UNITED STATES — This year’s African Liberation Day (ALD) mobilization will be different from any other that has occurred since the May 25, 1963 determination at the founding of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) that the date would be recognized as African Liberation Day. This year’s African Liberation Day event will be more than just a celebration; it will be an organized continuation of the struggle by African people to win genuine liberation for African people after hundreds of years of slavery, colonialism and the consequences of neocolonialism — the domination of Africa and African people by white power in black face.
Scheduled for Saturday, May 23 in Washington, D.C., and sponsored by the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP), African Liberation Day will function as the North American Conference to build the African Socialist International (ASI) under the slogan: “Separated by Colonial Slavery; Reunited by Revolutionary Resistance.”
Africans are expected to attend the D.C. conference from the U.S. and Canada especially, and possibly from Central America where other Africans have indicated an interest in building the African Socialist International, the single revolutionary organization that will function as the general staff for the international African revolution necessary to liberate and unite Africa and African people worldwide under the leadership of the African working class.
ALD mobilizations organized by the APSP have always been distinct in their revolutionary character. Since our Chairman Omali Yeshitela sat on the first ALD committee in the U.S. in 1972, we have understood that ALD cannot simply be a celebration of a liberation that our colonized nation has not yet won. To us, it is clear that ALD must serve to build revolutionary organization designed to destroy imperialism.
Since our Party’s founding, the call to build organization to defeat imperialism has been synonymous with ALD. For example, in 1986, the APSP organized ALD in Philadelphia, PA in direct response to the neocolonial mayor Wilson Goode’s bombing of the MOVE house and an entire African neighborhood in West Philadelphia in 1985. The slogan of that ALD mobilization was “Philadelphia, Reinforcements are on the Way!”
The 1986 ALD is just one of many examples of the ALD mobilizations our Party has built to forward our strategic goals and objectives.
While our Party emerged as a fighting Party to destroy the system of U.S. domestic colonialism, which holds captive nearly 50 million African people, our ultimate goal has always been the unification and liberation of Africa under an all-African socialist government. This goal has informed everything we do as a Party. The fact is that there will be no freedom for African people independent of a worldwide, united struggle of African people — under the leadership of the African working class — to liberate our mother Africa.
Forward to the North American Regional Conference of the African Socialist International!
A single worldwide African revolutionary organization with a single center and under a single discipline is necessary to take the African Liberation Movement to its final conclusion. That organization is the African Socialist International.
Under the leadership of ASI Director of Organization Chernoh Alpha M. Bah, the ASI held a successful West Africa regional conference in October of 2008. With over 500 attendants on each day, the conference has been characterized as “the largest socialist gathering in West Africa since the 1930s.” We are on the trajectory to hold the East Africa Conference in Kenya on March 15-18. Efforts to build the Central American Conference are currently underway as well.
And while the ASI must be built everywhere, the presence of the ASI in the North American region promises to serve a decisive blow to imperialism. In the U.S. in particular, but not exclusively, we struggle in the same imperialist cities and institutions that are responsible for developing and implementing a vicious counterinsurgent war against Africans and oppressed peoples worldwide. Masses of oppressed and exploited African workers live and work within walking distance of such institutions.
We live in cities — like Philadelphia where our Party is waging fierce class struggle with the neocolonial regime currently occupying City Hall — where imperialism’s neocolonial strategy governs over a political economy built on the highest incarceration rates in the world! This is all that keeps a dying but not yet dead parasitic economy alive, and neocolonialism is the only force that stands between African people and the organizational capacity and ideological clarity necessary to liberate ourselves!
We are making fierce struggle to expose and defeat neocolonialism in all its forms in Philadelphia, Washington D.C. (where Obama was recently sworn in to function as the current overseer of the U.S. imperialist plantation) and everywhere in the country. The struggle to build and consolidate the ASI in North America will provide the entire African community with the ideological clarity and organizational capacity needed to take the struggle to its final conclusion.
Moreover, the consolidation of the ASI in North America will provide African people with the capacity to move past the limitations of Pan-Africanism and expose the petty bourgeois opportunists masquerading as revolutionary or progressive leaders in our communities. Many of these forces mobilized support for imperialism’s neocolonial strategy in the form of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, showing that despite whatever nationalist rhetoric they espouse, their brand of nationalism is white nationalism. They are undercover U.S. patriots, willing to support imperialism’s attacks on our people as long as they are carried out with a black face.
The ASI could not have come at a better time, especially in the U.S., where African people are being told that we are somehow living in a “post-racial” society whose prison population just happens to be 80 percent African and Latino. The fact is the ASI is the righteous response to imperialism and neocolonialism, and its attempt to resolve its crisis through deepened exploitation and political repression of African people.
In the face of the deepening crisis of imperialism, virtually everyone today has its eyes on Africa, the richest continent on the planet in terms of natural resources. China, India and others recognize the weakness of U.S. and European imperialism, and are currently in motion to take full advantage of the situation, to tighten their own grips on Africa and her precious resources.
It is time for African people to have an agenda for our own Africa. We must build the African Socialist International to take Africa’s future into our own hands and free Africa and our people from the parasitic relationship that the U.S. and Europe have held it in or that any other force might plan for it.
ALD program serves as program for revolutionary organization
One can expect to hear at African Liberation Day presentations on theoretical questions made by ASI leadership, including Chairman Omali Yeshitela. The program for this year’s ALD will also serve to showcase the political and economic work the ASI is doing for the development and liberation of Africa.
Among the workshops will be presentations made by Dr. Aisha Fields, Director of the All African People’s Development and Empowerment Project (AAPDEP), a program that is dedicated to bringing sustainable development to Africa and African people. Currently, AAPDEP is leading water purification projects and healthcare programs to parts of west and southern Africa and organizing sustainability projects in North America in anticipation of the deepening economic crisis.
The program will also include discussion and implementation of the Revolutionary National Democratic Program (RNDP) currently being led in the U.S. by the APSP’s mass organization, the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement. The RNDP is designed to serve as the program to unite the broad sectors of the African community to overturn the colonial relationship that the U.S. government has with African people. Such issues as the prison industry, policed brutality and theft of African homes are addressed through the RNDP.
In addition, the work of our Party’s student wing, the African Internationalist Student Organization (AISO) will be presented at the ALD. AISO plays an extremely important role in the revolutionary process as it not only brings African students back into the revolutionary process, it also brings the struggle to the campus, thus advancing the overall strategic demand for reparations and free education for all African students.
Call to attend ALD 2009
Indeed, this year’s African Liberation Day promises to be of great historic significance. The ALD is a response to the changes that are occurring in the world, and at the same time, is representative of that change. Contrary to what the imperialists say, the basis of all change occurring in society today is the motion of oppressed people, demanding repossession of our freedom and resources.
No such motion has implications like that of the African working class struggling for our freedom and power. Imperialism was born out of its attack on Africa, and it is the African Liberation Movement that will serve imperialism its deathblow.
The ALD and the ASI represents a conscious effort on the part of the African working class to serve such a blow. This is a call for Africans throughout the U.S., Canada and the world to attend the upcoming African Liberation Day and join the African Socialist International!
Forward to the ALD 2009!
Smash neocolonialism! African workers must lead!
Build and consolidate the African Socialist International!
To attend ALD or to form a local ALD committee in your area call 215-500-0555 or visit www.alduhuru.org
