yes. It’s almost inevitable, on top of just the persistent targeting, the routine imprisonment of African people in the States – on top of that if you have a mindset or solutions to do something about food, clothing, heath, education, self defence - its pretty much inevitable you’re going to be set up. If just the conditions of trying to survive don’t lead you that way. So for many years I was able to evade a lot this. But by the time the 90s came along, and we took certain issues into the courtrooms, we took on the media in the USA, which is a very powerful body. Another thing a lot of people don’t realise – the FBI has grown from 7000 officials in the early 90s to 12000 today and it’s sure to grow with all these worldwide Gestapo type measures. So five years ago Aisha and I decided we weren’t going to wait – to be fitted up.

What happened then?

What happened then was, once we won a few battles in the court, Aisha won a law suit in the US, we won some battles by getting our stories about what was happening to us in the media. I went up against three lawyers in a discrimination and retaliation case, and of course the corporation involved paid a lot of money to fight me, an ordinary person , and we exposed the corruption in the court system, and it was effective. So after that it made sense to get out, to make tracks, before they ‘retaliated’ against us. Aisha managed to get a work permit to go to Canada, and we decided to try and make a life somewhere else, but it wasn’t far enough away. By 1998, Aisha's job had been sabotaged, we’d had apartment break in's, mail stolen – we were being followed. After the long drawn out process of being found eligible to bring a UN political refugee claim in Canada – we were turned down in Feb 2000 after written personal information forms and a few months after that we were ordered out of Canada. Then we were faced with the question - where are we going to go? - and we were told we could not go back to the USA even to transit. So we had to go elsewhere and we had to think quick and we chose Sweden.

Why Sweden?

We thought about some countries that were strongly anti US, or at least not pandering to the US completely. We decided in the end it was either France or Sweden, and we didn’t know French. A lot of people speak English in Sweden. And Sweden had a history of being opposed to the USA government. They took 35,000 war resisters during Vietnam. In Cuba, another option, there is a good chance you could go to prison, while they evaluate your claim. We decided we weren’t going to prison anywhere, if we could help it, because we hadn’t done anything. Also with Cuba you may not be able to leave and there are many activists from the 60’s and 70’s who are in Cuba, but they aren’t free to leave. So that wasn’t appealing to us. I mean people said to us ‘Oh go to Africa, or go to South Africa’ but if you take any realistic look at the recent history of Africa, I’m talking about the last 30/35 years, they have not been able to break free of European or US dominance. They have flag independence, that’s all. Sweden seemed to be the best option.

Could you explain more what happened, in your life in your community etc?

Well, you know, for centuries the African community has been dominated, economically, politically and culturally. My background isn’t so different from many other black people. One advantage was my father got a token job, when black faces were needed in key places, so corporations could go ‘oh look we have a black face’ and then say we have improvement in equality. So because of this I was dropped off in suburbia and I went to a better school etc – but you know you are just supposed to be a maintenance man for America. And many other black people who don’t have that, see the cars, the credit cards, see a way of escaping their conditions, and then believe they too can have that. I chose not to get caught up with it all, at an early age - so I got involved in politics. And then I became a focus of FBI COINTELPRO.

COINTELPRO was established in the 50s – to thwart communism and when that was achieved they turned elsewhere. In the late 60s they turned on the black movement, Martin Luther King, Black Panthers, Nation of Islam, Republic of New Africa etc they became their target. By the late 70s when I came along not much had changed, except it had become public knowledge that the FBI were targeting, infiltrating or killing people and groups. But by then the FBI said they had changed, and that COINTELPRO no longer existed – and they sort of admitted they had killed people like Fred Hampton from the Black Panther Party for Self Defence and destroyed the American Indian Movement – but they were trying to convince people that they wouldn’t do it again. And a lot of people went for that hype and a lot of African people got an extra biscuit and just turned their back on the conditions of the mass of people. So to continue to try to build upon things that happened in the 60s and 70s – to me it is obvious we would be targeted. We were supposed to be the children of the civil rights movement, if the generation before me, went for it, what do you think the US government would think of someone like myself, who absolutely rejected it out of hand? And COINTELPRO was set up to search out ‘ The potential’ and I want to emphasis that ‘ The potential’ of young people or any people who would be serious about social change.

Can you tell us about the social conditions of African people in the USA?

The social conditions are just as bad or even worse than before all you have to do is look at the situation of health care for one, there are 41 million people with no health care, you know many of these people have families too, and are holding down 2 or 3 jobs and they have no healthcare. The infant mortality of African children in for example Philadelphia is usually triple that of white children. And these are health care capitals, these are the home of Glaxo/Wellcom, SmithKline-Beecham, these corporations went global, before that they came out of Philadelphia. The health care of African people - its horrible, absolutely horrible. You have young women giving birth to low weight children that don’t survive infancy, nobody talks about it, and nobody talks about it! In the 80s when we set up food co-ops, with The Republic of New Africa, you know it was 12 and 15 blocks to a decent supermarket, one that sold a wide range of foods.

Meanwhile there are plenty of guns and drugs in the community, so the elderly would have to risk their lives walking there. These type of things like access to healthcare, real nutrition haven’t changed, meanwhile there are plenty of guns in the community, plenty of drugs in the community. In Philadelphia they would say you could tell which neighbourhood you were in because there would be the little plastic bag that the crack would come in, so you would be in either the grey strip section or the red or blue strip section, that’s how you knew because these dealers were all organised people, selling drugs usually with the ok of the police, young men in their twenties with automatic weapons, that completely controlled whole neighbourhoods. I saw it for myself in North Philadelphia, the cops, looking the other way, controlling the traffic. It took years for the media for anyone outside to know anything about it, we all knew about it, everyone in the community knew about it, we saw it everyday. It took about five years before it was revealed that in North Philadelphia there was about 5 or 6 cops that were responsible for thousands of people going to prison, many of these people refused to sell crack cocaine for the cops, so they got set up, because they wouldn’t sell it or wouldn’t sell enough. All these people got released after this investigation, but that’s all they got, was released, back into the same street the same corrupt cops released right back into the madness. These things go on all the time, and have gone on. Within the USA there is no solution, we say they have had hundreds of years to change. I mean the only time I was on a plane was when I was being ordered out.

I do want to emulate people like Dhoruba bin Wahad, he was in prison for 19 years for something he didn’t do, he was able to get out of America – he went to Ghana. It is important that people like Robert King Wilkerson and Mumia Abu Jamal and others can get out of the US permanently, because our struggle is not going to be recognised or seen as legitimate as long as we continue to return there. As Aisha says people who flee Iraq or Southern Africa where they experience what our people experience, what our fighters have, they don’t go back. And as the Canadian authorities said to us, when we went to the immigration and refugee board ‘ where is your class of people who have fled and claimed asylum’ what could we say? There are exiles but as far as we know there is no one who has UN political refugee status in the world, even people from the American Indian movement or whatever.

Why can’t people from the US claim political refugee status?

Well, 35 years ago the US was very powerful, it was then and it is now, there are CIA tentacles all over the world now, as there were then. That means governments, legal bodies whatever, even internationally, organisations like the UN are intimidated by the US. And then it comes to people, the officials, its down to the officials working there, so no one is going to urge Africans or any people to rise up, because they fear the wrath of Washington, the US. The other thing is, many of our people are illiterate, many of our people do not understand because of the brainwashing in the US, what these terms are, or the importance of them, they don’t understand it. So you have people in exile. You have people from that period who have hijacked planes, dozens of people. There were 100 hijackers every year out of the USA between ‘69 and ‘71, political hijackers. Just because you pull something like that off doesn’t mean you understand the legal process of what must be done in order for you to be given sanctuary in another country. These are mistakes, it’s easy to say looking back, these are the pitfalls and obstacles that haven’t made it easy for us today, and that needs to be looked into by people. As I say, as far we know there are no African American people who have, recognised UN Political Refugee Status.

The US government is an octopus – the other day I was reading the FBI are opening offices all over the place, even places they have never been, everywhere, to impose US dominance, even Jakarta – that’s crazy you know Indonesia has twice the population of the US, its very diverse, different from the US and the FBI are going to move in and set up business. Look they are moving into Baghdad, Afghanistan, this is very serious, the USA is everywhere. So as Malcolm X said, African people must broaden their scope in the international arena - this is essential.

It’s making those connections. I read somewhere that the destruction of the Black Panthers by the FBI, led way to the rise of the gangs. Because the BPP controlled the crime in the communities – could you say something about this?

Well the first thing the Black Panther Party for Self Defence, wasn’t made up of people like myself, who had time to read as a young person. Because of the job my father got at the age of 11, I was plucked away and dropped in suburbia, at the age when I would be expected to join a street gang. The BPP were made up of people usually called the ‘Lumpen’, these were people that didn’t go to school, that were sent to juvenile hall, people that understand very plainly what the system was all about, that the system oppressed people, and they had to get what they could get, and the system didn’t hold any promise at all for them. The BPP and other organisations like the Nation of Islam, which is a religious organisation, it had some social perspectives, but it was a religious organisation, and this was the problem Malcolm X found. But these organisations were very much rooted into the grassroots, so obviously they knew the streets and some had been running the streets, so they were tapped right in. So when they were moved out of the way by the FBI and US government, you had people, who as Malcolm X said, were ‘ trying to out criminalize the master criminal’. Malcolm X said ‘you are outta your mind, you’re trying to be a better criminal than this master criminal’ (capitalism, imperialism and racism) Malcolm was saying ‘you are crazy – you will never out thief the master thief’.

So Fred Hampton (BPP) in Chicago before he was assassinated, was in talks with organisations in Chicago and Los Angels this is where you would have street gangs that would boggle your mind - we are talking about hundreds of thousands of young men and women in these organisations in Chicago in Los Angeles. So Fred Hampton was trying to talk and politicise these groups, bring these groups on board to recognise it wasn’t about turf and killing each other, it was about this system that was dominating all of us. They got rid of Fred Hampton – assassination, a state assassination – in that era there were about 50 assassinations – by the US government and that was just in one organisation.

What about after the Black Panthers?

I was still young, I was a teenager in the 70s – but from what I understand and what I learned from talking to older activists– anybody who was talking about political change was just crushed. The US government had and still has enough money to just pour it into neighbourhoods and say ‘Oh capitalism, hey black capitalism’, Nixon was talking about that. So this came right in along with the drugs and the guns – there was nothing that was politically progressive, there was nothing – so it was a wasteland and it was only the Black Liberation Army, Late 70s early 80s – and many of them were hunted down, jailed, imprisoned – some made it to exile. Some people survived the 70s people like Mumia Abu Jamal, but when the 80s came they were captured, so different people did what they could. ‘MOVE’ did what they could – they were an inspiration to a lot of us and they were unafraid to fight the system on every level. When the 80s came a lot of people were just talking – I was a young person doing grassroots work. A lot of organisations that survived like The Republic of New Africa – especially looking back, were not going to do much more than talk. For that and for other reasons, like infiltration – I publicly resigned. But I’ve been doing what I can.

So you mentioned Black Capitalism, that is encouraged in this country, they have the race relation’s acts, and so-called positive discrimination – in the US they have affirmative action – could you talk about this?

Well a tiny few people were able to get some crumbs and it was blown out of proportion by the media and the government – claiming that this was happening for all the people. You don’t have to be a theoretician to realise that that’s impossible, I mean capitalism in order for it to function, needs people who can barely exist, at the bottom. Maybe ordinary people just don’t see that – maybe the people who are talking and analysing these things are out for their own personal agenda, this was a big problem too. Yeah there were some people after the 60’s and 70’s saying positive things, but they have their own agenda, so you have a lot of people dressed in African clothes who are capitalists, they are living in big houses among whites, outside of the black ghetto and they are preaching this whole solid pan African thing, but they are just about taking care of their own - standing on a pedestal talking down to the masses about how they need to pull themselves up - its just a black version of Horatio Alger and all the other stuff. This is what it is – this is pure confusion. I mean you can’t orchestrate a revolution, it doesn’t work this way – maybe this is what the BPP didn’t understand, you cannot organise yourself to have a revolution. I mean - why do you wear a uniform, when you don’t have the strength to take on a mighty enemy? Many of them who were honest once admitted that they didn’t know what they were up against. It wasn’t until years later when many of them had been killed, imprisoned or exiled, when the people who survived said ‘Wow we were really up against a huge monster’. So people didn’t understand. We are not blaming anyone, but people didn’t really understand. I mean these are things that today we should look at and realise that there are many ways to fight, there is not just one way to fight the system, and the mistake of duplicating something that has happened before note by note - that’s a disaster. If you think you are just going to print up and hand out literature so that people can be free, that doesn’t make sense either, maybe it did 100, 150 years ago – but its not making any sense today.

What makes sense then?

What makes sense I think – is wherever people can they have to have an analysis and that doesn’t mean meetings and chalk boards, it means people have to be honest with themselves, if they are privileged, they have to admit that and think ‘where did it come from’ how can I use this privilege to fight’ if you want to change something and you don’t know where to start you have to talk to someone who has done it before or study what has gone on before you. But whatever you read, see or hear – it’s not the gospel truth, so many people just don’t get that – they just can’t think for themselves. Thinking critically and analytically it’s the most important thing to do if you are going to fight, we say if you’re not fighting analytically then you’re not fighting. This is at the heart of what I think people have to do – critical thinking. Once you have that – then you can decide for yourself. You know if I’m travelling this path and if this isn’t going to work, let me get off, I see the enemy coming for me, I have to think how do I camouflage myself’ you know that’s critical thinking.

Is there a black movement in the US now?

Its been fragmented for a long time, its been smashed to pieces, so here and there you have determined individuals and groups but many times they are feuding with other groups. And I have to say it – its not a good feeling but there is tremendous infiltration of these groups by the US government and its agents, informers, provocateurs – if it wasn’t the case would you not see evidence of a real movement? These are things people don’t want to admit, if you’re not going to admit these things - how can you go forward? This is a problem for people who say they want change – there is not a real assessment of the negatives and the positives – there is a denial of what has gone on, there is a denial of many of the things that have gone on – you will very rarely hear people in the present day talking about COINTELPRO going on right now. I’m not saying I was out in public talking about this in the US, I wasn’t, but I never denied that it was real – I think people are denying that the government has a special programme to target dissidents of the black movement. But you know as always the youth are the hope – it’s not anyone over 30 – because 99% have made the choice already.

How do you survive at the moment?

Well for two years since we got to Europe, we have been networking with activists to make some not- so-public presentations and Aisha has her singing, writing and piano playing. She is carrying on our culture and struggle through music and with her work.

I have written a couple of books and I’m very pleased with that. This is how we survive, we don’t have work permits – we have to sell the my books and sell Aisha’s CDs. That’s the reality, the stress and strain of travel not knowing what’s going to happen – trying to get work permits in countries and being stonewalled about that – that’s the reality. It’s a wonder to me that we don’t have ulcers and all kinds of physical ailments, both of us have post-traumatic stress, Aisha is also dealing with a panic disorder. A lot of energy is taken up trying to be calm, taking herbal and natural substances, but you know it’s very difficult you know we are under tremendous strain. That’s what we do but we are very happy that we have been able to come to Liverpool, and other places in the UK and Sweden – we have other supporters in Belgium, Spain and even the US.

How long can you carry on like this?

Well people have been coping with it for 500 years, it’s a continuum, its not a straight line that ends – but what we are trying to do – is find a way to settle in Sweden, get a work permit there. That’s all I can say – nothing is written in stone. If a government, bureaucracy decides they are not going to uphold certain things; well we have to think again.

Our situation is completely ludicrous because we are from a so-called democracy, but it’s the life of almost all refugees and all stateless people, all so-called illegal people. We are fortunate because we have a foundation, there are others like us, people before us who have been on this path but we know we can win. Thirty (30) years ago people won in ways that were unheard of, we could win in ways that other people thought were impossible

Since you’ve been travelling around the UK, can you see any similarities to the US?

Well, yeah lots, the ol’ capitalist thing is so strong, the old individualistic mentality is so strong - its me, me, me, forget other people - its vicious, well I don’t know whether it’s the chicken or the egg thing. I would say its getting worse. You know people here have myths; they glorify the US, that’s so unreal. They pay more attention to Hollywood here than in the US. But it’s impossible for this country to be like America, the economy is different – you have this whole class thing – you have less diversity – I mean this is a white country – in the US the black population is 1/6 of the population - there are 60 million black people. And then you have all the Spanish speaking people.

Historically Americans are white people, even now when we go through airports we are stopped while white people sail through. We get asked ‘where are we going? what are we doing?’ So we aren’t even treated as Americans. But most black people will still not admit they are oppressed, they’ll fight with you to say they are not.

America is a very insular place, historically they have been very insular. Aisha told me when she was young; she took a group trip to Toronto, Canada. You know, a modern, big, city. And the people she was with didn’t want to leave the hotel, they didn’t even want to venture and find out about the place. That’s the American mentality in general – they think ‘we’re in charge we’re the centre of the universe everything else is foreign, strange,’ and has some kind of danger lurking around it – that’s crazy.

When I was travelling around the southern states a few years ago, Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Tennessee. One of the things that struck me was the barrenness, of the place, the barrenness, the poverty – and what I perceived to be the complete loss of reality, of the people I met.

Well, Imagine or realize 100 million Native people were slaughtered in that land – if you go through places for example Virginia – there was one battle that lasted two or three days. Two hundred thousand (200,000) men, women and children died in two or three days – in the civil war. Can you imagine the haunted, the desolation that was in those people and the people they descended from. And this is our people, the dehumanisation of the people. I remember a women who lived with us when I was a child – she was 104 years old, and she told us about the 1860s – to me these are the reasons why America is like this. A lot of times I couldn’t sleep when I was travelling by train – it wasn’t a nice feeling –you could sense something strange as you passed from town to town. Nobody came to Europe and wiped out a whole nation – terrible things have happened but not 100 million. For most people in the US the history is just a town or a street name – they don’t know anything else.

Can we stop this from happening again, do you think?

I think people have to look inside of themselves first, once you have done that you can bond with other people – men have to deal with sexism. That’s where it starts. From there it begins to become more natural and easier.

I think your magazine is good it isn’t pushing all the material and consumer stuff. You have to just keep talking to people, trying to reach people. It’s just good to talk to people. And the people should have a voice, not just the corporations.

I mean there are reasons why people feel alienated, lonely – disconnected; I don’t think it just happens like that.

You know the drugs came because the families were broken up if you had an uncle or grandfather to talk to, you probably wouldn’t do drugs. I mean suicide - its 500% higher than 25 years ago. The age groups are at odds with each other. People think they can grab a remote control and live through a TV character and that’s going to deal with their emotions, or go and buy something or stick someone up if they don’t have the money. And all this has replaced people talking to each other.

Would you like to say anything else? I can see you are getting tired.

People should get involved in helping to free US Political Prisoners, Zolo Agona Azania, Dr. Mutulu Shakur, Ali Khalid Abdullah, Obadyah ben Yisrayl, The MOVE 9 and all those who put their lives on the line.

Most importantly, we also ask readers to support us in practical way by picking up a book a CD or arranging a concert or book launch. This defeats the global music/literary corporations who have tried endlessly to keep Aisha from singing and to keep me from writing by censoring us. Our greatest need as well as that of Zolo, Ali, Obadyah and Dr. Shakur is help and support on a real, practical level.

Thanks for the opportunity to talk, its not often journalists will follow through with these kinds of interviews, we have interviews in all kinds of countries, with all kinds of people and you should see them run when it comes to printing it.

Well we wont run, as long as we get the money to print the next issue.

Thank you Bankole, let me take one more picture. And then we can get some sleep.

Website: www.geocities.com/exiledone2002