Class Suicide
Diaspora Bridges
2026
Historical Context
By the late 1960s and 1970s, a harder-edged current fused Pan-Africanism with explicit Marxism, arguing that racial solidarity alone was insufficient without attention to class — that a Black elite could exploit Black workers just as readily as a white colonial elite had, and that "African socialism" rhetoric often masked exactly this.
Amílcar Cabral, leading Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde's liberation war against Portugal, is probably the most theoretically rigorous figure here. His writings on the need for the liberation movement's leadership to commit "class suicide" — to abandon the class interests of their own relatively privileged position and align fully with the peasantry — were an attempt to guard against exactly the elite-capture problem Fanon had flagged. Cabral was assassinated in 1973, months before Guinea-Bissau's independence.
Walter Rodney belongs squarely in this strand: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is essentially dependency theory married to Pan-Africanist commitments, and his organizing in Guyana was an attempt to apply Pan-African, cross-racial working-class solidarity to a non-African diaspora context — which is itself a meaningful extension of the tradition beyond the continent.
Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso in the 1980s is a later, briefer instantiation of this same current — radical, anti-imperialist, feminist-inflected Pan-African socialism, cut short by his 1987 assassination, arguably in circumstances involving French and regional interests much like Rodney's death did.
Lyrics
[Intro - Just bass and one-drop drum, spoken low, almost a whisper] Bury the position. Keep the person. That's the task. [Verse 1 - guitar skank enters, lead vocal] Amílcar Cabral in Guinea-Bissau said the petty bourgeoisie can lead the fight, But it has to commit class suicide, or betray it in plain sight — Resurrect itself as worker, bury the rank it was born to hold, Or watch the revolution get repossessed by the class it was sold. Culture is a weapon, Cabral wrote, but only if it's aimed At the comfort of the leadership, not the enemy it named. [Mantra - dub echo on the vocal, slightly louder, second voice joins] Bury the position. Keep the person. That's the task. [Verse 2 - bass gets heavier] Fanon warned it first, in The Wretched of the Earth's central chapter's heat — Watch the national bourgeoisie, it inherits the colonial seat. It doesn't build, it middlemans; it doesn't produce, it trades a cut, A lawyer class playing settler, stuck in the exact same rut. He called it the pitfalls of national consciousness in his book — Independence with the same old structure is a flag, not a fresh look. [Verse 3 - full band, still sparse] Walter Rodney mapped it as underdevelopment, colony built to bleed — Monocrop, extractive, no linkage, exactly what the metropole would need. In How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, he said the terms of trade don't shift Just because the flag changed color — the comprador collects the same old gift. He said it about Africa and he said it walking Georgetown's street with the WPA, Same structure, different accent, same class eating what the workers made. [Chorus - horns enter for the first time, still restrained] It's not enough to hold the office if you're holding the old design, It's not enough to fly the flag over the same extraction line. Cabral said bury the position, not the person — that's the harder ask, Class suicide isn't a slogan, Fanon and Rodney said it's a daily task. [Bridge - drops to just bass and vocal] Cabral died in Conakry in '73, shot by men from his own ranks. Rodney died in Georgetown in 1980, a radio bomb, no thanks From a government that called itself socialist while it starved the plan — The class analysis wasn't paranoia. It's exactly what began. [Outro - Mantra, dub echo trailing off, names added one per line, then silence] Bury the position. Keep the person. Cabral. Fanon. Rodney. That's the task.