Africa World Now Project

A Conversation w/ Veteran Activist & Political Theorist Omali Yeshitela


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In, Amilcar Cabral and the Theory of the National Liberation Struggle, Professor Nzongola-Ntalaja writes that: “Amilcar Cabral’s contribution to understanding the success and failures of liberation movements, resides in his demonstration that national liberation struggles have two phases: the national phase and the social phase, with the latter being more crucial to its ultimate conclusion (1972: 102-110). This analysis is of course theorized within the reality that nation states themselves have deep inherent structural implications that will come into conflict with communities of people that are excluded in its fundamental assumptions of how and for whom society should be organized. It also is based on the reality that nation states, as advanced through European projects, were themselves developed as a direct product of imperialism and its attendant forms of colonialism (direct, indirect, neo, settler, internal). According to Amiri Baraka in Towards Ideological Clarity, “the 18th century [a time when European nation states, driven by the old wars between tribal Europe rapidly began to solidify their existence in national entities] was, also, the time when European capitalism amassed the initial wealth it needed to bring about the unprecedented technological advances responsible for what was later called the: industrial revolution. This primitive accumulation cannot be separated from the European Slave Trade...". Writing in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney further argues that: “throughout the 17th and 18th centuries and for most of the 19th century, the exploitation of Africa and African labor continued to be a source for the accumulation of capital to be re-invested in Western Europe. The African contribution to European capitalist growth extended over such vital sectors as shipping, insurance, [the formation of international corporations-such as but not limited to, the African Royal Company, East Indian Company, etc], capitalist agriculture, technology and the manufacture of machinery...". The legacy of this is encapsulated in an African world left to wrestle with the contradictions inherent in sociopolitical and economic structures where the exploitation of human and natural resources is the foundational ethos and the human response is a reclamation of its humanity as developed from a critical consciousness—in the case of the African world, a critical Africana consciousness. Today, AWNP is in conversation with veteran activist and political theorist, Omali Yeshitela, Chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party. In 1966, Chairman Omali Yeshitela after ripping down a racist mural from the walls of City Hall in St Petersburg, Florida, developing a political and intellectual trajectory informed by anti-colonial movements around the world and the struggle for liberation by people of African descent in the U.S., Yeshitela has dedicated his life to refining a praxis that seeks to institutionalize freedom for the African world. In 1972, the African People’s Socialist Party was formed along with the worldwide Uhuru Movement and the African Socialist International, with branches active in the U.S., Europe, the Caribbean and on the continent of Africa. Last year, Chair Omali, as Malcolm X did 55 years ago, traveled to London to participate in the formal debates at the Oxford Union. He was asked to argue in favor of the house embracing an ever-closer African union. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! For more: https://apspuhuru.org/
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Africa World Now ProjectBy AfricaWorldNow Project