Introduction
In October 2021 a new APPG on Afrikan Relations, led by Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP, was launched via a Zoom meeting. The necessary cross-party support was provided by Sir Peter Bottomley, who was put down as an assistant chair alongside Caroline Lucas and Marsha de Cordova. The APPG was launched in response to a campaign by the group Stop the Maangamizi, who Ribeiro-Addy thanked for “providing a view on what could be done”. The event's Eventbrite page stated that “Parliament has played a major role in legitimising historic and contemporary injustices against Afrikan people around the world” and that tackling racism at its root means “making meaningful reparations for the historic evils of slavery and colonialism”. On behalf of the Stop the Maangamizi campaign, the Maangamizi Eductional Trust will share the running of the secretariat for the APPG, with its chair Esther Stanford-Xosei being amongst those who spoke at the launch.
Who are Stop the Maangamizi
Maangamizi is claimed to be the Kiswahili word covering “the continuum of chattel enslavement, colonialism and neocolonilaism” (Swahili dictionaries define it meaning “destruction, catastrophe, annilhilation, devastation, disaster”). The campaign group say that they see the APPG as “a continuation of the world of the late Bernie Grant MP” (who controversially called for the British government to fund the repatriation of any person of African descent who wanted to return to that continent) and state that they’ve successfully lobbied for pro-reparations motions in the Boroughs of Islington and Lambeth in 2020, as well as Bristol City Council in 2021.
In their petition they accuse the British state of “genocide/ecocide” against “Afrikan people worldwide”, claiming that European mistreatment of Africans was a result of “Yurugu thought” (an African trickster god), that the Transatlantic Slave trade was a “Hellacaust” motivated by a “white supremacist racist mind-set” which is still present to the modern day, that the lack of reparations confirms there is a “Global Apartheid”, that reparations should be financial amongst other forms of restitution, and voluntary repatriation to “Motherland Afrika” for any “Descendent of Afrikans” should be provided. Meanwhile the “proliferation of guns, the distribution and sale of drugs and the resultant Black on Black self-annihilation” are blamed on “acts of Genocide/Ecocide by the State through its agencies of the police, armed forces, security and intelligence agencies”.
The proof for this includes the “denial of Black and Afrikan ‘Mother Earth’ (Nana Asase Yaa)”, the “health/medical, prison, psychiatric, economic, development, academic and military industrial complexes, which are making political prisoners of increasing numbers of Afrikan people”, the “mentacide of Afrikan heritage youth and adults through the state mis-education system”, and the “weaponization of pandemics, proliferation of HIV/Aids, ebola and other bioweapons of mass destruction”.
They say that their intent for the APPG involves working towards the establishment of an All-Party Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry for Truth & Reparatory Justice (APPCITARJ) to achieve all this, as well as galvanising grassroots work to set up the Ubuntukgotla or Peoples International Tribunal for Global Justice (PITGJ), which will continue this work on a global scale.
On their extensive but rambling website they claim that the “white supremacy racist establishment of Global Apartheid has terroristically compelled even some among our own Afrikan Heritage Communities and most Peoples of the world to be in denial” about the Maangamizi, suggesting that such denial should be criminalised in the same way as Holocaust denial is in other countries. They also claim that Roger Hallam of Extinction Rebellion (who the group are also associated with, with their leader Esther Stanford-Xosei giving a lecture on the official XR YouTube channel) was “lynched” as a “white race traitor” after he was criticised for comparing the Belgian massacres in the Congo to the Holocaust. In the same article they approving quote controversial US academic Noel Ignatiev’s statement that “the goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed White supremacists”.
They also say they “must rather truthfully speak in defence of those from amongst our allies who are seeking to do what the likes of...Black Liberation Army member Marilyn Jean Buck have”. Buck was a white Marxist, who was convicted for her role in the prison breakout of a cop-killer, the Brinks armoured car robbery of 1981 in which a guard and two police officers were murdered, another armoured car robbery in which a guard was murdered, and a series of bombings which included an attack on the US Capitol. She was only released from prison in 2010 due to the cancer which killed her.
In another open letter they claim that “we see the British Parliament as a crime scene which enacts unjust law that continues to drive the legal lynching of Afrikan people all over the world” and that Brexit has led to “Afriphobic terrorism, with what appears to be connivance of government and other organs and agencies of the UK state machinery”. As a result of this “white supremacy racist terrorism” they now demand “PAFREXIT: Pan-Afrikan exit out of the global system of Euro-Amerikkan imperialism”.
Who is Esther Stanford-Xosei
The main organising figure behind Stop the Maangamizi, and a dazzling array of other pan-African but membership-challenged organisations over the years, is Esther Stanford-Xosei. She describes herself as “an advocate for the collective protection of Global Pan-Afrikan nationhood and the elevation of the feminine principle as part of the transformation process” who is “currently completing a PhD in the history of the International Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations in the UK at the university of Chichester”. She also claims to run a legal company called Soul Law, although they have no website and seemingly no other employees. In addition, she runs the XR UK Internationalist Solidarity Network, and claims that Extinction Rebellion give her 20% of all their crowd-funder revenue as “an act of solidarity and reparation baked into what they do”.
She’s had an extensive history as an activist, which is documented on her website. It includes: being the legal advisor to the Black Quest for Justice campaign which tried to sue Tony Blair and the Queen over slavery (The Voice, April 7th 2003); speaking alongside the National of Islam, which the ADL says “has maintained a consistent record of antisemitism and bigotry since its founding”; being part of a delegation to Mugabe’s Zimbabwe in 2004, which praised his land reform efforts to take farms from white farmers and give them to black ones instead (The Harare Herald, April 23rd 2004), which led to mass poverty, hyper-inflation, starvation, a halving of the country’s GDP, an 80% unemployment rate, only 20% of children being in school, a cholera outbreak, 15% of the population contracting HIV, and more poaching; claiming on the same Zimbabwe trip that Britain should be charged with genocide “for the massacre of blacks at the hands of the country’s police, immigration officials and prison wardens” (Daily Mirror, 23rd April 2004); being part of a delegation to meet Gadaffi in Libya in 2006, where they asked for his support for reparations and the creation of a “United Afrikan States”; helping to launch Momentum Black ConneXions (MBC), which aimed to connect the “Jeremy Corbyn Support Campaign” to “the Black Power politics of Black communities of resistance”, and which later became the Popular Educational Complex of Black Empowerment Action Learning, promising a “Commonwealth bail out” of “Brexit Crisis-torn Britain” but only if Corbyn became Prime Minister.
Other activism has included speaking in support of George Galloway’s campaign to become the Mayor of London in 2015 because of his support for a museum on slavery as a “down payment” on reparations (he later returned the favour by interviewing her for his Sputnik programme on Russia Today); an “in conversation” event with the controversial academic Kehinde Andrews; co-signing an open letter to the Labour Party with Jackie Walker, who was at that time suspended for anti-semitism, which claimed that the Chakrabati Inquiry into Labour anti-semitism was “discriminatory” because it wasn’t also investigating “Afriphobia”; holding a mock trial of Priti Patel; and echoing a conspiracy theory that West Africa was to be used as a “testing ground” for vaccines and AI by Bill Gates, which she claimed showed that “the Maangamizi continues unabated”.
Comment
The history of Stop the Maangamizi and Esther Stanford-Xosei are relatively easy to find. The combination of conspiracy theories, wild claims about genocide, and even meeting with African dictators should make it clear that they are unsuitable to be the secretariat for an APPG. That none of the MPs involved in the APPG, including Sir Peter Bottomley whose cross-party support was necessary to launch it, either looked or cared about it is an indictment of them. It’s especially striking that, when Labour is calling for a crackdown on tech firms who don’t deal with vaccine misinformation, their own MPs are inviting someone who spreads such misinformation into Parliament. It also exposes a double-standard, where black groups who spread inflammatory rhetoric about other races - such as the need to abolish the white race, or comparing them to a trickster god - are left uncriticised. Those involved in the APPG should rethink their involvement.