After just reading five chapters of Omali Yeshitela’s soon-to-be-published book, “Omali Yeshitela Speaks,” one can perceive the urgency and significance of the well-known author’s dynamic presentation of politics, history and the black struggle in America.
Yeshitela elaborates about colonialism, neo-colonialism and the building of the African Socialist International. In one of the chapters, he closes with, “African Internationalist consciousness will be forged in the actual struggle to destroy and overturn imperialism on the continent of Africa.”
In the chapter on Malcolm X, Yeshitela explains that the murder of Malcolm X was one of many assassinations carried out by the U.S. or other representatives of imperialist white power. Yeshitela also adds all the other revolutionaries who were killed: Congo’s Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba; Martin Luther King in Memphis, Tennessee; and Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton.
The Chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) enlightens the readers that the APSP Congress in 1981 chose February 21, the date of Malcolm’s assassination, as the Day of the African Martyr.
Yeshitela candidly gives credit to one of Latin America’s great warriors, Che Guevara, as becoming a symbol of revolutionary spirit. In just a few words Yeshitela shows the difference between the white left’s sentiment of the Vietnam war — using exhausted slogans like “No More Vietnams” and “Bring the Boys Home” — and Che’s position exemplified in his fiery slogan, “Two, three, many Vietnams!”
Yeshitela’s comments are bold. He shows that he is not afraid of the PATRIOT Act, new laws on civil rights, the FBI, CIA or the Bush family.
He spells it out clearly with no holds barred, “When we look at America and imperialism, we are not just looking at America that is a predator State. It has always been a predator State. America is an imperialist country. It is the worst empire in the world.”
“Omali Yeshitela Speaks” is an up-to-date chronicle of U.S. history from the U.S.’s robbery of Mexican land, to its forcing the Indigenous people onto reservations, to its current war on Iraq. It’s a must read for movement activists, internationalists, socialists, but also for non-activists, scholars and mainstream politicians.
