This is a transcription of Chairman Omali Yeshitela’s January 2019 presentation at the Oxford Union debates in Oxford, where he was invited to speak on behalf of the closer union of Africa and Africans.
Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen, I have only recently come here from the United States of America; and that being the case, I cannot stand before this august body without prefacing my statement in defense of closer unity of Africa, without stating first my unconditional solidarity with President Maduro and the government and people of Venezuela who are currently under a savage attack by the declining world hegemon of the United States.
It’s absolutely necessary to say that, coming from that country, and especially [because the] United States travels the world preening, presenting itself as the guardian of democracy and the rights of the peoples around the world. Where the reality is that Africans who are colonized in the United States represent at least half of the largest prison population in the world. There are more Africans in prison in the U.S. than there are people in Djibouti or Equatorial Guinea.
And so, we find it very difficult also recognizing that by their own estimates, it would take 228 years for the income of Africans colonized in the U.S. to equal that of the colonial white population.
It is absolutely necessary for me to stand here today before you, expressing total opposition to the U.S. government’s terroristic actions against the people of Venezuela, with an attempt to starve the people into opposition to their government.
Mr. President, brothers and sisters, comrades, it is also necessary for us to say that this question of a closer union with Africa, between Africans or within Africa, is not a purely academic question despite the fact that this debate is occurring within the pinnacle of bourgeois academia.
There is a natural historical inclination for Africa and African people to be united, which is one of the reasons I am here today. The truth of the matter is that this discussion about the unity of Africa, the union of Africans, started much earlier than any incursion as it might be characterized of China or the Trump administration into Africa.
The reality is that Africa came under assault some six hundred years ago when Portugal first came and captured African people and initiated the process that would begin capitalism, and would establish and consolidate the identity of Europeans in the world.
It is a reality that capitalism rests upon a foundation of African slavery. Africans were the first capital. In order for this to occur and to last, it was absolutely necessary to keep African people divided so that we could not resist this horrible incursion on Africa that continues up to now. We’ve seen example after example of African people to unite.
We’ve seen what used to be warring tribes in this geographical terrain [Europe] that we occupy at this moment, able to achieve a sense of sameness that people refer to as nations founded on a common economy that came from slavery and colonialism.
This is the basis of the unity that we see.
If there is a problem with the European Union today it is because the foundation, the economic foundation of capital, of imperialism is being stressed by the struggles of the oppressed peoples of the world to take back their resources from this parasite that bleeds Africa, that bleeds the world, that bleeds Afghanistan, that bleeds the people of Yemen who are dying by the thousands even as we have this discussion.
This is the basis of Brexit. It can’t stand together anymore because the host is rejecting the parasite. It’s creating crises throughout Europe and throughout the imperialist world.
Brothers and sisters, there has been a natural trajectory by African people for closer Union.
We’re having this discussion in part because, in 1884-85, Europeans sat at a table in Berlin, Germany–not a single African there–and carved up Africa into the territories that we now sometimes call countries and illogically refer to as nations.
Africans didn’t do that. It was Europe that did that. It was Europe and imperialism that required Africa to be divided so that the resources of Africa both human and material could come and pave the streets in London and grow the buildings in Amsterdam and bring clean water to New York while the streets in Sierra Leone are not paved and the people in Sierra Leone do not have clean water and there is no national electric grid there.
It is necessary to keep Africa divided by European imperialism and by all the imperialism in order to continue to suck the resources from Africa so that cell phones could exist here; so that Steve Jobs and others could achieve some great notoriety from the coltan that comes from Congo where Leopold killed at least 12 to 15 million Africans in order to conquer and keep Africa in the condition it’s in today.
We talk about a united Africa, an African Union, because of what European imperialism has done to Africa to keep us divided. We know it’s true! We saw a hundred years or so ago Marcus Garvey organize the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Community League that stretched across the globe. More than 11 million African people everywhere were connected to this.
“Africa for Africans at home and abroad!” That was the cry!
Not Africans for Nigerians–that didn’t even exist until the British created it in 1915. And Flora Shaw, the mistress who would become the wife of Frederick Lugard came up with the name, ‘Nigga Area.’
Not this false national consciousness that has been imposed on Africans around the world. The Portuguese found shrimp in West Africa and then named it after the Portuguese word for shrimp Cameroon [camarão]; it is not true that they are shrimp despite the fact that the people call themselves Cameroonians today. It is a false national consciousness that created the American Negro, that created the black Brit and the Afro-Swedes.
We are one Africa, one nation and we must have closer union! But in order for that to happen it has to be a revolutionary union.
The Organization of African Unity created on May 25, 1963, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, was part of an effort to circumvent efforts by Kwame Nkrumah to build a single union of African states. Instead, they come up with an Organization Of African Unity that codified the colonial borders that were created by Europe in 1884 and 85.
We have to be able to break out of this but it’s going to take revolution, African Revolution!
In order to do this, [it will take] an African Revolution that will destroy imperialism and the world economy that’s responsible for the growing immiseration of the masses of people around the world.
Uhuru!
