African Socialist International Chairman, Omali Yeshitela , and acclaimed actor Ron Bobb-Semple are teaming up for a two-week tour of Europe as part of the strategy to build one revolutionary political party that will carry out the will of the vast majority of Africa's workers and peasants throughout the world.
This effort is organized under the banner, the "Marcus Garvey Legacy Tour."
It is an effort to carry out the Honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey's mission of "Africa for the Africans, those at home and those abroad."
Garvey was the leader of the greatest movement of Africans in modern history.
During the first quarter of the 20th century, he led an organization, the United Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, which spanned the globe with more than 12 million members.
One aspect of this Legacy Tour is the existence of Black Star Industries (BSI), the strategy of the African Socialist International (ASI) to emulate Garvey by launching the economic struggles to build our own economy, as Garvey did with Black Star Shipping Lines.
This strategy will allow us to “do for self” and become a free and self-determining people.
This Marcus Garvey Legacy Tour starts on October 18, 2012, in High Wycombe, a small city in the United Kingdom.
Chairman Omali has spoken many times in that city, first in 1995, then in 1999, 2011 and earlier this year in 2012.
It is a place where the International People's Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM) is in place and is strongly supported in this great struggle for self-determination.
The Tour’s next stop will be October 19 in Sweden, before going into Germany, then to Belgium and closing on October 28 in London, England.
In places like Belgium, where the vast majority of Africans there are from the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Marcus Garvey Legacy Tour would be an invaluable educative and organizing tool.
The tour will link the powerful and internationalist Garvey movement to Simon Kimbangu, the anti-colonial hero who led the fight against Belgian colonialism in Congo in the early 1920s.
In addition, it will teach about the influence Garvey had on Kwame Nkrumah, and that Nkrumah in turn had on Congo's revolutionary freedom fighter, Patrice Lumumba.
In Congo today, Simon Kimbangu has been elevated by his sons and the African petty bourgeoisie to deity and prophet status.
They liquidate the fact that it was Kimbangu's on-the-ground leadership against Belgian colonialism that forced the colonialist state to imprison him for more than thirty years on sedition charges, where he eventually died in Katanga, Congo in 1951.
This Marcus Legacy Tour will have the benefit of the participation Ron Bobb-Semple, a renowned actor whose one man show about Marcus Garvey is a unique experience that you cannot miss. It is like listening and being in the actual presence of Marcus Garvey himself.
This is an example of art in the service of revolution.
Joining African resistance worldwide
The outcome of this tour will be an acceleration of African Internationalist consciousness throughout the African communities in Europe, which suffer from the same united hands of white imperialism, yet resist and suffer separately.
This tour will cement the organized existence of the European Front of the African Revolution by connecting Africans across Europe with African Internationalism.
This tour is happening at a time when imperialism is in crisis all around the world.
It is unable to enforce its murderous world social order in the same old ways.
Imperialism can no longer depend solely on neocolonialist henchmen like Mubarak in Egypt, the Kabilas and Mobutus in Congo, the Shah of Iran or Saddam Hussein in Iraq to downpress the people.
Everywhere, oppressed peoples are demanding control over our lives, land and resources, and are fighting back and resisting to make it so.
We see a white power military coalition led by the U.S. government, fiercely assaulting the peoples of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria and others because the old way isn't working anymore.
We see proxy wars throughout Africa causing millions of deaths so that imperialist exploitation can continue. But even with their neocolonial henchmen, the U.S. has found it absolutely necessary to put U.S. boots on the ground with the presence of AFRICOM, headquartered in Djibouti in East Africa.
The crisis of imperialism in Europe has denied white people their ability to live in the same old way as when the "sun never set on the British empire."
The current generation of white people are unable to secure colonial bounty like their parents and grandparents did before them; capitalist ideologues and economists are nowhere close to explaining, let alone solving, the crisis for economic benefit and peace of mind for the majority of white people.
Anxiety is the order of the day. They just don't know what to expect from one day to the next.
White rulers and white colonial societies have no control over the revolutionary uprisings of the colonized and oppressed of the world, which is the cause of the crisis.
China, India, Malaysia, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, etc. are developing their own industrial capacities and self-help economies.
Reactionary states like Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Japan are strategically buying assets in imperialist centers, which were, not long ago, reserved to white ruling class ownership only.
This is an alliance stamped with "imperialism in decline" and “imperialism mortally wounded” all over it.
This is a period of change, a shift in the balance of power in favor of the toiling masses of Africa, Asia and Latin America.
There is no better time than now to bring back and uphold the legacy of Marcus Garvey.
As the old Chinese revolutionary Mao Zedong once said, we must "seize the time."
The Garvey movement achieved its political significance at a time of profound crisis of imperialism in the first quarter of the last century.
Imperialism was also in crisis in the 1920s when the Garvey movement was at its height.
The difference now is that during the First Imperialist War, the imperialists were fighting amongst themselves to divide the colonial booty, which was the basis of their wealth.
But this time around the imperialist have had to unite in NATO to survive the growing national liberation movements which are taking back their stolen resources. They now have to fight the colonial peoples ourselves to maintain the system of the oppressed and the oppressor, which was not the case in the First or Second Imperialist Wars.
Garvey understood the shift of power which was happening in the world during his time.
He saw the Chinese, Vietnamese, Mexican and other oppressed peoples engaged in national liberation struggles, trying to take back their destiny in their own hands.
Garvey was a witness to the victory of the Russian revolution against a feudal monarchy, and subsequently sent a congratulatory message to V.I. Lenin and the Russian revolution's leadership.
Garvey was well aware that Africans were part of a worldwide anti-colonial force of change.
Within the oppressor white nation, Garvey saw the growing German capitalist power, and the U.S. challenging England for the capitalist white power nations' leadership.
Garvey understood that Africans had to organize, unite and strike out as one people against white colonial power, and snatch back our inalienable and non-negotiable right to universal African self-determination.
Garvey realized that we can only win our freedom as one people, as Africans.
No one has ever mobilized and organized any working class as Garvey did, across three continents, achieving a membership of 12 million people.
The time for Africans to go on the offensive
For Garvey, the crisis of imperialism was a time for Africans to go on the offensive.
The Marcus Garvey Legacy Tour in 2012 is happening in similar circumstances, dominated by the general crisis of imperialism.
There is a weakening of the Euro and the U.S. dollar, the loss of prestige by U.S. imperialism, the rise of resistance from the international Muslim population, the awakening of China, India, Iran, the resistance of the people of Syria and Lebanon, the bold resistance of Chavez and the people in Venezuela and the growing resistance in Latin America to oppose U.S. domination, etc.
This tour is part of the call to organize the dispersed African nation for the onward march toward a united Africa under the leadership of the African working class.
This is the mission that Chairman Omali Yeshitela, the leader and founder of the African Socialist International has set for himself and the Party.
In order to win our freedom, we must be organized as One Party, One People, One Africa, and One Nation, because we have One Destiny!
All fronts must be united into one vanguard party of the Black Revolution, and that party is known as the African Socialist International (ASI).
The ASI is today the “Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League" of yesterday.
With a blossoming African Socialist International, the advanced detachment of the international African Working Class, we will uphold the best of the Garvey legacy; we will free and unite the African nation and plant the Red, Black and Green flag on the hilltops of every village, town and city in Our Africa.
Join the Marcus Garvey Legacy Tour!
This time til its won!
Uhuru!