African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) Chairman Omali Yeshitela is a giant of our times working to change the world. He has no State power, but his philosophy represents an existential threat to the status quo that is strangling the vast majority of the peoples of the planet; his philosophy recognizes that the colonial mode of production is the main contradiction that all peoples who want to see a new world being born face.
There is no other articulated force in the world that is saying and demanding that the colonial mode of production be overturned for peace to return to humanity.
He is the living revolutionary link to what came before in the black liberation movement. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Marcus Garvey, Patrice Lumumba, Malcolm X —they all find their place in Chairman Omali. They did not die in vain. They continue to live in revolution theorized and led by him.
No colonial university can claim him as the product of any training received from them. On the contrary, Chairman Omali’s work appears in the University of Oxford, the University of South Florida and other prestigious institutions of the bourgeoisie to enlighten everyone, whatever their intended purposes.
The self-taught giant—unlike those who preceded him like Garvey, Malcolm X, Lumumba and others—took on the worldview of socialism and remodeled it by criticizing Marx’s theory around primitive accumulation, the starting point of the genesis of capitalism without which there cannot be capitalism.
How can the white workers be the central force to destroy capitalism at its foundation if colonialism or “primitive accumulation” is the starting point?
The Chairman rightly coined the phrase “the road to socialism is painted black;” this is validated by the events that are unfolding before our eyes around the world.
The reparations demands initiated by Chairman Omali at the 1982 World Tribunal on Reparations for African People in the U.S. were but one of the contributions influencing a new dawn in the struggle for worldwide mobilization and unification of the African National Liberation Movement.
Today those African presidents and other personalities inside the petty-bourgeois class in African opportunistically demanding reparations, knowingly or unknowing, are feeling that influence. For instance, Ibrahim Babangida, the former president of Nigeria called in 1990 for Europe and the Americas to compensate Africa for the untold hardship and exploitation the continent has been subjected to.
Even more recently, in September 2025, the president of Ghana, John Dramani Mahama spoke at a book launch event for a reparations book written by Kwesi Pratt Jnr that he prefaced where he stated, “Reparations are not a charity. They are about truth. They are about justice. They are about healing and the reordering of the global system that has for centuries been built on the exploitation of Africa and her people.”
Such is the growing influence of Chairman Omali in Africa and around the world. There are all kinds of reparations organizations everywhere in the black world today, from the Caribbean to Africa to Europe and elsewhere.
Here in Europe, there are no black militant demonstrations in the UK that don’t chant African People’s Socialist Party slogans created by Chairman Omali such as “Touch One! Touch All!” and “One Africa! One Nation!”
In the UK, there used to be a commonly used slogan “Black and Asian Unity,” but the Party led the fight for African identity in the UK. We are not just “black” people. We are Africans.
We printed countless flyers, wrote articles and went on community radio programs, and we tirelessly proclaimed that black people in the Caribbean were Africans just as the Africans on the Continent of Africa. This is a battle that continues to transform the UK’s black community. The “West Indians” term to describe Africans born in the Caribbean islands is today obsolete to the majority of African people.
The Chairman brought the science of organizing to the streets of London: tables packed with literature of African Internationalism and a bold banner in the background only began to be seen with the Uhuru Movement.
The Party armed with African Internationalism stopped opportunist white militants coming to disrupt meetings to talk to us about Marxism, class struggle or socialism. They would get their ass politically kicked.
Chairman Omali Yeshitela is an innovator, thinker and practitioner. He often said the work is to solve the problems of the revolution, which concretely means the problems to win our freedom by regaining control of our future.
Just look at institutions created under his leadership in his relentless 50 years of leadership. It’s awesome! There is the African National Women’s Organization, the African People’s Solidarity Committee, the Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations and more.
That’s why we can say unequivocally and unambiguously, Long Live Chairman Omali Yeshitela! Hands Off Uhuru! Hands off Africa!
