Relentless! 50 years of leadership towards African redemption
A CALL for global African Liberation Day mobilization
By Chairman Omali Yeshitela
The year 2022 marks the 50th Anniversary of the first African Liberation Day (ALD) mobilization which was held on May 27, 1972. ALD was originally organized in unity with the armed anti-colonial struggles for independence being waged for African liberation in Namibia, South Africa, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau and Angola.
Fifty years later Africa is still not free. We continue to be ensnared by the colonial mode of production that came into existence through the savage European attack on Africa that stitched together a global economy for the first time in history. These atrocities rescued what is now Europe from a thousand years of impoverished and unfree existence under a feudal mode of production mired in ignorance and cruelty.
The African People’s Socialist Party also celebrated our 50th anniversary during the 3rd Plenary of our Seventh Congress held February 11 through 14 this year.
A half a century ago, our Party was founded to overturn this oppressive colonial relationship that defines the reality of Africa and Africans globally. Enchained within illegitimate borders created by Europe to satisfy its vampiric economic appetite, and forcibly dispersed from our Motherland, Africa and Africans involuntarily became the source of the now-existing global economy. This economy is characterized by the dialectic of predatory parasitism affixed to a fettered host – the dialectic of the colonizer and the colonized.
This is the economic basis responsible for the subjective factor – the sense of white sameness – resting on the material economic foundation of a global colonial economy, a relationship that together constitutes the required definition of nations.
The theme of the African People’s Socialist Party 3rd Plenary reflects this history, the basis of the global conditions of our existence as Africans and the task ahead for Africa and Africans universally.
“Relentless! 50 years of leadership towards African redemption” was the appropriate theme for our Party’s 3rd Plenary. It is also the appropriate theme for the African Liberation Day activities being organized by the African People’s Socialist Party throughout the world.
Our theme “Relentless” represents a refusal to accept the verdict of imperialism, of colonial-capitalist rule, that has condemned Africa and Africans to an eternity of national subjugation and humiliation facilitated by colonial borders in Africa and our forced African dispersal throughout the world.
Africans, a once free people existing within our own independent economies in Africa, have been transformed into commodities (first-capital) and producers of capital (first-workers) within a global social system defined by the relationship between capitalist production and producers resting on a foundation of slavery and colonial domination of peoples and territories.
National liberation serves the purpose of freeing Africans from direct foreign domination. However, direct foreign domination is not necessary for vicious, life-draining economic exploitation, either by foreign or domestic capital.
“National liberation” under the leadership of the African petty bourgeoisie has left in place a system of exploitation. African toilers, producers, now continue to be exploited under the aegis of a domestic flag, maybe as in today’s conquered Libya, a reactionary appropriation of our Red, Black, and Green flag.
To be victorious, our revolution must take place under the leadership of the African working class. This is the role of the African People’s Socialist Party, the advanced detachment, and general staff of the African working class.
Only the African working class, aligned with other toilers, especially the poor peasants, has a material interest in destroying the entire system of exploitation and all of its attendant structures, including the fabricated colonial borders that exploit Africa but function as the incubators for the reproduction of the neocolonial petty bourgeois class as a social force.
Only the African working class is compelled to fight for the destruction of class society and the foreign and alien exploitation that produced it.
Under the independent revolutionary leadership of the African working class, organized under African Internationalist principles, victory will mean the defeat of foreign imperialists and their domestic minions.
It will mean that the toilers – the workers and poor peasants in particular – will become the new, temporary ruling class, the legitimate custodians of the means of production now owned and controlled by capitalists, mostly foreign.
Liberation under the leadership of African Internationalist-informed workers, organized in the African People’s Socialist Party will mean the unification of Africa and Africans globally and the end of economic exploitation, and once the imperialists and African petty bourgeois neocolonialists have been crushed, the end of all exploitation and the destruction of the colonial-capitalist system.
This is the liberation fought for under the leadership of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and Marcus Garvey more than 100 years ago under the slogan: Africa for Africans at home and abroad. This is the African liberation sought by Kwame Nkrumah that the 1963 creation of the Organization of African Unity that codified the colonial borders within Africa, was conceived to deny.
The Organization of African Unity (OAU), founded in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on May 25, narcissistically declared its neocolonialist birth date as African Liberation Day, thereby conferring legitimacy upon the colonial borders and continental-wide neocolonial rule over Africa for the first time in history.
The 1963 creation of the OAU was a highpoint of the global colonial war against Africa. It was a reactionary colonial war that attempted to quench the fires of liberation in Vietnam, all of Asia, South America and much of Africa as exemplified by the Mau Mau in Kenya, the National Liberation Front in Algeria, and the Union of People of Cameroon.
These were cascading struggles that constituted existential challenges to the colonial mode of production. They offer some context for the attack on Nkrumah’s efforts to unite a borderless Africa that fed the anxiety of the white colonial rulers who had already murdered Patrice Lumumba in Congo and Dedan Kimathi in Kenya as well as neutralized Robert Sobukwe and the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania.
Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a guest of Kwame Nkrumah and attendee of independence ceremonies in Accra, Ghana in 1957, were to be victims of colonial assassination within this general time frame along with several others, especially members of the Black Panther Party in the U.S.
The liberation of Africa and Africans has not yet occurred. There is not yet Uhuru. Nor will the name change to “African Union” suffice to obscure the infamy of the Organization of African Unity as a superstructure of the colonial mode of production enveloping Africa and the world.
This is a call by the African People’s Socialist Party to Africans of the world to join with us in the mission established by our 1972 founding to complete the Black Revolution of the Sixties. The history of the African revolution of the last 50 years is concentrated in our Party.
Malcolm X, Patrice Lumumba, Robert Sobukwe, Kwame Nkrumah and the great Marcus Garvey all live in the fifty years of continued work for total liberation and unification of Africa and the dispersed African nation by our Party.
This is a call that is extended to all Africans – in Africa and abroad – to every region of the world to which our nation has been forcibly dispersed. Join with us throughout the U.S. – in the Southern, Midwestern, Northern and Western regions of St. Petersburg, Florida, St. Louis Missouri, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Oakland, California, respectively.
In the Caribbean Region we will be mobilizing in Jamaica, and in Europe we will congregate in London, England and Paris, France.
The Party’s African Liberation Day organizing work for continental Africa is centered in Johannesburg, South Africa. We are organizing for African Liberation Day in every region in Africa from our Johannesburg headquarters.
The African People’s Socialist Party has been custodian of the African revolution. The African Revolution is not to be confused with the purely localized Pan Africanist struggles that accept the limitations placed on our struggles by artificial borders and false national consciousness.
We are African Internationalists. The African People’s Socialist Party recognizes that the liberation and unification of Africa and Africans can only happen under the leadership of the Advanced Detachment, the Vanguard of the African working class and nation, those of us who have no material interests in preserving the colonial mode of production upon which all capitalist activity relies for its existence.
Our call to organize African Liberation Day activities in every region of the African world is a call by the African People’s Socialist Party to complete the Black Revolution of the Sixties and reverse the verdict of imperialism requiring infinite rape, pillage and humiliation of Africans and our Africa.
This is also a call in preparation for the African People’s Socialist Party’s 8th Congress in October 2023, the first ever on the African continent, marking the final offensive for African liberation and unification at home and abroad.
This is a call to Africans of the world to participate in the African Liberation Day activities sponsored by the African People’s Socialist Party in every region of the world, to attend in person where possible and through social media where necessary.
Today we see more and more evidence of what the Chairman of our Party calls, the crisis of imperialism. The white ruling class and their neo-colonial puppets can no longer rule in the same old way. Throughout the world, African workers have taken to the streets to demand that governments address their basic needs and concerns. Small reform and consensus no longer satisfy the appetite of the suffering African masses.
We are at a time in history when the desire for total liberation for African people conflicts with white colonial capitalist domination over Africans and other colonized peoples of the world.
Under the leadership of Chairman Omali Yeshitela, our Party has taken up the responsibility to win Africans to organization as we prepare to govern. The task of building an African worker’s state requires it, which the Chairman writes, “can only come into existence by the workers destroying the colonial base of capitalist production replacing the oppressive State of the colonial capitalist and transforming ‘surplus’ value into social wealth to provide for the well being of society.”
The Party has already begun the work to build the infrastructure for self-government through the creation of its regional committees in Africa, the Caribbean, the U.S. and Europe.
Forward to African Liberation Day 2021!