Dhoruba al-Mujahid Bin-Wahad, age 63, is a former Black Panther Party leader from New York. Once a Black Political Prisoner in the USA for nineteen years, Bin Wahad is a long time Pan-African activist, writer, and lecturer. Born to parents from the Caribbean and Southern United States, Bin-Wahad was raised in the Southeast Bronx and Harlem as “Richard Earl Moore”. Once a South Bronx gang leader (Torch) and a fledgling artist, Bin- Wahad’s social and political consciousness developed during the cold war era in an America deeply polarized by institutional racism. Characterizing himself as a “victim of public school education”, Bin-Wahad is mostly self- taught, with only two years of college under his belt. He has always viewed academic pursuit as tool enabling social activism—not as an end in itself. For Bin-Wahad, to pursue education is to train for the struggle—but social practice is the criterion of a valid education. Refusing to be sucked into the standard western educational system, which he defines as an “elitist system of mental engineering which teaches people what to think rather how to be better people”, Bin-Wahad has engaged scholars internationally for over two decades on issues of racism, the role of European history and culture in global under-development, and the politics of modern nation-states. His radical and often controversial analyses and essays have received wide- spread acceptance amongst Black and Non-Western students and critical acclaim from progressive intellectuals ranging from Professors Noam Chomsky to Dr. Cornel West. Civil rights and moral activists Rev. Al Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan respect and acknowledge the depths of Bin- Wahad’s “no holds barred” Pan-African analysis.
Currently, Bin-Wahad resides in West Africa where he is the resident “Director of the Institute for Development of Pan-African Policy (IDPAP), and BlackStar Consults Limited”. IDPAP is a West African Based NGO, which attempts to co-ordinate expatriate expertise to evaluate and study policies from a grass-root Pan-African perspective and perform advisory and liaison work for the African Diaspora.
