This is an excerpt of the “International Call to African Martyr’s Day” written by the Secretary General of the African Socialist International, Luwezi Kinshasa
International Call to organize against colonial violence against African people
In September 1981, the Congress of the African People’s Socialist Party instituted February 21, the day the U.S government assassinated Malcolm X─ a giant of the African revolution─ the “Day of African Martyr.”
Agents of the U.S government gunned down Malcolm X cowardly because of his success in mobilizing and organizing African people against the U.S. colonial government.
His assassination was part of a worldwide U.S. government counterinsurgency program to destroy successful leaders of the growing Black Liberation Movement.
U.S. leaders united with leaders of France, Britain, Belgium, Portugal, South Africa and others to neutralize our anti-colonial leaders and movement.
Just to name few, they killed Patrice Lumumba, Joseph Okito, Maurice Mpolo in Congo; Martin Luther King, and Fred Hampton in the U.S and Félix Moumié and UM Nyobe in Cameroon.
They also imprisoned Robert Sobukwe and killed Steve Bioko in South Africa and overthrew Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana etc.
On February 21, we commemorate all fallen leaders and Comrades in line of duty, in service of African liberation and unity across the world.
We are making a determination that death can no longer be used as a weapon to intimidate us!
We will not tolerate any of our oppressors to use death as a deterrent to force us to surrender or to lock us in a permanent state of powerlessness and demoralization.
Imperialist death or threat of death of our leaders will never lead us to a collective or individual surrender, but rather it’s a call to fight back as stated in The Spear:
“The African People’s Socialist Party calls on all African revolutionaries of all countries to raise high, in a revolutionary manner, the heroic memory of all fallen martyrs, of all those in every city, village, community, and country where they fell, as evidence of the determination of our people to fight every battle on every front ’til liberty has been won,” The Burning Spear, February-March 2004.
We need to fight back and defeat the fear of colonial death forever
Masses of African people everywhere across the world do not see any future and do not experience any genuine happiness.
Every year, we produce against our will– millions of tons of copper, silver, tin, cobalt, platinum, oil, diamonds etc.– but have nothing to show for it.
Colonial mining corporations and a multitude of financial institutions, however, get richer and richer.
We experience needless deaths due to curable diseases, poverty, malnutrition, lack of basic healthcare and police brutality.
Horizontal violence, where we kill each other as a direct consequence of our colonial conditions, is present whether we live in imperialist countries or live in colonized countries.
We are targeted by waves of anti-black immigration rules, gentrification, subprime mortgage loans, poor housing and high rents, obscure religious and cultural groups that spread ignorance, police profiling (also known as stop and search in England) and the illegal drug and alcohol economy that destroy our nation.
These are all direct consequences of colonialism imposed on us by white colonial rulers.
We are stuck in favelas in Brazil that are subject to regular army lock downs with armed police equipped with the most modern weapons to contain us.
In Colombia, the army and its armed paramilitary groups kill our leaders and force us out of the most fertile lands to give way to agricultural and mining companies.
That is how the Colombian neocolonialist rulers gunned down Emilsem Manyoma, an African activist who is now a martyr.
In Africa, the economy of extraction is characterized by French colonial pact, crop economy, mineral depletion, white World Bank and International Monetary Funds, which loans warfare and its corollary – the Structural Adjustment, that decimates and privatizes public owned companies, education and healthcare – paving the way for parasitic charity organizations to cover up the looting of Africa with their highly publicized aid programs for the “poor victims” in the bourgeois press.
Africa is bled through tax evasion by colonial companies and unpaid and under paid African workers go for months without pay whilst required to turn up at work in Congo, Nigeria, Guinea, Liberia, Ghana, etc.
White power’s impunity in the destruction of the environment necessary to sustain independent black lives by imperialist companies, in their brutal extraction of uranium, oil, gold and other key minerals, remains untold.
The French company AREVA has the right of life and death in Niger where uranium is extracted. Shell, BP, Exxon and other colonial oil companies have destroyed the agricultural and fishing production in the delta region in Nigeria with profound devastating effects for African people.
The imposition of proxy wars to extract coltan and other minerals has come at a cost of 10 million deaths in less than 20 years; such is the basis of success of Apple, Samsung and other electronic companies.
We are besieged by U.S. engineered bio-chemical warfare, such as AIDS and Ebola, with millions of Africans dead and more to die as the war continues.
The U.S. and its allies, such as Israel, organized fratricidal and proxy warfare in Sudan and in what is now South Sudan, with thousands killed and millions displaced in refugee camps.
All these conditions are concrete manifestations of colonialism that turn everything upside down, leaving Africans at the mercy of business men and women of faith.
All Africans killed under colonialism are martyrs
This is a call from the African People’s Socialist Party to take death, used as a weapon against people who want to struggle, away from our oppressors.
It is a call to organize to end the demoralization that has affected our community due to horizontal violence.
We want to inspire a new wave of international African resistance. We cannot tolerate that the so-called “black on black” violence is blamed on the disenfranchised and dispossessed African working class.
We understand that this is a social problem created by colonialism, just as are things like price hikes of food, rent, and medical insurance.
The ruling class is responsible for all social problems that happen as a consequence of the existence of the capitalist system and decisions made by themselves.
The African working class does not yet have the power to print money nor set and control the federal budget. It has no voice on how the money is stolen from us in the form of taxes and under paid wages.
The struggle against all colonial violence is a struggle for Black Power! It is a struggle in solidarity with other colonized peoples.
It is a struggle to end the opportunist leadership of the African petty bourgeoisie and white peace movement that has failed to show solidarity with the struggle for Black Power.
Only a united African revolution will succeed in making the day of the African Martyr an international day.
Only a united African revolution will succeed in taking away the fear of death as a weapon from the white bourgeoisie and African petty bourgeois leaders.
Smash colonialism!
Smash all forms of violence against African people!
Long live the African Martyr!