It has been a few days since we arrived here in Kenya. We have come to conduct training for the comrades who have taken upon their shoulders the responsibility to build the African Socialist International (ASI) in this area.
Things here in Kenya are relatively calm at the moment compared to the last time I was here. Last year, crisis and instability were thick in the air, and government repression was obvious.
At that time two student activists had just been assassinated in broad daylight a month or so before we arrived. The coalition government that had been formed off the back of the fraudulent elections that spawned widespread violence was shaky and struggling within itself.
Two ministers resigned within a few days of our arrival and another former minister had held a press conference saying the government was trying to kill him.
The instability and repression were extremely overt then, but that is not to say that they are not present now.
One can still walk down the street and see police troops carrying AK-47s and other automatic weapons.
Of course, the conditions of the people have not gotten any better either. I spent some time in one of the poorer areas of Kenya on yesterday.
It seemed like I was walking through one of the shantytowns of Soweto in Occupied Azania (still called by the colonial name South Africa).
Makeshift houses formed from scrap metal filled the area. Like in Kliptown in Soweto, there is no kind of plumbing or toilets. Waste runs in ditches alongside the shanties away to the outskirts of the community. On top of that, people are paying rent to live in these conditions.
So despite the relative calm, the conditions are the same or worse for African people here. There may be relative "peace" at the moment, but it is peace on the plantation — just an absence of resistance to the colonial rape of Kenya’s resources.
And even that peace seems to be running out of time as the warring sectors of the sellout neocolonial class gear up to do battle for the upcoming elections of 2012.
So the conditions here in Kenya, like those everywhere else that Africans find ourselves, call for the building of the African Socialist International. The ASI is a worldwide African revolutionary party that organizes and struggles for the liberation and unification of Our Africa and her people dispersed around the globe under the leadership of the African working class.
These conditions that are faced by our people from Kenya to Haiti, New Orleans to Sierra Leone make our success critical. We must consolidate the ASI in every location in the world where African people are.
And today, we have to strengthen the organization on the ground here in Kenya. So we shall do it!
Uhuru!
For the Party of Our People!
Binga
