Chairman Omali Yeshitela’s message on the colonial murder of George Floyd and the righteous revolutionary resistance of the African Nation

On Friday, May 29, 2020, three days into militant protests that have rocked the foundation of the colonialist capitalist world, African People’s Socialist Party Chairman Omali Yeshitela broadcast this message, which has been slightly edited here and which can be found in its original video version on the Burning Spear TV channel on YouTube.

Uhuru! Uhuru means “freedom.” It is Swahili and it’s a word that was made popular, a slogan demand that was made popular, under circumstances quite similar to what we see happening today in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

It was the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, called the Mau Mau, that in the 1950s had grown tired of being dominated by foreign and alien power in East Africa, in Kenya, by British white colonial interlopers.

So I greet you with that word Uhuru. I say Uhuru because it means freedom and it reminds us who we are as a people, as African people. And we say Uhuru because we think freedom is something that has to be on the minds of African people 24 hours a day.

So I want to talk to you as the Chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party, the Chairman of the organization that has provided African people in this country and around the world for the first time in our history our own revolutionary political party that is absolutely necessary for the African working class to possess if we’re going to win our freedom, if we’re going to be able to have an appropriate analysis that will help us to understand what is happening in Minnesota, in Minneapolis, and throughout this country and how it’s connected to what’s happening around the world.

Minneapolis exposes existential crisis of the system

So what we are looking at in Minneapolis is the existential crisis of a system that came into existence through the genocide of the Indigenous people who were called “Indians,” the Indigenous people of this land, and the captivity and colonial enslavement of African people.

This crisis of the system is being pushed into full view of all the peoples of the world by the crescendo of resistance that characterizes our struggle in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.

What we’re looking at is not simply a crisis in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The entire social system, especially as it is rooted in the United States but globally, is experiencing an existential crisis.

The murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African man, in a typically brutal and wanton act of colonial terror inflamed the righteous indignation of our long-suffering people. It has led to masses of Africans breaking free of the political and ideological constraints imposed on our struggles since the military defeat of the Black Revolution of the 1960s, of our fight for happiness and the return of our stolen resources.

In just a few days the struggles that we have seen unleashed in Minneapolis, this unbridled resistance of African people, has forced creatures like Joe Biden—the presumptive democratic presidential candidate responsible for authoring a colonial crime bill in the U.S. Congress that won white support for the presidential campaign of William Jefferson Clinton by putting 100,000 police in our colonized and starving communities—to declare his sympathy for Africans suffering police violence.

Other politicians, including heads of police organizations, have officially declared disgust with the videographed murder of George Floyd.

Religious leaders, artists and sports figures have all been in a frantic race to state their opposition to the cruel treatment of African colonial subjects by the police in the United States.

These declarations of spontaneous black love and the inconsequential declaration that “black lives matter” includes the mayor of Minneapolis.

Resistance achieves what sell-outs could not

The black reformist preachers, pacifists and generally traitorous politicians elevated by the U.S. government  to positions of presumed leadership after the defeat of the Black Revolution of the 1960s—which included the murders of Malcolm X and the pacifist Dr. Martin Luther King and scores of revolutionary leaders and incarceration of hundreds of thousands of Africans who have occupied prison cells since that time—have been not able to make any of these forces come out expressing any unity or solidarity or sympathy or empathy with the conditions of African people since that time.

It’s been more than two generations. They’ve been stuffing prison cells with African people. They’ve been starving our communities.

They’ve used economic terror against us, pushing us out of our communities and the rest of it all that time.

In just a few days the militants in Minneapolis have accomplished more than these sell-outs have over this long period of time.

This incredible mass seizure of the third precinct police station, abandoned by escaping colonial military forces known in the U.S. as the police, has raised the resistance to a level almost unheard of in the U.S.  and certainly not heard of since the African petty bourgeois neocolonial opportunists walked over the graves of murdered and imprisoned freedom fighters to take up their rewards as spokespersons for our oppressed people.

Target destroys black businesses, not “looters”

While these opportunists have been forced to voice sympathy to the cause of our people they are the ones who are mostly voicing opposition to the so called “excesses” of the growing resistance such as the destruction of the third precinct military outpost and the corporate businesses that fell to the wrath of the people.

It is they, the opportunists, who equate the destruction of some small African businesses by the people with the destruction of Target and other billion-dollar colonial capitalist enterprises that function as the existential threat to all small businesses in Minneapolis and the colonized communities globally.

These pacifists and opportunists and liberals want to make the fact that some small businesses in our community were destroyed the fundamental question or a fundamental question, they ignore the fact that ALL of the businesses in our community are threatened, their existence HAS been threatened by these major corporations like Target, Walmart, you name them. They are the ones who have been killing the small businesses in our community all this time.

Colonialism has been doing that and not African workers who are struggling against our oppression.

Our Party must provide the political education to the people that would allow the resistance to have greater clarity about who it attacks.

We must recruit more of the small businesses to actively join in the struggle against colonialism so that their small enterprises will become anti-colonial enterprises, recognizing themselves as functioning in our communities to negate the influence of billion-dollar corporations that exist as capitalist extractors in our already destitute communities.

Rebellions expose U.S. colonialism to the world

The Minneapolis uprising is functioning as the spark igniting the metaphorical prairie fire in Los Angeles, Louisville, Denver, New York, Chicago, Oakland, Huntsville, Alabama; St. Pete, Florida; St. Louis, Portland, DC, Philadelphia, Newark, and other places.

What we are seeing is that these uprisings and demonstrations are becoming the order of the day.

The naked, nasty underbelly of U.S. imperialism is being revealed again to the world.

Our colonized people have been criminalized by imperialist white power since the defeat of the Black Revolution of the Sixties.

When our revolution was alive and strong, the world was able to empathize and unite with our aspirations for liberation.

It was clear to the world that in the U.S. our churches were being bombed and our children were being killed and our leaders were being assassinated just because we wanted to experience some modicum of democracy.

The African opportunists of the Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton ilk are among those who assisted the U.S. in giving the impression that somehow African colonial subjects had become Americans and that our fundamental aspirations—which was in their view acceptance as U.S. citizens—had been achieved.

The mass uprisings of Minneapolis and other places function as much to break free of that false narrative and political assumption as they do to fight against police brutality.

The uprisings are exposing to the world that Africans continue to suffer from colonial domination, that the U.S. government and State are the enemy, not some impoverished African like Floyd who’s held up as an example of black criminality in a democratic U.S.

Our struggle is escalating. We saw a major development that occurred in Ferguson-St. Louis, Missouri in 2014, just six years ago.

This was the thing that really reunited the militancy of Africans throughout this country, helping to raise the consciousness of our people to levels that we hadn’t seen since the defeat of the Black Revolution of the 1960s.

Now in Minneapolis and various other places the masses are breaking free and are making this struggle.

Brothers and Sisters and Comrades: our struggle is a just struggle.

The struggle of our people in Minneapolis is a just struggle and the destruction of that military outpost, the third precinct, was an awesome righteous act by the masses of people who need to break free.

What has happened to our movement over the last period of time is that the pacifists and the preachers and the opportunists have been able to accomplish much of what the U.S. military murders of our revolutionaries were unable to do alone.

We fight colonialism, not racism

They have struggled to convince Africans and the world that what African people are struggling for is not any material gains—nothing that satisfies the material interests of our people; nothing that is about realizing a capacity to end the indignations, the police murder, the mass arrest of our people; nothing that gives us power in our own hands; nothing that we were fighting for in the 1960s that talked about self-government, that was in solidarity with all the other oppressed peoples around the world.

What they have convinced many Africans in this country and what they have convinced the peoples of the world is that African people are fighting against this thing they call racism.

And if you’re fighting against racism the way they have defined it, what you’re fighting for is to make white people, or the colonizer, like us.

It’s like we don’t have any material interest. Everything is subjective and based on winning the approval and appreciation of the very same colonial force, the very same white people, white power, that oppresses us.

This is what they have been able to do over long periods of time.

Now as we see this crescendo of actions, of uprisings, of mobilizations by African people fighting against this oppression we see an awakening, a political awakening happening among the masses of our people.

Your Party, the African People’s Socialist Party, has for the first time provided the African working class with its own instrument for liberation, with its own ability to fight and win our freedom.

The APSP has brought to us the science of revolution, has brought to us an understanding that we cannot achieve anything fighting against the ideas in the heads of white people or anybody else, that our struggle has to be won for total liberation of black people.

And that increasingly is what we are going to be able to see happening in Minneapolis, happening in Los Angeles, happening in all these other places where African people are oppressed and are organizing to win some modicum of freedom.

This is not to say that we won’t wage struggles for democratic rights. But in every instance when we are fighting for democracy the African People’s Socialist Party, the organization of the African working class armed with the theory of African internationalism, will help us to understand that even struggles for democratic rights, for democracy, for reform, are struggles to position ourselves in a better place so that we can win the total liberation of our people.

This is very important for us to understand. This is my opportunity to speak to you about what our struggle must be about and do so within the context of the uprising that’s happening in Minneapolis, the thousands of African and other people who are in the streets, who are wreaking havoc for the normal functioning of a social system that has only the objectives of world domination and the oppression and exploitation of the peoples of the world.

It is through African Internationalism; it is through the work and activity and teachings of the Party of the African working class that we have come to understand that the entire world and economic configuration has its origin in the enslavement of black people, of African people.

Capitalism rests on colonialism

This is where the whole social system began.

This is the origin of Target. This is the origin of the various other institutions that suck the blood and resources of African and other peoples around the world–slavery.

Karl Marx, a white man who used to be appreciated by white leftists, once said that what he characterized as wage slavery, that is the work in capitalist activity in Europe, he said “wage slavery in Europe requires as a pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world.”

And the new world as they were defining it had to do with African people who have been forcibly dispersed around the world to create wealth and value for white people and white power at the expense of wealth and value of African people ourselves.

This is the kind of social system we are dealing with.

When we look at what happened to Brother George Floyd it is not unusual.

The fact of the matter is that what we experience is colonialism.

Colonialism is the absolute total domination of a people by a foreign and alien power that controls everything.

The ability to eat, the ability to function in society is under false domination of a brutal alien and foreign power. That’s what we are experiencing.

That’s why it is every time we look up the police are killing us.

They’re not just killing us in Minneapolis, They’re not just killing us in St. Louis. They’re killing us all around this country.

Uprisings escape control by sell-outs

This uprising rests upon a foundation of the brilliant uprising that we saw happening in Ferguson on Canfield Drive, an uprising that also escaped the control of the African petty bourgeoisie, especially as it first began.

It started right there in an African working class community on Canfield Drive in Ferguson.

The African workers didn’t come out saying “Black Lives Matter.” They didn’t come out saying “hands up, don’t shoot.”

They were saying “kill the police.” And they were saying “kill the police” as a logical response to the reality that the police are killing us throughout this country and various other places around the world.

So now we have our own Party, an African working class Party, a vanguard Party, the advanced detachment of the African working class and the oppressed African nation, that functions as a general staff of the revolution.

It’s really important for us to understand that.

It’s really important for us to have no sympathy at all for this notion that somehow destroying property created by African oppressed and enslaved people on stolen Indigenous land is the problem and that we are the criminals, as some of the opportunists right there in Minneapolis would have us to believe.

Expropriating the expropriators

In fact, many of the people who are condemning the African people and the masses who have taken on Target and who call us looters and things like that, some of them claim to believe in reparations.

But they don’t believe in reparations. What they believe in, most of them who are doing this condemnation, is the U.S. government.

They believe that the U.S. government is somehow going to give reparations to the people from whom they’ve stolen everything and that somehow they would make it right for us.

What we are saying is that reparation is the expropriation of the expropriators.

When the people go into that Target and the various other colonial corporations that exist in this country and around the world, they are expressing reparations in a very serious kind of way.

They haven’t gone through a court. They haven’t gone through a legislation to do it because the masses of the people recognize it is we who created the value and everything that you see.

If it’s Apple or some other major corporation, it has come as a consequence of stolen value of African people, stolen labor of African people, and as a consequence of the genocide that’s been inflicted upon the Indigenous population who are living in these concentration camps that they call Indian reservations.

So we’re not sympathetic at all to those corporations, but we do know that the people have to be organized.

To what end?

Even though we appreciate the militancy and we appreciate the ability of the people to take the struggle to a higher level, there must be a “to what end?” that is involved in this struggle.

The people have to be conscious of revolutionary goals, of taking political power.

This is one of the reasons we are so opposed to this notion of racism because fighting against racism doesn’t take you to power, It doesn’t change anything about your lives.

It just makes you a servant to white power. It makes you someone who spends your time trying to win appreciation by those who colonize us.

It tries to make everybody get along together, the colonized and the colonizer, when the fact of the matter is, it’s the responsibility of the colonized to destroy colonialism, to destroy the system of colonialism, because it’s a system that sucks the blood and resources of our people.

Police serve colonial white power

All of our communities around this country and the world are encircled by steel, by armed forces who are there for the purpose of maintaining this social system – that’s what the police is!

They are not there to help us. They don’t come to our communities to help people take little kittens out of the trees.

They are there in order to maintain this relationship that African people who are colonized have with white power, with colonial capitalism.

The truth is, they have to be there because colonialism cannot work, the domination of African people cannot work, without extreme violence and the threat of violence being imposed on that people.

While we can demonstrate quickly about a police killing, such as what we’ve just seen happening in Minneapolis, the reality is that this country has the largest prison population in the world,

More than two million people are in prison and more than half of them are African people and other colonized people.

How did they get to prison? They didn’t volunteer to do that!

The police didn’t kill them. They arrested them! They made the decision of when they should go to prison and it’s a colonial system that made that determination.

U.S. is a white settler State

In this country, in the United States, Brothers and Sisters, one of the things that the African People’s Socialist Party, our Party, the Party of the African working class, the advanced detachment of the African working class, has helped to explain to people is that one of the things that makes colonialism difficult to understand to some degree and to recognize, is that what happens in the United States is what we refer to as domestic colonialism.

The United States is a white settler State. It is a State where Europeans left Europe and came to this territory, just like they left Europe and went to Palestine and stole the land of the Palestinian people and now call themselves Israelis and call the land Israel.

Just as white people left Europe and went to Africa and stole the land and called the land South Africa, and then call themselves South Africans, giving the impression that they’ve always been there.

The same thing happened in the United States, where you had Europeans who left Europe and came to this territory, this land.

And in order to take and keep this land, in order to hold up the notion, the lie, that they are people who are indigenous to this land, they have committed near genocide against the Indigenous people inside these borders that they have created.

This land is the land of the Indigenous people. This is their land.

Then they [Europeans] captured African people and brought us here to work for free as slaves.

And they’re crying to us about a Target?! That was destroyed in Minnesota?

They worked us for free as slaves! The economic foundation of Target is African enslavement!

It’s not like some genius white people created all this wealth.

It came from the slave trade. It came from colonialism.

It came from European imperialist domination of Africa and the rest of the world.

The whole world economy, the political and economic configuration of the world, is based on that reality.

And that’s the thing—whether people are conscious of it or not—that people are actively engaged in breaking out of it.

That’s the reason that you see the economic crisis that exists in the United States, that exists in Europe.

That’s the reason that you see a Brexit where the so-called British are leaving the European Union—because the capitalism that came into existence was born as a consequence of enslavement and colonizing the people of the world and the peoples of the world everywhere are fighting back to take back our resources.

And now the white man—which is a statement that I make as symbolic of the U.S. government, the U.S. social system—now the white man finds himself having to fight among themselves and have to kill the peoples of the world to maintain this status quo.

Desperate U.S. attacks the world

It’s a parasitic system. It came into existence through enslaving people.

It came into existence through stealing people’s land and resources.

It can only maintain that through brutal oppression of the peoples of the world.

It has established economic and political structures to make sure that this system stays in place.

That is why you see in the world today the U.S. and other countries attacking peoples around the world.

That’s why they are trying to starve the people of Venezuela, take their resources.

That’s why they are threatening and initiating what they call sanctions against the people of Iran.

That’s why they’re attacking Syria and other places around the world.

That’s why they’re attacking the Palestinians.

They want to maintain this nasty status quo.

And that’s why they are attacking our people in Zimbabwe and all over the continent of Africa and also in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

We are part of the same struggle. We are part of the same fight-back and we have to understand that, if we are going to be victorious.

So the struggle is not against racism.

The struggle is not to make white people like us or love us. And this is not an anti-white statement. It is an anti-colonial statement.

White people can earn their place

The fact is that white people who want to be loved need to do something to earn the love of the masses of the peoples of the world by turning against their own ruling class.

We shouldn’t have had to burn Target. They should’ve burned Target.

They should have expropriated all the resources from Target.

They should have initiated a reparations drive that took all the resources from Target and from the rulers of this country and turned it back over to Africa and African people from whom it was stolen.

This is what their task is. So it’s not about being against white people.

In fact we have organized a movement; we have organized through the African People’s Socialist Party an entity, a Party organization, that’s called the African People’s Solidarity Committee and the Uhuru Solidarity Movement.

These are movements that recognize that white people have to earn their place back in the family of humanity by turning their backs on their own ruling class and by expropriating the resources that have been stolen from us that’s responsible for our great impoverishment.

They have to be fighting. They have to be black power in white face in the same way that your local politician is white power in black face.

Minneapolis is part of African struggle

So we have to recognize Brothers and Sisters, when we look at what’s happening in Minneapolis, that it’s part and parcel of the world struggle.

It is part and parcel of the struggles of the peoples of the world to rectify their relationship with imperialism and imperial white power.

We have to recognize also that while we are fighting in Minneapolis and Los Angeles and Louisville, Kentucky and Pensacola, Florida and St. Petersburg and Huntsville, Alabama and all these other places, we are part of a struggle that has its origin in the initial attack on Africa.

That’s how we got here. Africans didn’t come to this country looking for a better way of life. In fact we lost a better way of life as a consequence of being brought here.

We are the only group other than the Indigenous people themselves that did not come to this country looking for a better way of life.

We are the only group to which that happened.

America is a prison of nations

Your white liberal friends and the Joe Bidens and the Bernie Sanders and the rest of them like to talk about America as a nation of immigrants. America is not a nation. It’s a prison of nations. And Africans are not immigrants. We are captives.

We’re on the land that was stolen from the Indigenous people part of whom are recognized as Mexicans. Half of Mexico was taken at gunpoint by the United States.

An artificial border was created that has resulted in starvation and deprivation and oppression of the people on both sides of that artificial border in what they recognize as Mexico and what they recognize as Texas, Utah, Arizona or New Mexico.

That’s the reality. That’s what we’re looking at in terms of the political configuration of the world.

It has its origin in the enslavement and colonization of the vast majority of the people.

We are Africans

We are Africans. There’s no way you can get around it.

You can’t get on a boat in Africa as an African and then get off the same boat in the United States as a negro.

If we were Africans when we got on the boat, Brothers and Sisters, we had to be Africans when we got off the boat.

This is so important. If you don’t understand that and you don’t understand that it is the foreign and alien force that’s dominating black people, you fall prey to the notion that somehow now “we are Americans and they’re Americans and they just don’t give us as many rights as we should have.”

When the reality is we are colonial subjects.

Just like the people of Viet Nam existed under French colonialism and then American colonialism after the Vietnamese defeated the French.

Just like the people in various other places around the world have lived under colonial domination.

Just as the people in Afghanistan are occupied by colonial domination, in this instance the United States.

We are a dominated colonized population.

Africans must have self-government

We have to fight for our freedom against this colonial domination which means among the other things that we have to achieve is self-government.

We can’t have any freedom as long as somebody else controls our ability to feed, clothe and house ourselves.

Self-government has to be on our agenda.

So when we are making these amazing incredibly heroic struggles in Minneapolis, self-government, self-determination and control of our own economic capacity needs to be on our agenda and needs to be part of what we are fighting for.

We’re doing this not in isolation. There’s war, struggle, happening right there in Haiti.

Haiti fought for all of Africa

African people owe so much to our brothers and sisters who suffered in Haiti.

Haiti—the African Revolution in Haiti—almost destroyed the capitalist system itself at a time when the whole capitalist system was organized around direct slavery.

It was Africans in Haiti who defeated Napoleon’s best army. Once liberated, Haiti told Africans any place in the world, “if you are enslaved and you get to Haiti you will be free”.

They made it illegal for white people to own land in Haiti because they were the colonizer.

And then of course Haiti has been paying the price since then. What the imperialists have done to punish Haiti, the first black Republic that was created after slavery, is to continue to rob Haiti of all its resources.

Haiti has been invaded by the United States marines who took all the money out of the treasury.

Haiti has been attacked by France and all of white power.

The first economic quarantine or sanction that happened in the Western Hemisphere happened against black people in Haiti-because Haiti was the beacon of hope.

Haiti inspired forces like Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey, who assumed that we could make this revolution because we were making revolution in other places around the world.

Haiti was the place that inspired revolution all over the Americas.

That was our Haiti. That was African people.

And now they are struggling by themselves because there is not a common recognition among black people either in Haiti or in Minneapolis that we are part of the same struggle.

We are part of the same struggle.

U.S. domestic colonialism on Indigenous land

But part of the problem is that in the United States we have colonialism and it’s a different kind of colonialism. We characterize it as domestic colonialism.

It’s different only in the sense that it is a colonialism that exists on the same territory as the colonizer.

Usually what we’ve seen is, the white man leaves Europe.

He goes to Africa. He dominates the people there.

He goes to Viet Nam. He dominates and sets up a colonial power there.

And it’s clear that this white man is the foreigner.

But now what they succeeded in doing in this country, especially since our revolution was defeated in the 1960s, is convinced the people that “everybody is an American”. Now they characterize black people as American in this country.

They can only do that because they’ve stolen the land from Indigenous people. They’ve almost committed genocide.

They haven’t succeeded in that. Of course the Indigenous people are fighting right here on every front and they’re doing it almost alone.

But they have disguised the fact that African people live under colonial domination with the characterization that “we are all Americans.”

A false national consciousness has been imposed on black people all around the world.

White power divided Africa

You’ve got to remember that Europeans sat down at a table in Europe—this is the white man—in 1884 in Berlin, Germany and they carved up Africa.

Africa didn’t have those borders. They carved it up so that they could give certain portions of Africa to different countries so that they can become rich off our resources.

They say the French can have what is now referred to as Cameroon.

The British can have what was characterized as the Gold Coast, that’s now called Ghana.

The British can have this territory called Kenya.

This happened all over the continent of Africa.

It was the British who invented Nigeria.

The British, the white man, invented Nigeria just as he invented many places in the Middle East.

Nigeria was named Nigeria in 1915 by a white woman who was a wife of Frederick Lugard, who created and developed the whole strategy of indirect rule called neocolonialism.

He was sent to Africa, to West Africa, by the British government to make this territory into one administrative hold and the name they gave it, from his wife Flora Shaw, was “nigger area”.

That’s where Nigeria comes from.

You have a situation in West Africa, off the coast of West Africa.

When the Portuguese first got there, they found shrimp. The Portuguese word for shrimp sounds like Cameroon and so they named the place Cameroon.

And then Africans refer to ourselves as Cameroonians, as Nigerians, as black Americans, as negro Americans, as black Brits, as Afro-Swedes, Afro-Colombians and all these other characterizations.

We’ve had a false national consciousness imposed on us, so it’s hard for us to find our way.

Brothers and Sisters, this is a part of what it is that we have to understand.

We’re not fighting against racism. We’re fighting against colonialism.

We’re fighting to have power over our own lives.

African Socialist International is here

It is the responsibility of the Advanced Detachment of revolutionaries to take that consciousness—that revolutionary theoretical understanding, that science, that African Internationalist understanding—into the struggles of our people because a revolution must have a revolutionary theory.

When the people engage in struggle, we have to provide this information, this understanding.

That’s what we do as the African People’s Socialist Party in various places around this country and around the world.

The African working class has created an African Socialist International.

It has allowed us to put the struggle of African people down, under the leadership of its Advanced Detachment, the working class, throughout various places of the world.

We are in the Caribbean. We are in The Bahamas. We are in South Africa, and I am particularly pleased with the work that we do there and the organizational capacity we’ve developed there.

We’re in West Africa, in Ghana, in Sierra Leone. We are building bases in various other places on the continent.

We are throughout Europe. We are in England. We are in France.

So we are struggling also in the United States. As quietly as it’s kept and even though Al Sharpton and Bernie Sanders and others wouldn’t want you to know this, the African Revolution, the struggle for black power, the struggle for black freedom, has run into its limitations when fought within the context of the borders that were created for us by white power.

We are one Africa. We are one Nation.

Our struggle has to be for the total liberation of Africa and African people around the world.

We have to fight for our material interest and our material interests are ALL the resources of the richest continent on Earth, which is Africa.

Our material interests happen to be the resources that we find in the communities that we’ve created globally all around the world.

We have to fight for power. We have to fight for self-government.

We have to fight to be our own government and we also have to fight for the interests of our people, our class.

The African working class is going to have to lead this struggle for national liberation if it’s going to result in overturning a system based on parasitic extraction of value and the genocide of peoples around the world.

So I wanted to have this discussion with you, my Brothers and Sisters and Friends, because as the struggle is unfolding in Minneapolis—and Minneapolis has served as a spark that’s initiating struggles in various other places—we have to have consciousness of what it is that we’re fighting for.

Our movement has to be able to say “to what end are we fighting?”

When people look at us around the world they have to be able to answer this question.

Our objectives, demands

Yes, we want reparations. We want payback. We want everything.

And so payback is Target. Payback is expropriating the expropriators.

We want all of the Europeans out of Africa who came there and exist there as a part of extracting value from Africa. They would have to commit national suicide in order to stay in Africa.

That means they’re going to have to unite with the aspirations of the African working class and turn over to the African working class all the value that they have extracted that allowed them to live differently and better than African people.

This is part of what it is that we have to say that we’re struggling for.

We want to see the immediate release of every political prisoner, EVERY political prisoner —all these African brothers who are rotting in these prisons because they fought against this nasty colonialism that kills our people with impunity in the streets of this country just as what we saw happening with brother George Floyd.

Africans have fought against that and they’re rotting in prisons and have been rotting there for more than two generations. That is unthinkable! That is something that we cannot allow to continue.

We cannot be talking about making a movement that allows these heroes and heroines to rot in prison.

We have to say “hands off Assata Shakur!” who was able to escape prison and is now living in a tenuous situation in Cuba.

We have to say “end the economic quarantine of our people in Venezuela!”

We have to really initiate a struggle that recognizes what our interests are as a people.

We have to be self-governing.

African working class must lead

There is no way beyond that and the African working class has to lead.

And the African working class cannot lead without the benefit of its own revolutionary Party, its own Vanguard Party that’s guided by advanced revolutionary theory, that’s the African People’s Socialist Party.

We have to join the African People’s Socialist Party. We have to support the African People’s Socialist Party. All of you who are participating in this discussion should go to APSP, that is African People’s Socialist Party—APSPuhuru.org.

We’re going to continue this discussion because this struggle is going to continue.

It’s not over now. We see that the struggle is escalating and it’s reaching new heights, new levels of resistance.

It has to result in African people becoming free.

It has to result in African people having total absolute control of Africa and all the resources of Africa, of the liberation of all of our people.

It has to result in opening up these prison cells where African people are rotting away, not just the political prisoners but the more than 1 million Africans who are stuck in prisons.

You never see any of these thugs who walk around in suits and ties and who occupy positions of power in the government, who wear these uniforms of the government, being thrown into prison like this.

Nobody can satisfy us by simply locking up or firing four cops in Minneapolis.

The truth of the matter is what happened in Minneapolis is common.

They do it all the time. It is the way the colonizer treats the colonized no matter where the colonized is.

Look at Sandra Bland. Look at what they did to her. Look at what they’ve done to us all over this country. You know in your own communities where this kind of thing is happening.

We have to say “One Africa, One Nation”, “All power to people and Black Power to the African working class!” and Uhuru! sisters and  brothers and comrades.