Chairman Omali Yeshitela summed up: “Paris was ours completely!”
Brutalized in the urban hell where French colonial subjects are amassed under deep poverty and intense police repression, Africans in Paris were enlightened by the clarity of the African People’s Socialist Party’s political line of African Internationalism which views the world through the eyes of the African working class.
Following the Party’s African Liberation Day (ALD) in Paris, Chairman Omali Yeshitela spent the next week sweeping through Cologne and Berlin, Germany and Stockholm, Sweden, completing the first leg of his 2013 worldwide tour building for the African People’s Socialist Party’s Sixth Congress December 7-11, 2013.
With the Congress’ theme of “One Africa, One Nation, One Party: African workers and peasants of the world unite!” the Chairman has already traveled to three continents on this year’s tour which is slated to continue until November.
African people and our allies from around the world are preparing to converge on St Petersburg, FL for the December Congress where we will be determining the upcoming work and strategy for liberating Africa in this period when the Party is experiencing exponential growth across the planet.
The Chairman was accompanied on the European tour by Party Deputy Chairwoman Ona Zene’ Yeshitela, African Socialist International (ASI) Secretary General Luwezi Kinshasa and African People’s Solidarity Committee Chairwoman Penny Hess.
In every city, the Chairman received enthusiastic responses to his call to build Party organizations as the cornerstone of the movement for the liberation and unification of Africa and African people everywhere.
ALD-Paris: ASI emerges as leading force
About 150 people participated in African Liberation Day in Paris, giving Chairman Omali a standing ovation after his powerful keynote speech.
The Chairman’s presentation recognized how Africans are deeply oppressed throughout Europe in ways that are different from our oppression inside the U.S. where Africans have resisted for hundreds of years as a domestic colony.
As the Chairman has often stated, African people are flooding into Europe in search of our resources stolen from us by European colonialism which has enriched white people at our expense for the past 500 years!
In many parts of Europe there is a concerted assault on the African identity, which is why African people in Europe often put great emphasis on culture as a matter of self-defense.
ASI European regional leader, Comrade Unia Leti gave a powerful presentation on the struggle of African women inside of the African Liberation Movement that challenged the opportunism and white nationalism of the white feminist movement.
Deputy Chair OnaZene gave an informative multi-media presentation on Black Star Industries (BSI), the Party’s institution for building the African liberated economy in the process of winning self-government led by the African working class. Her presentation elicited a lot of interest and questions in the BSI program.
Other speakers at ALD Paris included Secretary General Luwezi Kinshasa who gave a rousing call for membership, and African People’s Solidarity Committee Chair Penny Hess who laid out the political basis for the Party’s formation of the solidarity committee.
Other presentations came from the Algerian activist Houria Bouteldja of the group Les Indigenes; Krishna Makiese of the organization Cri de Femme from the Congo; and Franco Folia from the Brigade Anti Negrophobie.
Comrade Aqwapuma, a member of the Tawantinyu Nation, an organization of Indigenous people from South America based in London also gave a powerful poetry presentation.
Comrade Unia observed that “this year’s ALD-Paris was an outstanding event that marks the continuation of building the European Front of the African Liberation Movement.
“Presentations on the condition of African women, the issue of neocolonialism as the last stage of imperialism and the question of building solidarity from Europeans stood at the forefront of the program.
“Africans, who never heard of the Uhuru Movement before as well as other oppressed people, responded to the calls for organization with deep unity.”
Building the Party: solidarity in Germany and Sweden
From Paris, the Chairman and his entourage traveled to Cologne, Germany for an event on June 4.
InPDUM member Matos Kaumba coordinated the Cologne event which packed the house with at least 80 people that was a mix of Africans and Germans.
Since part of the goal of the tour was to build the African People’s Solidarity Committee on the European continent, the remaining events were opened up by a PowerPoint presentation by Hess addressing the European comrades, some of whom expressed interest in joining the solidarity committee.
From Cologne, the group traveled to Berlin where the Chairman spoke at Humboldt University as he did previously during the October 2012 Marcus Garvey Legacy tour.
The Berlin event was especially significant in deepening the relationship between the Party and the Filiz Demorova and Georgel Caldararu who are leading activists in the Roma community and founders of the online journal Der Paria.
As the Roma community is and has historically been under serious white nationalist assault in Europe, Comrades Filiz and Georgel want to deepen their relationship to the African People’s Socialist Party in the process of building a liberation movement for their people.
There was also an enthusiastic response from Africans in Berlin, including a man from Namibia who had seen the Chairman on TV when he visited the country several years ago.
Comrade Matos said of the events in Germany: “The African Liberation Day and the following events in Cologne and Berlin were exciting and successful. We are winning more and more people to African Internationalism everywhere, especially in Cologne-Germany, where we were able to contact new comrades as well as possible partners for the upcoming work of the African People’s Solidarity Committee in Germany!”
Leaving Berlin the group flew to Stockholm, Sweden which had been the scene of fierce resistance on the part of young Africans in the past few weeks following the police murder of a Muslim man.
The Stockholm work was coordinated by Comrades Fosiya, Makda and Sabrin, three powerful African women building the movement there. The event helped to consolidate local forces in Stockholm where an InPDUM branch is being formed.
Fosiya said of the event in Sweden, “We received positive feedback from people who came at the event, in particular from two people who want to build a relationship with us and join us.
“Oscar, a white person in the audience said to us a few days after the event, ‘Chairman Omali has shaken my worldview. The way he described the history was on point. It felt different to hear him speak of me as a white person as the object and not the subject. I really want to be a part this work.”
You can bring Chairman Omali Yeshitela to your town or city as part of his 2013 worldwide tour! Get on board; join the African Revolution! Build for the Sixth Congress of the African People’s Socialist Party!
For more information:
Call: 727-537-9723
Email: info@omaliyeshitela.org
Visit: http://omaliyeshitela.org/
