Farrakhan’s Betrayal of Black Africans: In Their Own Words
Louis Farrakhan has styled himself for decades as the most passionate, most authentic black leader of all time, and the most loyal to his race.
But in the 1990s, as reports emerged that blacks were being captured, bought, sold, and owned as slaves on the soil of their own continent, Farrakhan was not among the first black leaders to react.
And when he did react, he denied that modern-day African slavery existed, and began attacking those who were rallying support to free the slaves.
Why? Because the slave owners were Arabs and Muslims. And this fact does irreparable harm to Farrakhan and his Nation of Islam’s mission, which is to convince American blacks that Islam is their path to freedom. It was also revealed later that the Arabs were paying him to cruelly double-cross his own people.
And so, as the evidence seeped into the black media, beginning in earnest in 1995, representatives of the Nation of Islam mounted a concerted PR campaign to defeat the budding abolitionist movement. At event after event, NOI operatives slandered the evidence of slavery as a “Jewish-inspired” lie, and callously attempted to explain the allegations away.
But what did the actual black Africans of whom Farrakhan claims to be the most loyal friend have to say about what he was saying, supposedly, on “their” behalf?
Regarding the case of the Sudan — whose brutal war-time slave trade Farrakhan vengefully challenged American journalists to actually prove even existed — the minister’s role was indeed diabolically disgraceful. As black Sudanese American community leader Sabit Abbe Alley wrote in the June 6 – 11, 1996 edition of the now-defunct black newspaper The City Sun,
According to brother Farrakhan, the claims of genocide and slavery in the Sudan are mere fabrications and propaganda by the Western world and media to disgrace Islam and at the same time tarnish the “good” image of the Islamic Republic of the Sudan.…
Members of the Southern Sudanese Community in America in particular and their friends were stunned and outraged by these statements. They found it hard to believe that a man of Farrakhan’s standing and intelligence could stoop so low as to flirt with Arab slavers and deny the existence of an industry (slavery) which has grown tremendously over the years and has become common knowledge the world over. What with the tons of reports pouring out of the Sudan daily from journalists, academicians, human rights activists, etc., detailing the military crimes of the Sudanese government against its black African populations and its encouragement of the heinous trade in human beings!…
Alley went on to chronicle how, astoundingly, during his 1996 African tour, Farrakhan actually helped the slave-trading Arab government of Sudan fight his fellow blacks in the south by going to Zaire (today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo) to ask the brutal late dictator Mobutu Sese Soku for troops and military bases for Khartoum to use in its war against Farrakhan’s fellow black people. Then, once again at Khartoum’s request, Farrakhan went to Nigeria, this time to meet with another vicious despot, the late Nigerian general Sani Abacha, for oil money which Sudan would no less than use to buy weapons for its jihad against the south from Communist China.
As Alley concludes,
It is indeed ironical that a supposedly black man of slave descent should hate his kith and kin and actively participate in programs aimed at their eradication from the face of the earth. Who knows, maybe the honorable Minister suffers from an inferiority complex of some sort.
Actually, Farrakhan not only assisted Sudan’s genocidal Islamic government in their war of annihilation against the black Christian rebels; he also betrayed the black people of Sudan far more directly.
As Steven Wöndu, the current Auditor General of today-independent South Sudan, wrote in the March 1998 issue of the Sudan Democratic Gazatte,
In April 1994 during the Pan-African Conference in Uganda, [Farrakhan] had several hours of discussion with the [late] leader of the [black] liberation movement in the Sudan, Dr. John Garang. Farrakhan heard and understood the predicament of the black man in Sudan. He even, quite admirably, told Garang that although he, Farrakhan, was a Moslem, he would side with his fellow black Africans on the issue of slavery and domination. This remark was applauded by our National Convention then in session in South Sudan. Unfortunately, we did not and could not give Farrakhan any dollars. In God we trusted.…
In 1998, however, after he returned from his latest pan-African tour,
…Farrakhan told southern Sudanese that they should abandon their appetite for pork and beer in reverence to Islamic traditions and that we must convert to Islam. His remarks were an unscrupulous and dastardly way of telling us to surrender to his friends, the Moslem slave traders of Khartoum. In Islam, the word is “submit.”
The fury which Farrakhan’s repeated and despicable betrayals evoked in real black Africans on the ground in Sudan shifts the dialogue from simply the dry words of human rights reports to actual black people, who actually experienced the Arab genocide, racism, and slavery which Farrakhan had aided and denied.
In fact, Alley’s own wife, Jane, barely escaped a bloody Arab slave raid in 1990. But she had and was able to rescue herself and her own children; she and thousands of others did so without any help from Farrakhan.
But Farrakhan has harmed and abandoned far more people than just the mostly non-Muslim black people of South Sudan.
At the same time as reports of slavery in the Sudan were coming to light, the reality of slavery in 100%-Muslim Mauritania was also unleashing outrage in the black community.
Unlike with slavery in Sudan, which he actively denied, Farrakhan chose a different tactic with slavery in Mauritania. Even though all black slaves in Mauritania are Muslims like him, Farrakhan routinely and deafeningly ignored the scourge of Mauritanian slavery. One would think that black, Muslim slaves would be a top Nation of Islam priority, but Farrakhan, as often happens, is a ready source of surprises. Perhaps the Islamic tyrants who rule Mauritania were too poor to pay Farrakhan to lie for them.
Here, watch Mohamed Nacir Athié, a black Mauritanian Fulani Muslim, explain how he, as a Mauritanian Muslim, felt about Farrakhan completely ignoring the plight of Mauritania’s slaves.
In light of what the real-life African victims of Farrakhan’s callous double-dealing have to say, the real question finally bobs up.
Is Louis Farrakhan actually the great “savior” of the black man, or is he, in fact, the ultimate middle-man in the Arab world’s unending rape of black Africa?