This is part three of Chairman Omali Yeshitela’s 2026 Political Report to the Fourth Plenary of the African People’s Socialist Party’s Seventh Congress.
Applications to Party increased in the face of state attacks
Any presumption on the part of the colonial state that the attack on our Party would serve to frighten Africans and others from association with the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP); any notion from Party and Movement forces that the severity of our anti-colonialist African Internationalist political line would deter Africans from attempting to join the ranks of our Party, the Advanced Detachment, have been proven absolutely wrong. Indeed, there was an explosion of membership applicants following news of the attack on our Party.
There were two related reasons for this. Although we were not personally or organizationally named in colonial media coverage as the “unindicted co-conspirators” who experienced the July 2022 military assault, enough was revealed for people to discover it on their own with some assistance from the Party’s media outreach following the attack. The attack made it possible for many who had never previously encountered us to learn of our existence and our work.
The second, related, reason the attacks contributed to a rash of membership applications, was because in discovering us, the people learned there were still anti-colonialist liberatory forces not limited to simple protest and “activism,” but were seriously intent to win the freedom being sought by legendary forces like Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba, Che Guevara and others who represented in the public mind the last dignified and principled struggle to change the world that most of the “activists” of today are limited to only explaining.
From July 30, 2022, the day after the military attack on our Party, until the end of 2024, nearly 400 people applied for Party membership. Most of them were not accepted as Party members. We were not prepared for the rush. Some of this was due to structural and procedural shortcomings, something we have been working on since that time, up to now.
The larger reason we were not prepared for the stampede clamoring for Party membership was what we learned from the experience of the Black Panther Party (BPP) of the 1960s. The greatest rush of Black Panther Party membership occurred with the attacks made on the organization by the colonial state. In many instances Africans began to spontaneously set up Black Panther Party branches and engage in activities the BPP headquarters knew nothing about but for which they were held accountable by the people and the state.
This spontaneity had created the perfect scenario for colonizer-initiated provocateurs to wreak havoc within the organization and tie it up with treasury-exhausting and politically disruptive adventures from which the Black Panther Party spent an inordinate amount of time, resources and prestige attempting to extricate itself.
We were not going to do this. Of course some of the membership rejections were due to our errors. From a tradition of protecting ourselves from some of the contradictions that undermined the BPP we swung heavily in the other direction.
Our process of recruitment made the error of requiring applicants to be African Internationalists before they had the benefit of the political education provided by Party membership. This contributed to a situation where our recruitment protocols served to keep people out of the Party rather than bring them in.
Of course many were just not Party material for a number of reasons for which neither they nor the Party were responsible. But we continue to work on resolving all the contradictions associated with the crucial task of recruitment.
African women are equal makers and shapers of history
The African National Women’s Organization (ANWO) is our immediate response to bringing women into the Party en masse. For the first time ever, a revolutionary Party has assumed the responsibility of targeting African women to be educated and recruited into the African Revolution as equals. From its inception the African People’s Socialist Party has recognized and acted on the historical role African women have played in the struggle to make us free.
We have spurned a tradition of ghettoizing the issue of African women in the liberation movement that assigned women into areas of work and committees with the responsibilities of handling “women’s work” as though the issues confronting African women are not embodied in colonialism and the colonial mode of production just as those confronting African men.
And while ANWO gives us an organization with the responsibility of bringing African women into political life and helping to overcome the existing social prejudices and structures affecting their abilities and confidence, the organizational participation of women in our Party is not limited to ANWO. The leadership of women in all Party work is reflected in the high percentage of women on our Central Committee, a number that has at times been greater than 50 percent.
Historically the African Revolution has been victimized by a bourgeois colonial practice of ignoring or giving short shrift to the specific features of colonialism as it affects African women—treating African women as simple appendages being incapable of understanding the world and their special oppression as women from a scientific, African Internationalist perspective.
This practice has contributed to the successful lure of petty bourgeois or outright bourgeois feminist intervention into the revolutionary working class-led struggle to defeat colonialism and the mode of production that obscures class and national oppression.
With ANWO we enhance the Party’s capacity by unleashing the revolutionary fervor and genius within our sisters, thereby creating the conditions for bringing at least half the colonized African population into the ranks of our Revolution. This alone is enough to salute the work of ANWO. But beyond this we contribute to the definition of the African Revolution by bringing, full-fledged, the issues specific to the colonial contradictions that target women.
Our Revolution and our Party must have access to this critical force. ANWO is the strategic organization at our disposal to bring African women into our Party, first indirectly as a reserve force through membership in ANWO and ultimately directly into the Party.
ANWO is part of our work to bring African women fully into active, organizational participation in the revolutionary movement to liberate our whole people from colonial domination under the leadership of the African working class. ANWO has a seat on our Central Committee and participates in every aspect of our Party’s work along with every other member of the Central Committee.
These are some of the additional reasons the recent struggle with ANWO President Comrade Yejide Orunmila is so important. ANWO was created to bring African women firmly into the struggle of our whole people against colonialism under the leadership of the African working class as represented by our Party.
Instead, through ANWO, Comrade President Yejide Orunmila attempted to open a second, contending headquarters that included women whose primary unity was in opposition to the Party and its various policies with which they disagreed.
This second contending organization violates the ANWO Constitution and Party’s Constitution and structure in many ways.
The Constitution of ANWO clearly states that ANWO was formed by the Party, is subject to the supervision of the Party and follows Party policies and protocols.
This was a severe abandonment of the Party’s main organizational principle, democratic centralism that did not require the women dissidents to unite with the Party, our strategic direction or any of the Party Congress or Plenary Political Reports or resolutions.
Additionally, this error was compounded by Comrade Yejide’s filing paperwork with the colonial state, without permission of the Party, to transform ANWO, a Party organization into an independent organization based on entirely different principles and opening the Party up to colonial state attack, and liquidate the political question of colonialism in addition to liquidating the leadership and control of the Party itself, something with which the Party is still contending as this political report is being prepared.
With the formation of this new entity, ANWO would be severely limited as a 501c3. Activities such as the Arrest CPS Campaign, social media, organizing demonstrations or awareness events, public statements supporting APSP or the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM), transferring any funds to APSP or political entities would all be curtailed.
The Party’s intent is to maintain organizations such as ANWO, the African People’s Solidarity Committee (APSC) and InPDUM as organizations of the Party.
They were set up this way specifically to stop opportunist and renegade attempts to subvert the structure and purpose of the organizations. For example, the Party has learned from historic struggles with APSC in 1984.
The Party has so many tools developed to help Party members and leaders to understand our political line, it goes beyond just talk. We have books, newspapers and manuals to assist us with any questions we have, but most importantly we have leaders, and members ready to help answer any questions that one has about the Party struggles and contradictions.
Struggles with Comrade Yejide in our Central Committee meetings have opened this contradiction up for full view and examination. They have allowed the Central Committee to crush this renegade action and forced recognition that good intentions are not sufficient to justify violation of basic Party organizational principles, especially the main organizational principle of democratic centralism.
President Yejide fully united with the criticism and has fully united with overturning this stance. Criticism/self-criticism helps us to discover all mistakes, deviations and shortcomings that separate us from the masses, and to correct them. It helps us to improve the work of the Party organizations; to smash liberalism, subjectivity and bureaucracy; to expose the agents of the enemy in our ranks.
The African People’s Socialist Party has a political theory based on practice and science that shows how to analyze and move in a way that’s effective and brings positive results.
Part of the Party’s process of educating our membership and rectifying the errors of Comrade Yejide’s grievous recklessness, requires her to present her self-criticism publicly within various Party/Movement forums, including this Plenary.
Organizing Africans in prison
Another essential front for mass recruitment is in the concentration camps of the colonial prison system. We must use the presence of The Burning Spear in the colonial prisons as an opportunity to recruit from the prisons. We must also consider reestablishing the African National Prison Organization (ANPO) as a vehicle for bringing prisoners into the Party.
Africans incarcerated in the colonial prison system’s concentration camps represent a generally untapped revolutionary force. The original Nation of Islam (NOI) that recruited Malcolm X into the anti-colonial struggle from prison set an example of the possibilities to win these caged Africans into revolutionary life.
The prisoners are forcibly locked into a disciplined life within these concentration camps. They are cruelly oppressed within the prisons with no real understanding of why they are there. Often even the most militant of politicized prisoners accept the colonizer’s narrative that their presence in prison is due to their own culpability, the result of something they participated in that violated the colonial law.
With the exception of those who have come under the political or ideological influence of our Party, the prisoners do not generally understand that the law they may have violated is based on the reality in which the viciously cruel colonizers confer upon themselves the ability to make and enforce law within a legal order that is born of an illegitimate colonial system. This “legal order” constitutes part of the superstructure that rests on a parasitic colonial economic base.
Like the rest of the population—Africans and others—prisoners are taught by the colonizers that their plight and presence in concentration camps is due to personal, individual choices made by themselves. This tends to isolate the prisoners with this false abstraction of reality. This obscures the fact that all freedom is illegal for the colonized, that colonialism by definition requires repression of the colonized, and that any other explanation serves as a justification of colonialism as a forcibly imposed social system.
We are teaching them differently. Our Party has worked within the prison system since our founding more than 50 years ago. We created the African National Prison Organization in 1979. One of its main leaders was the legendary Mafundi Lake from Birmingham, Alabama who had achieved heroic stature throughout the southern U.S. because of his organizing work at the notorious Atmore-Holman prison.
