The Communist Party Marxist Kenya notes the recent sanctions imposed by the United States government against a Tanzanian police official over the torture involving Kenyan activist Boniface Mwangi and Ugandan activist Agather Atuhaire.
As revolutionaries and defenders of democratic rights, we firmly condemn torture, arbitrary detention, repression, disappearances, and attacks against activists, workers, peasants, journalists, opposition forces, and progressive voices anywhere in Africa. The suffering of the people can never be normalised. State violence against the masses remains reactionary regardless of which government carries it out.
However, the Kenyan masses must analyse these developments beyond the surface and beyond bourgeois liberal lenses.
The fundamental political question is this: why does the United States suddenly claim concern for human rights in Tanzania only when internationally visible activists are affected, while remaining largely silent when ordinary poor Tanzanian workers, peasants, youth, and opposition supporters are killed, abducted, imprisoned, or brutalised by the same state machinery?
Does the US administration not know that Tanzanian opposition leader Tundu Lissu remains imprisoned? Does it not know about the killings, repression, and shrinking democratic space in Tanzania? Imperialism knows. Imperialism always knows.
The truth is that US sanctions have historically never been neutral instruments of justice. They are instruments of foreign policy pressure, economic coercion, regime management, and geopolitical control.
From Cuba to Venezuela, from Zimbabwe to Iran, sanctions have been weaponised to discipline states that fall outside the strategic interests of US monopoly capital and Western imperialism. Human rights become the slogan. Domination becomes the objective.
This is why progressive and patriotic forces across Africa must treat every imperialist intervention with political caution and ideological clarity.
We reject the dangerous illusion that Washington is a defender of African democracy. The same US ruling class speaking about human rights today operates Guantanamo Bay, a global symbol of torture, illegal detention, and systematic abuse of prisoners. The United States remains one of the chief perpetrators of torture and imperial violence globally, while simultaneously presenting itself as the moral judge of other nations. It finances wars, backs dictatorships, supports Zionist aggression, militarises Africa through AFRICOM, and sustains neo colonial plunder across the continent.
The Kenyan masses must therefore reject two dangerous deviations.
First, we reject the opportunist tendency to deny or minimise repression simply because imperialism is exploiting it for geopolitical interests. Torture and repression against the people are wrong and reactionary.
Second, we reject the liberal tendency to celebrate US sanctions as acts of humanitarian justice. Imperialism has never liberated Africa and it never will.
The liberation of Africa shall not come from Washington, London, Paris, or Brussels. It shall come from the organised struggles of workers, peasants, youth, women, progressive intellectuals, and revolutionary movements fighting both domestic reaction and imperialist domination.
Africa must defend democratic rights. Africa must reject torture and repression. But Africa must also defend its sovereignty against imperialist manipulation disguised as moral concern.
As the masses deepen their struggles across East Africa, we call for revolutionary vigilance, ideological clarity, proletarian internationalism, and the building of genuine people centred democratic power.
The struggle continues.
General Secretary
Booker Omole
Communist Party Marxist Kenya
CPMK