In this most volatile crisis situation the capitalist world is in, the oppressed nations continue to irreversibly push forward an end to the relationship that has binded us to oppressor white nations against our will for the last 600 years.
The Seventh Congress of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) is the most strategic political gathering that one can find inside the African Nation and around the world.
This is precisely because it is the only one that addresses this imperialist crisis with a clear intention of defeating the whole system at its foundation.
Thus, this is where the clearest direction and trajectory of African revolutionary struggles will be decided.
It is in this Congress that African membership will adopt Chairman Omali Yeshitela’s latest political report and will elect the highest leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party: the Chair and its Central committee.
It is also where white forces in solidarity with the African Nation and solidarity among all colonized people’s struggles of the world will find their best expressions.
Achieving Black Power, unification of the African Nation in a liberated and unified Africa through revolution, is the Congress’ trajectory even as most African politics, on the Continent and beyond, revolve around the neocolonial electoral process and wars.
Africans from throughout the world will converge in St. Louis, Missouri in October 2018 for this historical meeting of the leadership of the African working class.
It is not unlike the first UNIA convention in New York City in 1920 that set a new anti-colonial movement standard that threatened to dismantle the whole edifice under which this system of parasitic capitalism rests.
APSP carrying out and developing Garvey’s vision today
The African petty bourgeoisie cannot develop Garvey’s vision; the Vanguard of the African petty bourgeoisie is inside the government in a balkanized, neocolonial Africa.
The neocolonialists’ rear guard is the one that postures inside the African Liberation Movement, known today as Pan-Africanism in its various trends.
As Chairman Omali Yeshitela stated in his political report to the Seventh Congress of African People’s Socialist Party: “However, our Party is not only the Advanced Detachment of the African working class, but as we have said before, we are the Vanguard of the entire African National Revolution.
“We have accepted the responsibility of liberating Africa and the entire forcibly dispersed African Nation that suffers under the cruel weight of colonialism everywhere.” (Page 16)
We are doing exactly what Garvey was set to do: mobilize and organize the African working class and poor peasants worldwide for revolutionary liberation and unification of the African Nation.
That is what this October Congress in St Louis, Missouri is about. It is the embodiment of one continuous African Liberation Movement with one final objective; it does not matter where we are located.
That is the recognition of who we are as African people!
In a report from the New York chapter of the UNIA-ACL at the First International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World in 1920, New York delegate Mrs. Sarah Branch stated: “We are tired of being called Negroes. We are not Negroes. We are Africans. [Applause] We want to be called Africans.
“God gave us the name Ethiopians and we want to be called Ethiopians or Africans. Negro is simply a pet name that the white man gave us when he went to Africa and stole our fore parents.
“Let us all in this convention with one voice cry out, ‘We will not be called Negroes any longer, but Africans!’’ (Omali Yeshitela Political Report to the Seventh Congress, Page 92)
The history of Africa did not start in the Berlin Conference, so it cannot be defined by colonial borders Berlin has created for colonial purposes.
Every struggle of Africans must include the same beginning and its development around the world.
The struggle of resistance in Nigeria cannot be limited by what happened in Nigeria alone, because our oppression did not start with Frederick Lugard’s creation of Nigeria.
The consciousness of struggles in Nigeria or anywhere across the African Nation must include the Haitian Revolution, Nat Turner Resistance, the great Marcus Garvey’s Movement, the rise and fall of the Patrice Lumumba-led anticolonial Movement in the Congo, the Algerian struggle for independence, the aborigine struggles in Australia, New Zealand, new Caledonia etc.
That growing highest-level of consciousness is African Internationalism. It says that all black people are Africans and all other non black people can be part of the African Nation if they are committed to the mission of the black proletariat and commit national suicide in order of being part of the black nation.
Every genuine African organization must speak to the question of the African Nation
This is another significant aspect of the African People’s Socialist Party in carrying out the legacy of Garvey.
UNIA was the Vanguard of the African struggle of its time and so is the APSP today.
It sets the new criteria for what it means to be a genuine national liberation Movement; regardless if one is a socialist or not, one must recognize the existence of the organic African Nation and the strategic necessity to organize as one people in one continuum Movement across the planet for a Black Power State.
The African petty bourgeoisie have joined hostile and parasitic organizations which tied up Africans to all kinds of foreign alien organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), United Nations (UN), Francophonie, Commonwealth or to foreign corporations who are not only a part of the economic fabrics which fleece the African Nation of all of its blood life, but are consciously opposed to a united Africa and African people around the world.
UNIA, the forerunner of the APSP’s dual power institutions
Garvey’s leadership saw the realization of anti-colonial institutions of productions and distribution owned collectively through the UNIA and African Community Leagues (ACL).
When one thinks of Garvey, Black Star Line comes to mind. This idea of doing for self and self-reliance is what characterizes the APSP from inception.
We have united the political and the economic fronts. The statement, “We are preparing to govern,” is really loaded with tangible programs that everyone can see.
The Party established a nonprofit entity, the African People’s Education and Defense Fund (APEDF) to host community programs in defense of the human and civil rights of the African community.
APEDF today encompasses Uhuru Furniture & Collectibles, One Africa! One Nation! Marketplace and other economic programs of the Party created over the past three or more decades.
We have built the dynamic Uhuru Houses with their Akwaaba Halls in St. Petersburg, Florida; Oakland, California and now in St. Louis, Missouri.
We created Black Star Industries that includes Uhuru Foods and Pies, Planet Uhuru Apparel, the African Independence Workforce Program, Burning Spear Publications and other institutions that comprise the foundation of a liberated African working class economy, an expression of dual and contending power.
African petty bourgeoisie opposed to liberation of Africa and African Nation
In his time, Garvey had to contend with various petty bourgeois politicos deprived of state power. W.E.B. Dubois is the most known representative of that social force, and George Padmore is the other known veneered Pan-Africanist.
The imperialist engineered downfall of Garvey in alliance with the Communist party of USA and African petty bourgeoisie opened the way for the rise of Pan-Africanism in Africa.
Dubois and Padmore are key historical beneficiaries of the imprisonment of Marcus Garvey and destruction of his UNIA’s anti-colonial dual power institutions.
These two were to play a role in influencing Kwame Nkrumah’s capture of political power in Ghana (1957-1966).
Nonviolence, neutralism, Positive Action and parliamentarism politics of Nkrumah were announced first by Dubois and Padmore—political initiatives aimed at reforming imperialism in Africa.
Dubois and Padmore chose not to fight the British colonial army, which when re-baptized, turned into Ghana’s neocolonial army.
This same army, being the center of military power of the African petty bourgeoisie, would overthrow Nkrumah in February 1966 with the massive support of the U.S. and British rulers.
Dubois and Padmore represented the African petty bourgeoisie and the Ghanaian neocolonial army that overthrew Nkrumah’s rule.
The struggles under the leadership of the APSP are the struggles that happen in the era of neocolonial State power or white power in black face, which dominates our lives across Africa, the Caribbean, etc.
This is where the generals, colonels, majors and intelligence officers control the apparatus of state coercion that kills African people daily to maintain the status quo.
The Organisation of African Unity (OAU) is the greatest betrayal of the African petty bourgeois leaders; they rejected the road to a minimum collective power with Nkrumah’s vision of African union government, One African market and common foreign policy and defense.
OAU is a manifestation of Pan-Africanist opportunism, which is anything one wants to be except united Black Power State under the leadership of the African working class.
Pan-Africanism does not respond to the long term strategic goals of the African Nation, but opportunistic class ambitions and goals of individuals of the African petty bourgeois and their thirst for colonial power.
Victory to the African Nation!
Build the Seventh Congress of the African People’s Socialist Party!
