Ibrahim Traore and the Fight for Africa's Future | Shahid Bolsen

You know, when people talk about a Patrice Lumumba or a Kwame Nkrumah, for example, or Thomas Sankara, or even Sukarno, they always say that they were ahead of their time, but that's not true. They weren't ahead of their time. They were not revolutionary thinkers, if you know what I mean. They were just incredibly astute, mature, sensible men with a a very crystal clear understanding about how things should be. There was nothing futuristic or utopian in their visions.

They just understood and identified exactly what had been done to Africa, and what was being done to Africa. And they understood exactly what liberation and what sovereignty required. You know, if they had been leaders in the West, no one would have called them revolutionary or even visionary. They just would have been regarded as logical, sound, rational, reasonable men who had an intricate understanding of economics and politics, and basic fairness. I'm not saying this to slight them, not at all.

I'm saying this to emphasize the heinous criminality of the western power structure and how it has dealt with Africa. Because if you were a leader in Africa in the nineteen fifties, the nineteen sixties, or the seventies, or the eighties, and you had a sound mind, a rational mind, you had an understanding of politics and economics, and you had an understanding of what's required for sovereignty and fairness, well that made you a revolutionary, calling for, pursuing basic fairness and sovereignty and independence for an African leader, saying things and doing things and implementing policies that just made sense for your nation constituted rebellion. Now, they weren't ahead of their time. Time refused to advance. Time was being held back, especially in Africa.

The West, Europe, The UK, and America refused to allow Africa to exist in the present day. Not just Africa, of course, all across the global South. But nowhere was this more the case than in Africa. You understand, I pointed out before, more than once, relationships between countries, between continents evolve and develop and change over time. We've seen drastic changes in international relationships in just the last twenty years.

In fact, we've seen drastic changes in just the last four or five years, you know, even the last hundred days to be honest. But the West's relationship with Africa has remained essentially the same for a thousand years, subjugation and extraction, looting and pillage. So for Lumumba or Nkrumah, it was the nineteen sixties, but for the West it was still the eighteen sixties, the seventeen sixties, the sixteen sixties. For the West Africa was frozen in time and they kept it frozen in time by force. They kept it frozen in time by violence, by assassination, by coups, by invasions, and by hostage governments and collaborators.

They kept it frozen in time by predatory lending, by, neoliberal policy coercion, by manufactured debt and abusive trade policies. You know, when they can't send soldiers, they send consultants. So in all those great leaders weren't ahead of their time, the West stopped time in Africa. And understand this, when you arrest the forward movement of a people, when you stop them in time like that, you're not just stealing their wealth, you're stealing their future. You're robbing them of possibility.

You're burying generations that have not even been born yet under the rubble of your exploitation. Because what could have been created, what could have been discovered, what could have been achieved, it never gets a chance to exist. The mind of Thomas Sankara, the determination of Patrice Lumumba, the vision of Nkrumah, these weren't anomalies. They're the normal, natural, healthy state of a decolonized mind, of a liberated mind coming from a liberated people. They're examples of what Africa would have been, should have been, and still will be.

But the West systematically crushed the conditions necessary even for normalcy to flourish. You see, you don't just kill the leaders when you kill the leaders, or when you overthrow the leaders. You steal the future that those leaders could build. You know, Allah said in the Quran that when you kill one person unjustly, it's as if you killed all of mankind. Well, isn't just metaphorically true.

In the case of the leaders that the West has destroyed in Africa, they also destroyed millions of lives along with them. Millions of living and unborn lives have been destroyed in terms of their hopes, their opportunities, their rights, their freedom, their independence, their sovereignty. Well, you can trace the carnage going on right now in Congo today, all the way back to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. They assassinate the idea, they they assassinate the man who represents the idea, so that future generations will look back and go, well, know, they tried, they tried and they failed, so we better not bother. It's psychological warfare across time.

Because if you can make a people believe that liberation is impossible, if you can make them believe that wanting sovereignty is naive and that dignity is an unrealistic hope, then you don't even have to conquer them anymore, they'll remain conquered inside themselves. And please understand, when we talk about people like Sankara, Nkrumah, Lumumba, Sukarno, we're actually just talking about the natural state of a decolonized mind. We're not talking about something extraordinary, we're talking about what's supposed to be normal, not exceptional, normal. They didn't have utopian visions for their countries, like I said. They wanted their countries to be normal, but the West would not allow it.

And back then, the West had the power to prevent it. The relative power, that's the key point. They had the relative power to prevent it. They had the relative power to steal Africa's future by prolonging its past by force. But as I've talked about many times, the West's relative power is receding.

That old wolf still has fangs but the global South is raising some young lions of their own today. They're reviving the spirit of Lumumba and Sankara and Nkrumah. Your grip on Africa is being pried open. And yes, of course, I'm talking about Ibrahim Chawri in Burkina Faso and all the leaders in the Sahel alliance countries obviously, but especially Ibrahim Tore. You know, it's often only in retrospect that we recognize the magnitude of a figure who shifts the course of history, shifts the course of events in the world.

But if anyone's paying attention, you can all see that Ibrahim Tore is clearly one of the most consequential leaders, not just in Africa, not just in the Muslim world, but in the entire global South, and in in fact in the world. You know, I said on on X the other day that Ibrahim Tore is the most important Muslim leader in the world today. More than Erdogan, more than MBS, more than anyone else. Because of what he represents. You know, of course I had a lot of fake pan Africanists in my comment, comment section getting mad about the fact that I was referring to Ibrahim Tory as a Muslim leader, because they only want to identify him exclusively as a black leader, or as exclusively as an African leader.

They don't want to acknowledge the fact, the fact that he is a Muslim. Because in their CIA produced pan Africanism, they're ready to exclude 500,000,000 Africans from Africa. They're so propagandized in their mind by the CIA and by the intelligence that they think being African and being Muslim is a contradiction. They fall in for the for the old divide and rule tactics of the colonizers. Their indoctrinated brains will short circuit over the inconvenient fact that the most admired and the most heroic leaders in Africa today are Muslims.

In Burkina Faso, in Niger, in Senegal, even Naledi Pandor in South Africa is a Muslim taking the Israel to the ICJ. Just because Ibrahim Tory doesn't wear his religion on his sleeve, and just because he doesn't taqwa signal, you know, all the time like some so called Islamist, you think we don't get to claim him as part of our ummah? We don't get to say that he's a Muslim leader, but he is a Muslim leader. He's an African leader who's a Muslim. And I'm sorry to tell you, but again the fact of the matter is that the best leaders you have in Africa today are the ones who are Muslims.

You can get mad about it all you want. You can say why does Shahid have to bring up religion? Why do you have to bring religion into it? But that's just a way of gaslighting about the fact that you don't want religion to be brought into it. You wanna keep religion out of it.

No. Ibrahim Tari is fighting those western backed, western trained, western funded jihadi groups because he's a Muslim. Nobody has suffered more from those mercenaries than the Muslims have. Suffered more from their violence, and suffered more from the warped image of Islam that spread by their violence. Now, when Ibrahim Chaudhry stands up to those French and Ukrainian backed psychopaths, he's standing up for real Islamic values, whether you like it or not, from the perspective of middle nation, from my perspective, from the prism through which we analyze the struggle for justice and sovereignty and dignity.

Ibrahim Chawri's emergence is nothing short of historic. I mean, alhamdulillah, we have many great Muslim leaders in the world today despite what everyone says, we have great leaders, many. But in my opinion, Ibrahim Chawari is the most important. Burkina Faso, the land they call it, the land of upright people has again produced an upright man, not only for their country, not only for the Ummah, but for all of humanity. First they gave us Thomas Sankara, who was a Catholic, but his life was extinguished before he could ever reach the full, before he could realize his vision.

But today, in Ibrahim Tawray, we see that vision revived and refined and aligned with the consciousness of Islam. We don't have any hesitation acknowledging Thomas Ankara, we're proud of anyone, regardless of their faith, who stands for justice. You know, were many leaders, heroic leaders in the global South, particularly in Latin America who were inspired by the so called liberation theology within the Catholic church, even if their own church hated them for it. We salute them, You know, even those with no faith, who genuinely struggle for the rights of their people, we salute them. It's a part of our faith, it's a part of our religion to appreciate those who genuinely stand for justice.

Even if we know that their vision is never gonna be complete without Islam. So if you wanna be proud of Ibrahim Chawri because of just his skin color, go ahead. If you wanna be proud of him because of his country or his continent of origin, go ahead. But we're proud of him because of his belief. He's our brother in belief.

We're proud of him because of his faith. And anyone who wants to deny that, or deny us that, well, you're just petty and foolish and ideologically shackled. Ibrahim Chawereh led a coup against a government that was subservient to its foreign masters. You know, there's been many many coups across the continent, but usually those just replaced one neo colonial agent with another, usually. But Ibrahim Tory is different, he's not just changing the government, he is uprooting the whole system of neo colonial domination, and he's succeeding.

He's understood what many people have failed to grasp, which is that independence is meaningless. If you don't sever the control of the owners and controllers of global financialized capital. He's understood that security is a myth as long as it depends on the military patronage of your former colonizers, and he's understood that sovereignty is impossible, under the shadow of western tutelage. He's not merely a head of state, Ibrahim Choroi is the revolutionary archetype of the twenty first century. He was forged in the reality of western backed insurgency, and western economic warfare and propaganda.

Because you know, today the the fight for freedom is not just waged by armies anymore, but by narratives, and by resource policies, and by alliances, and by collective sovereignty. Charlois made the choice to look towards Russia and Turkey, and towards other new centers of power in the multipolar world, less strategic. Not because they're perfect allies, but because he recognizes the necessity of breaking the western stranglehold on Burkina Faso. This is pragmatism in service to principle. This again is the the the methodology of Middle Nation.

It's engagement without submission, cooperation without subjugation, it's trade offs without selling out. He also understands crucially that Africa's liberation cannot be rented from outside. It has to be rooted in the reclamation of Africa's own wealth, you know. His moves to exert control over Burkina Faso's gold, building indigenous defense capacity and food sovereignty, these aren't just political decisions, these are acts of civilizational self respect. It's a declaration that Africa's children will no longer be bled dry for the enrichment of western imperial capital.

We see Ibrahim Chaworeg as a brother not simply because of his faith, but also because of his fight. Because he embodies the spirit of the Quranic guidance to stand firmly for justice even if it is against your own selves, even if it is against those who are in power, and even if it is against the odds. Burkina Faso isn't just a battleground today for the the Burkinaabe people, it's the front line in a global struggle for liberation. What Ibrahim Chorah is doing is echoing in the Sahel, in Niger, in Mali, across Africa, across the Ummah, across the global South and across the world. Every oppressed people around the world can now look to Burkina Faso and to Ibrahim Chawre and say liberation looks like it's actually possible.

But obviously, the global order trembles at the prospect that anyone is gonna follow his example. They're afraid of his courage and his clarity, and his defiance in the face of western power and western threats, and they should be afraid of that. They should tremble because they know the jig is up. But we know that when they get scared they get dangerous, and Ibrahim Choure is under severe threat. There's already been something like 20 attempts on his life since coming to power.

They just stopped a coup, from happening last week, organized by the Americans and by the French, right there in the French embassy. Because a free Africa is just something that that old wolf can't take. You know, they've been keeping Africa in the past for so long that they know that if they let Africa get away from them, then they're gonna be the ones who are consigned to history. The chains that have been holding Africa down all this time are also the only things holding the West up. So now America has said that they wanna arrest him, you know.

They've already tried to take him out more than once, like I said. Now they're trying to smear him, they're trying to attack him, they sent the head of AFRICOM to the Ivory Coast a couple of days ago, which is a neighbor of Burkina Faso, and which is is known to have allegedly anyway participated in the killing of Thomas Ankara. Allegedly they participated in the coups, or helped to organize the coups against, or the two coup attempts against Ebrahim Tory, and the western sycophantic leader that was overthrown by Ibrahim Tory is in exile in the Ivory Coast right now. So they're getting ready for something. Understand, Ibrahim Tory isn't just fighting insurgents and militants in the desert, no.

Every time he has to meet with some western diplomat or politician or ambassador, he's fighting that same enemy. They're just wearing a suit and tie, and and meeting in some conference room or some embassy somewhere. But it's the same enemy that he's fighting in the desert. He doesn't have a meeting with any western official except it's a kind of combat. Imagine, the same ones that are smiling at you are from across the table, those are the same ones who are also paying mercenaries to kill you.

That's why there's going to be a continent wide protest at the end of this month, I think it's on the thirtieth. And I really hope that we'll see activists fill the streets all around the world, not just in Africa. It's a demonstration in support of Ibrahim Tawori, in support of Burkina Faso, and it's a protest against American and Western threats against him. And I really hope that we see massive numbers globally participating in this. I hope that even we'll see people of the Ivory Coast turn out for it.

Listen, this is important. Burkina Faso is important. Ibrahim Chawri is important for everyone, not just for Africans, not just for the Burkinaabes. This isn't about idolizing the man, it's about understanding the importance of what he represents, and what he represents is a paradigmatic shift that the whole world needs. You understand me?

The OC GFC have been on a path of power consolidation for decades, accumulating more and more power in fewer and fewer hands, and leaving almost nothing beyond their control. We are in a struggle against this consolidation. Do you understand? It's a struggle for decentralization, that's the essence of it. That's what multipolarity is, it's decentralization.

We need to pursue, protect and preserve variance. They don't want there to be any options. They don't want there to be any divergence, any independence. But see, they built their power structure initially on the assumption that American power would last forever. Now they're understanding that they have to recalibrate, they need to transition.

It's like they built one of those Jenga towers on a kitchen table, and now they have to relocate it. They have to move that tower all the way across town without it falling apart. Because now you have to move to the global South. It's a completely different terrain than what they're used to. So they're gonna try to eliminate as many variables as they can to try to manage this transition so they come out on the top.

Because they don't want their tower to fall apart. But if their tower falls apart, that is liberatory for everyone on this planet. Burkina Faso, as I say, represents decentralization. It represents variance. It represents a threat to the power consolidation.

They see, Ibrahim Choure as a glitch in their system, but their system is a virus on humanity. Burkina Faso represents not only the promise of African liberation, but liberation for all of us. And the instinct for liberation is not a bug in the human software, it's a feature. So everyone should do whatever they can and we should all do all we can to try to defend and protect Ibrahim Chawari. Because Wallahi, this is a matter of self defense.

Ibrahim Chawari isn't simply a political figure, he's a turning point.