POINT OF THE SPEAR

Chairman Omali Yeshitela speaks on the International African Revolution

The following presentation was made on July 25 in London on the first day of the Conference to build the African Socialist International.

Uhuru. I really want to express my appreciation to those of you who have been able to get out today, and to Chairman Luwezi who leads our international work and who is a member of the Central Committee of our Party.

I want to express my appreciation to Comrade Thami Ka Plaatjie, who is the former Secretary General of the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) of Azania, and who is directly responsible for the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) re-establishing a relationship with the PAC after some many years and who is also responsible for allowing us to come back home to Azania. I’ve been there twice in the last six months.

I had an opportunity to speak to the 8th Congress of the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania, and to experience on the ground the terrible betrayal of the African workers and peasants by the African National Congress (ANC). Increasingly I think we’re going to see that there are other formations that will prove equally as bad in terms of betraying our revolution, though they may not currently be in power.

Also I want to express appreciation to Comrade Penny Hess from the African People's Solidarity Committee (APSC) and the comrades who were able to make that trip from the U.S. to come here. We felt it was important to have these comrades participate in this discussion concretely. They represent an aspect of the strategy of our Party to take the African Revolution itself into the territory of the imperial colonial powers inside America.

These are crucial times that we are confronted with as Africans and as people in the world today. A page in history has clearly been turned. We in the African People’s Socialist Party characterize this as the "era of the final offensive." We mean this in historical terms. There’s not going to be one great battle fought on any particular front that’s going to bring imperialism down. But in historical terms, imperialism is in serious crisis, and the masses of people around the world are in a process right now that can destroy imperialism once and for all.

As Africans, we are confronted with serious contradictions. There is a kind of African Exceptionalism that we are often confronted with that is dangerous. This African Exceptionalism often attempts to disregard the experiences of revolutionary struggles of oppressed peoples around the world, to liquidate them and to assume that there is something rather special and different about Africans that makes it unnecessary for us to go through revolutionary processes that other people around the world have had to go through to win their freedom.

It’s an historical problem. We do not live in an era of communal society. We live in an era of capitalism, which was created as a world system. It dominates the entire world. It is the system that conditions all of the struggles that we are involved in everywhere.

We are going to have to deal with this question of class contradictions inside our own communities. I believe this is one of the paralyzing contradictions that we look at in occupied Azania today.

Even in the ‘60s and ‘70s, we could not find comrades from the PAC, who we worked with very closely, who were willing to criticize the African National Congress or Nelson Mandela. Even today we’ve seen leaders in the PAC of Azania who refuse to criticize Nelson Mandela, because somehow it disregards or frustrates some kind of historical, traditional kind of relationship we have as a people. But the traditions of African people today are being affected by the colonial class structures that have been imposed on the whole world, including Africa.

ANC responsible for oppression
Nelson Mandela, should he live long enough, is going to have to be struggled against. The ANC is going to have to be struggled against. They are responsible for terrible oppression of African people. How can we be united with the masses of African people throughout the world and be united with the petty bourgeoisie force that sits on our heads at the same time? They aren’t united with us, they are united with imperialism. They are white power in black faces.

Do we have to wait until these forces betray us, before we know who they are? No, we say that there are ways that we know now. There are social forces at work here. We are convinced of that. That informs our practice.

We believe also that the African Liberation Movement has run into its limitations, whether in Africa, in England, in the U.S. or any other place in the world. There is not going to be an African-British revolution. There is not going to be an African-American revolution. There is not going to be a Kenyan revolution that will liberate the people of Kenya. The fact is that imperialism has a stranglehold on all of us.

All you have to do is look at Africa itself, where all these so-called independence revolutions have led to what? Greater emiseration for the masses of African people than we’ve ever seen in the history of Africa.

So what we need is to unite the revolutionary process around the world. We need a worldwide revolutionary movement, and that is what we’re in the process of doing by building the African Socialist International.

The African petty bourgeoisie cannot do it. I don’t care how much they talk about Pan-Africanism. They cannot do it. Why can’t they do it? Because the colonial borders of imperialism benefit them. They have a material interest in those borders. That’s why Nkrumah couldn’t get these Pan-Africanists to come together.

They said, "Nkrumah wants to be the president of all of Africa." That meant "I can’t be president of Kenya," and "I can’t be president of Liberia," and "I can’t be president of Nigeria," and "I can’t have this little political economy." The only force in Africa that has an objective interest in destroying the colonial borders is the peasants and the working class. That’s the objective basis there.

Africa cannot even have a national economy, the way it is split up now. It cannot even have access to its own resources through these imposed borders. The only way these borders will come down is if the working class aligned with the poor peasantry is in power.

These illegitimate neocolonial governments are going to have to be overthrown, and the African internationalists are going to have to put revolutionary forces down on the ground, in Kenya, in South Africa, in Nigeria, in all of those places where Africans are in the world.

In the process of defeating imperialism, we’re going to have to defeat the petty bourgeoisie. You can’t unite with them. The petty bourgeoisie is a dying social force in historical terms. It has no future. It is only the African working class that has a future.

So we say, "Unite with the future." Someone says, "Well, that is a foreign concept when you deal with issues of the working-class and therefore we shouldn’t use it." The reality is that the working class produces value and wealth. All wealth comes from the consequences of human beings laying our hands and impacting on nature. That’s just an objective reality. So we identify what social forces are in motion.

What are the critical social forces necessary for social transformation? It’s the working class. That’s where the future is. That’s the only social force that can reconcile the contradictions in human society — the fundamental contradiction being the contradiction between social production and private ownership. Anyone ever see a banker in the trenches? It’s the workers who produce, not the Nelson Mandelas and the Thabo Mbekis?

Only seven percent of the formal trade in Africa happens among Africans, which means 93 percent of what passes as trade is simply the looting of Africa. Our resources go to North America, Europe, and increasingly to Japan.

Eighty-three percent of the gross domestic product of Africa goes to pay "debt." That leaves only 17 percent of what Africans produce at the disposal of Africa, and once the petty bourgeoisie takes off its part, the masses of Africans will be lucky if we get five percent. That is the incredible reality that we are confronted with.

International African revolutionary organization necessary
Our movement has to build a revolutionary organization. It is not enough simply to recognize that black people should be together, that we should create institutions that will educate and do all these other wonderful things that I’ve seen talked about at some of these global Pan-Africanist meetings.

The reality is that Africa suffers because of imperialism, and we will only be free as a consequence of defeating imperialism. It is going to have to be taken to the grave by the conscious masses in arms. Imperialism is going to have to be destroyed, and Africa cannot be free independent of that.

We are going to have to fight these guys to get out of here. I don’t care how many other kinds of solutions that you look for. In the final analysis we are going to have to fight. It was the point of a gun that created the conditions for African peoples around the world. We’re going to have to fight our way out of here, and Africans are going to have to come to that conclusion.

We also have to go beyond this situation of seeing ourselves as being involved in some kind of solidarity movement. That’s another striking thing that I found in certain places where Africans do political work. They say, "I’m doing solidarity work with Africans in Zimbabwe" or "solidarity work with South Africans" or something like that.

Che Guevara once said, "It is not a matter of well-wishing, but of sharing the same fate, whether in victory or in death." I think that in the final analysis that’s how we have to understand this issue of what we are involved in as Africans, as African internationalists.

We are part and parcel of the liberation of Africa. We have to understand this in a very clear way.

In the U.S., Africans are talking about wanting reparations. I think that’s a just struggle. They say "we want reparations for slavery." Slavery isn’t something that happens to Africans in America, or Africans in Europe. Slavery is what happened to Africa. Slavery happened to Africa! We have to understand that we are part of the African revolution, not just some section out here that’s supporting the struggle in Africa.

Nkrumah stated quite clearly that our task, wherever we are, has to be to fight for the liberation of Africa. We believe that imperialism, not just U.S. imperialism, will be destroyed as a consequence of the liberation of Africa.

U.S. is the strategic enemy of the world’s peoples
We also believe that it’s necessary to recognize, in building this process, that the U.S. is the strategic enemy of African people and the world’s peoples.

Even as we are fighting against imperialism any other place in the world, the truth is that U.S. imperialism is the headquarters of all imperialism. We have to develop a strategy that talks about making liberation that targets and isolates U.S. imperialism, because that’s the primary enemy we are confronted with.

We think this is a very critical time. Given its preferences, the U.S. and the imperial powers altogether would re-impose direct colonial rule over the world. George Bush has said as much. It’s clear they don’t even pretend anymore that they believe the peoples of the world have a right to be free. They even write about themselves as "imperialists" today.

This is a critical time. Brothers and Sisters, we’re committed to moving forward in the revolutionary process, and our struggle is to identify and win as many other Africans on earth to participate in this revolutionary process as we can. We recognize clearly that there are folks who have differences with us. That’s alright. But this is the trajectory that we are on, and as many people that can move with us, we say, "Right on, let’s do it."

There cannot be unity that disregards the contradictions in our own house, in our own community. If we’ve got people in our community who are selling us out, they’re selling us out! If there are people who are tied to imperialism, they’re tied to imperialism. I’m not going to unite with them. I don’t care what kind of friendly smile they have, or firm handshake. They won’t get unity here.

My objective is to bring them down, and I shall do everything possible to bring down the neo-colonial sellouts, the petty bourgeois forces who have led Africa to ruin in unity with imperialism around the world. There can be no unity with the lackeys of imperialism no matter what color they are. Neo-colonialism not only must be destroyed as a system — the neo-colonialists themselves are going to have to be physically destroyed before Africa can be liberated.

We have a lot of reports that folks are going to be making throughout today from different places throughout the African world. That’s going to be extremely important. We get an opportunity to know what’s happening to us in the African world because we’re with each other. That’s part of what this process is about. It is to let us know what our brothers and sisters are confronted with wherever they’re located.

I want to express my appreciation for everyone who was able to come out. I hope that we can continue to have a really serious discussion. I just want to restate that we see Pan-Africanism as something extremely limited. I think just the discussion that we’ve had here revealed exactly what we’re talking about. It is something that, as almost everybody has said, allows anybody — whether reactionary or revolutionary — to be a Pan-Africanist.

We’re trying to distinguish ourselves from that. Pan-Africanism was extremely significant during the era of struggle against direct white colonial rule. As it emerged, it did not have a class content. At the juncture that colonial rule retreated and then put forth white power in black faces, which is what we’re confronted with all over the world, then Pan-Africanism was no longer able to help us make the move.

Some people call themselves Pan-Africanists because they want to be able to make a revolutionary process that recognizes the need to unite all of Africa. We’re saying, "That is correct. We have to have that kind of struggle." But, we have to distinguish ourselves from those folks who are not able to make the distinction of what social force is going to lead this revolutionary movement. It can’t be led by just any social force. It must be led by the African working class and poor peasants.

In the ‘60s, there was so much hope for Africa. There was incredible struggle all over the African continent. African masses, the peasants essentially, were in armed motion.

The problem was that these struggles were led by the petty bourgeoisie. In the ‘60s, all of imperialism was lined up against Africa. All of Africa was essentially under direct colonial white power. The African revolutionary movements against imperialism turned to the Soviet Union for support.

In order to get help from the Soviet Union, which had its own struggle with U.S. imperialism and imperialism in general, it was necessary for these revolutionary forces to declare themselves socialist. So they called themselves socialists.

The Soviet Union decided that there were six authentic revolutionary organizations in all of Africa. It funded those organizations. It trained those organizations. It brought them to the Soviet Union. It hooked them up with all of the liberal organizations that were connected to the Communist Party all over the world. Those forces supported by the Soviet Union became the predominant forces.

In South Africa, the ANC was one of those organizations supported by the Soviet Union.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) were organizations supported by the Soviet Union. In South Africa, and at one time even in Namibia, there were revolutionary organizations that had much better politics than the ANC, and they attempted to make the struggle on the ground that would unite Africa.

The Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) said that it was the kind of organization that wanted to unite Africa. So along with the PAC they were supported by China. China’s a poor country. It could not give the kind of support to these organizations that the Soviet Union was giving to the so-called "authentic six."

Virtually every one of these came into power. But there was no socialism, no revolutionary content. It had been the petty bourgeoisie that called itself socialist in order to get support from the Soviet Union and from China.

Now the masses are worse off in Africa than they were before. What happened to the Pan-Africanism of ZANU? What happened to the Pan-Africanism even of the PAC? Once segregation fell in South Africa, PAC went back into the country. It was hard to find them.

What happened to Museveni, who has been hailed as a great Pan-Africanist?

But what does Pan-Africanism mean for any part of Africa? Nothing. It has brought us nothing except more misery for masses of the people. That’s because the petty bourgeoisie was in leadership. That’s because we were not even able to articulate who the leading social forces should be during that era.

Now, we do have that ability, and it is our responsibility to say that the leadership has to go to the African workers in line with the poor peasantry.

We’ve seen the other social forces come into power, and it’s been nothing but more misery. So the way that the workers and peasants will know that the future belongs to them, is because the power will be in their hands.

That’s the struggle to which we are committed. Hopefully there are other people who will be able to unite with this process.

In the final analysis it is the test of practice. It is practice that will make the determination of who you are and where you’re going. So, that is why we are involved in this discussion. Now we want to move toward the practice, building the African People’s Socialist Party.

Uhuru!