BRITAIN — On May 23-24, 2009, Africans from around Europe will converge in Manchester, England for a special two-day African Liberation Day (ALD) conference. Every year in many parts of the world, Africans come together at this time to celebrate and support African struggles that are happening around the world. They also meet to draw lessons from the past era’s resistance that has led to the end of direct white colonial rule over Africa and African people.
However, the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) intends to use this year’s ALD to take the responsibility to complete our struggle for freedom. We must recognize what the whole world recognizes — that the overwhelmingly vast majority of the toiling masses of African people have nothing to celebrate.
From Congo to Somali, Sudan to Haiti; from Zimbabwe to the jails of the United States; from the working class neighborhoods of Brazil to England, poverty and colonially engineered violence dominates the lives of African people. Our conditions continue to worsen without relief or end in sight.
The period requires ALD to be tool to liberate and unite Africa
This period of economical turmoil, characterized by the ongoing unprecedented financial world crisis of imperialism, requires from African revolutionaries and progressive forces a different type of African Liberation Day.
It must be an ALD that speaks to the conditions of the African workers and poor peasants by raising the centrality of the emancipation of the whole African working class and poor peasantry all over the planet. It has to help to solve the pertinent questions facing the oppressed and dispersed African nation.
What type of organization is required to lead the emancipation of the African nation and its one billion toiling masses? What would be the strategies and tactics of that organization? What type of social class and what type of philosophical worldview are required to lead this process?
Freedom must mean the end of indirect colonial rule and the unification of Africa states under the leadership of the African working class. Short of international State power in the hands of workers and peasants, freedom would be an empty word, which only favors imperialism, its compradors and bureaucratic allies of the African petty bourgeoisie in the quest for the status quo.
The African People’s Socialist Party is calling on all African revolutionaries and progressive individuals based in Europe to use this ALD as a special occasion to unite into a single organization that will coordinate the struggle of African people and defend in Europe the interests of the worldwide African liberation struggle that is being fought in all corners of the globe.
Unlike Africans in our homeland, we reside in Europe, the homeland of the imperialist bourgeoisie that is historically responsible for the daily neocolonial exploitation and violence against African masses on the continent. The $1 or less a day paid to us is a decision made by the white capitalist rulers here in Europe. The harsh immigration laws that fill the jails with our young people or cause us to lose our lives crossing the seas in precarious conditions are made here in Europe.
Most of the weapons and wars that are devastating Africa come from here. Europe is one of the places that stores that untold millions of trillions of dollars of wealth and value continuously stolen from Africa for hundreds of years.
It is here in Europe that many of the puppet rulers of Africa are trained and supported in their job to facilitate the looting of Africa. The formation and existence of a united African revolutionary struggle, lead by a single revolutionary organization, is of fundamental significance in advancing the interests of African workers and poor peasants, most of whom will never see the Europe that their labor and wealth have built.
ASI is African workers’ tool to take future in own hands
The conference is open to the public and will include workshops on consolidating the African national identity; the imperialist military operation AFRICOM; war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somali and Sudan; crisis in Zimbabwe and South Africa; creating sustainable energy development projects in Africa; and the question of reparations and the upcoming World Tribunal on Reparations for Africa and African People.
It is time now that we, the African workers and poor peasants, take our future into our own hands and liberate our Africa under an all-African socialist government. With our unity, we will defeat the opportunist African petty bourgeoisie that has sold us out time and time again.
The ASI is the vehicle to achieve the visions of our great leaders Kwame Nkrumah, Malcolm X, Patrice Lumumba and Marcus Garvey of a united and free Africa — the homeland of Africans on the continent and those forcibly dispersed across the globe. The more than one billion African people worldwide must build for ourselves a single united revolutionary fighting organization to make Africa a powerhouse in the world, where no nation would be able to steal our resources and labor at our expense.
African Liberation Day will be held at the West Indian Centre, 74 Carmoor Rd, Manchester, England M13 0FB
For more info, email uhuruasi@aol.com or call 0786 229 4364 or 020 8265 1731.
