Every member of the Uhuru Solidarity Movement remembers the first time we heard Chairman Omali Yeshitela. For each of us, it was a day that changed the course of our lives.
While our individual circumstances may differ, the essential experience is the same: it was the day we began to see the world through the eyes of the enslaved, the colonized, the oppressed.
The voice of the African working class spoke directly to us, calling on us to turn our backs on our own ruling class, to disavow a system that enriches us at the cost of unending violence against African and colonized peoples, and to join humanity in the creation of a world where no one is oppressed.
The Chairman challenged us to see that in facing the horrors of our history and taking responsibility to repair the damage, a bright vision of the future opens up to us. We can join this future, but we must do our part.
Because of Chairman Omali Yeshitela’s leadership, white people across the U.S. and the world have been moved by the revolutionary message of African Internationalism to take action for reparations to African people as a stand of solidarity with the African Revolution.
We give our deepest salute to Chairman Omali who courageously rose from the military defeat of the Black Revolution of the 1960s with the mission to rebuild it and lead it to its ultimate victory.
Through African Internationalism, the Chairman systematically dismantled the web of lies that makes up the colonial narrative and provided the science and strategy through which we, as white people, can end our self-imposed exile from the human family.
Through principled, material solidarity with the African Revolution, we gain the opportunity and honor of becoming truly connected to the liberation struggles of oppressed peoples everywhere, from Palestinians to Indigenous people in the concentration camps of North America.
This is not, as Che said, a matter of well-wishing. It means joining the struggle against colonialism. The Chairman taught us that the struggle is not against racism but against colonialism, a struggle for power—Black Power, African self-determination, and the right of African people to control their resources, labor, land and destinies.
As part of his mission to make reparations a household word, the Chairman extended the African Revolution into the belly of the beast, into the colonizer population. He proclaimed that reparations is a revolutionary demand, not a call for charity. Solidarity is not a favor; it is the pathway to our own liberation.
Under the leadership of the African Revolution, we experience solidarity with our own humanity. We can be freed from the despair and isolation of being the colonizer. The road to socialism—painted black, as the Chairman says—is also the road to our own freedom from the cruelty and inhumanity of a society built on rape, torture, and slavery.
The Chairman once said, “Revolutionaries are optimistic. We can actually envision a new world. It is we who will not allow our vision for the future to be determined by what is real today.” Thank you, Chairman Omali Yeshitela, for your revolutionary vision and your relentless fight to bring it into reality.
In Chairman Omali Yeshitela’s lifetime, Africa and African people will be free.
Uhuru!
