Social Justice Guides Lee's Vision for TransAfrica
New Leadership Faces Challenges in Post-Apartheid Era
New America Media, News Feature, Khalil Abdullah, Posted: May 02, 2007
WASHINGTON -- TransAfrica Forum's new executive director still sees the Pan-African vision as relevant today as during the Free South Africa Movement which broke the back of apartheid.
Nicole Lee, named in December 2006 as executive director of TransAfrica Forum, knew from six years old that she wanted to work in the human rights arena. She was struck by the television ads showing the affects of poverty in Africa -- the starving children with the bloated bellies. “I told my mother I wanted to work with those kids.”
Lee was too young to have a critical eye for the context of those ads, the framing that described suffering but rarely addressed geo-political causation. And, she was far from attaining her law degree from the University at Buffalo Law School (SUNY) in her hometown. That degree would put her in Haiti only two weeks after graduation in 2002, employed by an organization that was investigating human rights abuses.
In an interview in TransAfrica Forum’s office in Washington, D.C., Lee said, between the ages of 11 and 22 years old, she was raised principally by her father who worked for a record label. Her mother, a Pentecostal minister, was on travel eight or nine months out of the year in Africa.
“They had a very interesting consciousness around what was going on in South Africa,” Lee said of her parents. She described them as, “fairly conservative, Republicans, black Republicans, but they found Randall Robinson, [the first president of TransAfrica], to be very compelling, and the issues around southern Africa and apartheid were very disturbing to them. And, so like many American families, we kind of took on our own boycotting campaign,” particularly as the involvement of U.S. corporations in supporting and profiting from apartheid became more widely known.
TransAfrica, Inc. was founded in 1977 as a non-profit advocacy organization to lobby the U.S. government of behalf of African countries and interests. Its counterpart, TransAfrica Forum was set up as a vehicle for public education. The organizations’ vision has been guided by a Pan-African commitment, that people of African descent share in a collective history and, more importantly, a collective responsibility to address social and economic ills, whether they occur in Africa, the Caribbean, or the Americas.
“I think that the Pan African vision that we [TransAfrica] put forth 30 years ago has evolved,” Lee explained, “it’s still something that African Americans view as being a plausible -- not just a vision -- but an actual plausible reality for this next generation. …We continue to argue that neo-liberal policies, economic policies, are not working for the African world.”
TransAfrica Forum critiques U.S. foreign policy and, where it deems appropriate, challenges African leadership as well. Lee and the organization have taken a vocal and critical view, for example, of Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe and his administration’s contentious relationship with his country’s opposition leaders.
Robinson and other TransAfrica board members received widespread media attention after being arrested in 1984 while protesting at the South African embassy, calling for the end of apartheid and the release of then-imprisoned African National Congress leader, Nelson Mandela. There were manifold factors and pressures that led to the eventual crumbling of apartheid, but, at that time, TransAfrica’s media savvy unarguably played a key role in focusing the American public’s attention on the stark inequities of South Africa’s caste system.
“Randall was brilliant,” said one long-time observer of the organization who noted that over the course of his tenure at TransAfrica’s helm, Robinson called people on the carpet publicly. “He made enemies.”
Later, Robinson also raised the public’s awareness about the U.S. sanctions on Cuba and took on the Clinton administration’s policies toward Haiti (that included the abysmal racially-driven disparity on limiting the number of Haitian immigrants to America when compared to other countries), but TransAfrica’s heyday was the Free South Africa Movement.
How to recapture the momentum and cohesiveness of the anti-apartheid era is a continuing challenge for the organization. Yet, in a real sense, the fact that nearly every public analysis of the organization starts with that era as the benchmark of success is itself problematic.
Bill Fletcher, Jr., a veteran of the labor movement, who brought a keen intellect to the organization in his critique of globalization and its impact on developing economies, succeeded Robinson as the organization’s president in 2001. His role, in part, was to bring some financial stability to the organization. TransAfrica, Inc was quietly folded and Fletcher sought to “retool the organization [TransAfrica Forum] to reach the grassroots.” Yet, he also confronted an African American body politic whose political objectives, as related to Africa, had long since been diffused.
“In some respects, the anti-apartheid movement was the final stage of the U.S. civil rights movement,” Fletcher said. Now a visiting professor at Brooklyn College, N.Y., after leaving TransAfrica in 2006, he pointed out that the success of the anti-apartheid movement “was the result of 40 years of work … not just Randall’s brilliance.”
Fletcher said the movement included “communists, socialists, and [black] nationalists,” and its broad-based popular appeal was rooted in the injustice of “white-on-black” oppression. It was this stark, literal contrast that made South Africa almost a simplistic poster-child of inequity. “We,” said Fletcher of African Americans, “have far more difficulty in figuring out how to deal with post-colonial African leaders who oppress their own people.” And he includes Zimbabwe’s Mugabe among that cohort.
Lee, also, cautions those who are quick to compare today’s realities with the past that the Free South Africa Movement was solidly rooted in coalition politics. “Pan African groups that were organizing and women’s groups that were organizing, their views and their objectives were very different than the student groups, for example, that got involved or the divestment campaign within corporations that occurred, which was fascinating but which weren’t going to go much further that that particular divestment campaign…. By definition a coalition doesn’t stay together once the problem dissipates.”
In 2005, when Lee joined Fletcher’s staff as director of operations, her duties including fundraising and budget work as well as involvement in the organization’s programmatic activities, such as economic justice for Haiti.
Lee was meeting with Fletcher when Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was physically removed from Haiti in 2004. She vividly remembers the date, January 29. “It was such a gut–wrenching moment, for me and for many other people who were committed to Haiti,” she recalled. “The shock that Aristide supposedly had resigned … it was just very difficult.”
Aristide was then serving his second term as president but faced well-financed opposition and mounting violence. He claims he was forced out by an American-backed coup d’etat and the evidence supporting his allegations is convincing.
Both Fletcher and Lee find the entire arc of U.S. and European involvement with Haiti to be a rather sordid affair. While Lee considers the entire African diaspora TransAfrica’s responsibility, she admits a special sensitivity for the Haitian people and their courage to resist, first Napoleon’s armies to earn their independence from France in 1804, and now their efforts to reconstitute their daily lives from crushing poverty.
Lee traveled to Haiti in 2006 with TransAfrica’s chairman, actor and activist Danny Glover. “Danny Glover and I attended the inauguration of Rene Preval [the current president] which was a good moment after what has transpired in 2004 and what’s been transpiring in Haiti throughout its history in dealing with European countries and the United States. That was a good moment.”
She said she heard the Haitian people talk about the future, their expectations and the demands they would seek to extract from their government, and “what were their demand of us as an organization in the United States whose mission is to hold the U.S. government accountable for its actions within the African world.”
“It’s one thing to have ‘democracy,’ it’s another to have health care … to have food and shelter and all of things that we’ve really deprived the people of Haiti,” Lee said, “And when I say ‘we,’ I mean the United States government has really deprived the people of Haiti.”
One of Lee’s key concerns is “the plight of Haitian workers in the Dominican Republic, the neighboring country that shares the island of Hispanola.” She said Dominican companies bring in Haitian workers, but their children, who are born there, are deprived of citizenship as the Dominican Republic does not issue them birth certificates. “They’re not citizens of the Dominican Republic; they’re not citizens of Haiti. They have no county – which is a violation of international law.”
She explained that “each and every person has the right to citizenship in the country where they are born” and that the practice of denying birth certificates has been condemned by human rights organizations. Lee points out that access to education and health care are but two examples of services that are typically tied to proving one’s identity, clearly a factor in the immigration debate within the United States and other industrially developed countries.
Additionally, she cited instances where Haitian migrant workers had been burned to death and said there are “many, many reports” of the torture and rape of Haitian women by soldiers in the Dominican army.
While ceding that African Americans “don’t see politics all the same way,” Lee said that the conditions in Haiti or Darfur, as examples, illustrate the need for advocacy and education, a role she envisions TransAfrica fulfilling. “The spirit of African American culture really speaks to a lot of things TransAfrica is talking about, issues of economics; justice versus economic disparity.” She adds that one tool to measure is whether there is positive feedback from the civil societies where TransAfrica is active.
Lee argued that is important for those who want a “progressive” voice to take action. “If you want to see cutting edge work, you have to support it,” she said. Interacting with the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), whose members she generally counts as allies, is one mechanism to influence U.S. foreign policy. “They are engaged,” she said of the CBC. “It is not possible any longer for any member of Congress not be engaged on international issues.” But she pointed out that “Congress – they hear from the Exxon-Mobils” of the world more consistently than it does from organizations like hers, so when TransAfrica steps out on an issue, “we need to make sure we have our facts straight.”
Lee is upbeat about TransAfrica’s future. “We’re going to have some new and exciting policy initiatives,” she said emphatically. While recognizing the organization is situated in a different era and context than its formative years, she is comfortable with her arrival at its helm. “My entire existence led me into human rights – I don’t think I could have done anything else. I was never really interested in anything else.”
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