By Alison Heone, member of the African People’s Solidarity Committee
The African People’s Solidarity Committee (APSC) is making a call to white people all over the world to get involved in a campaign to build African People’s Solidarity Day (APSD). The campaign will culminate in weekend-long African People’s Solidarity Day programs and teach-ins on November 4 and 5, 2006 in Oakland, California, and on November 11 and 12 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as well as a forum in St. Petersburg, Florida.
African People’s Solidarity Day is a call to white people and the peoples of the world to unite with the unification and liberation of Africa and African people worldwide, and to demand that U.S. and Western imperialism take its hands off Africa and African people everywhere.
APSD recognizes that all of Africa’s resources belong to African people wherever they are located around the world. It acknowledges that the only solution to the desperate conditions imposed on African people by white power is the through the brilliant strategy of Chairman Omali Yeshitela and the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) is the realization of their aim: the liberation and unification of Africa under the leadership of the African working class and poor peasants.
The African People’s Solidarity Committee is organizing African People’s Solidarity Day to wake up the white population to the reality that the day has come when African people, Indigenous and Mexican people, Palestinians and Arabs, Latin Americans and the oppressed peoples of the world are organizing and rising up to take back all their resources, their lands and their independence stolen by Europeans for the past 500 years and more!
APSC believes that this is the time when white people — whether we are in the U.S., in Europe, Canada, Australia, Occupied Palestine (Israel), Occupied Azania (South Africa), or in South America — have a historic decision to make.
We have to learn from September 11 that there is a price to be paid for hundreds of years of relentless oppression, torture and exploitation of the peoples of the world. We can’t enslave and decimate the entire continent of Africa, slaughter the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and steal their land to build the wealthiest, most powerful and viciously brutal system in the world without consequences.
White wealth comes at the expense of African life
APSC is initiating the African People’s Solidarity Day campaign because we believe that there are thousands of other white people in the world who abhor the colonial relationship we have inherited. We have to be outraged when we realize that we live a life where everything we take for granted — relative wealth, good jobs, three meals a day, cars, health care, college, democratic rights, cell phones and computers, living in peace, diamond engagement rings, vacations and homes around the world — all comes at the expense of African people.
We have to ask: why do we have everything and African people living a few blocks away have poverty, daily police terror and murder, hostile schools and life sentences in prison? Why do Africans in Sierra Leone and Congo get paid 30 cents a day for the brutal work of mining diamonds while having to live without food, clean water and electricity? How is it possible that Africa is the wealthiest continent on the planet, yet African people everywhere are the poorest in the world?
We believe that people want to be able to take a righteous stand against the hideous conditions Africans suffer, whether in Sudan, Haiti or Philadelphia. It is no longer viable to look at the pictures of starving African children with swollen bellies and flies buzzing around them and make opportunist, idiotic statements like, “Make Poverty History”. Not unless we are committed to support the liberation struggle of African people on their own terms.
“We can no longer pretend that there is no relationship to [white] wealth and Africa’s poverty. We have to start the struggle for real change through acknowledging that everything we have in the white world is stolen goods. ”
Our stand must be, “Hands off Africa and African people everywhere! Reparations Now!”
We can no longer pretend that there is no relationship to our wealth and Africa’s poverty. We have to start the struggle for real change through acknowledging that everything we have in the white world is stolen goods.
We have a billion dollar diet industry and eating disorders because African children have a bowl of rice a day, if they’re lucky. A whole generation of young African men is in prison in the U.S. because we want jobs in the prison economy and in a job market that two million Africans would be competing in if they weren’t locked up.
U.S. and Western imperialism is looting Africa like bandits! All the resources that should be providing housing, education, food and a peaceful and prosperous life to African people are coming to feed the white populations in the U.S. and Europe. The genocidal wars in Africa that white liberals like to blame Africans for are being instigated, armed and funded by imperialism for the sole purpose of controlling Africa’s enormous natural wealth.
White people have to decide to stand with the future are maintain unity with imperialism
African People’s Solidarity Day gives us the opportunity to take a stand for the right of African people to liberate Africa, so that they can control their own resources and future. It gives us a chance to unite our interests with the interests of the rest of humanity, which is something that hasn’t happened for many centuries, if ever.
APSD challenges us to declare to the world that there is a growing sector of the descendants of the slave master who have become allies of the descendants of the slave in the struggle to bring about the final blow to the system of slavery and oppression once and for all.
APSC calls on all freedom-loving white people to get involved in the APSD campaign. You can form an APSD organizing committee wherever you live.
You can actively support the work of the Uhuru Movement by organizing a fundraiser. This could be a benefit concert, a donations drive, a car wash or any other way you can think of to raise resources.
You can organize a political forum or teach-in and APSD organizers will come to your city, campus or area to speak and show DVD presentations. There can be African People’s Solidarity Day sister events and actions anywhere in the world!
Organize a contingent to come to Oakland on November 4 and 5, and to Philadelphia on November 11 and 12. African People’s Socialist Party Chairman Omali Yeshitela will be the keynote speaker, and there will be presentations and workshops from many fronts of the African Revolution, There will be representatives from the Indigenous and Mexican liberation movements, from Venezuela, Haiti and Palestine, as well as some revolutionary culture.
Build African People’s Solidarity Day!
Solidarity with the Unification and Liberation of Africa and African People Everywhere!
Hands Off Africa! Reparations Now!
Uhuru!
Visit www.apscuhuru.org to find out what you can do to get involved!
