Mario Africa's Latest Incarnation

(The Latest Incarnation of the former "Mario Africa" on the left)

There are people in and around MOVE who know what the deal is with the cult and then there are those whose eyes and minds are glazed over. Mario Africa belongs to the first category. Mario was up to his bloated neck in the terror campaign waged against John Gilbride while at the same time serving as a kind of recruiter and mentor for newer MOVE supporters.

And although the now clean shaven, bald-headed, ex-MOVEer has apparently left the cult to which he called home for so many years, he still seems unwilling to say why.

Now he has his own Myspace webpage at

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=113901301

proving that if the internet is the information highway, that Myspace is the seething gutter where the refuse goes.

What I find interesting about Mario's site is that while there are brief mentions of, Mumia it does not mention MOVE or it's founder John Africa. In MOVE, John Africa is venerated as a god, if not the one and only God. For Mario not to mention his former deity on his new site serves my point that he has forsaken his former rulers and struck out on his own.

It also appears that he no longer resides in Philadelphia, but instead has pulled up stakes and gone off to Brooklyn NY. No mention of the MOVE "family" he left behind aside from some very bad poetry dedicated to the children he apparently abandoned to the cult. One can only hope that one day his poor kids will be taught to read so that they can see that daddy cared, just not enough to get them out of the hell that they will grow up in under MOVE's oppression.

I realize that there will be those reading this who will suffer under the misaprehension that I am being unjustifiably hard on poor old Mario. The argument could be made that yes he has left MOVE and wants to leave the past in the past and get on with his life. The fact is that I know of former MOVE adherents who have done just that and I have no quarrel with them. The problem I have with Mario is that he knows exactly what MOVE is and he knows precisely what MOVE has done and to whom the group has done it to and yet he continues to pretend otherwise.

What is perhaps even worse than his silent complicity is the fact that he paints himself as some kind of crusader for justice and even proclaims himself amongst many other things to be an "anti-authoritarian". The hypocrisy of this man is severely testing my intestinal fortitude and I am afraid that if I go further with this subject that my Taco Bell dinner will soon make it's way onto my keyboard.

Now, while I reject MOVE's brand of ad-hominem attacks and crass rhetoric I must admit that sometimes only certain words can apply to certain kind of people. And when I think of Mario the only thing that comes to mind is "motherfucking coward". That about sums it up...