Manifesto
of the African People of the World
Resolution from the Conference to Build the African Socialist International,
April 16, 2000, London, England
African people throughout the
world are rising up. We have entered into the new millennium in motion,
struggling to overturn the 500 year legacy of oppression and exploitation
to which we have been subjected by a parasitic social system born at our
expense.
We are fighting to reclaim
our destiny as a single people whose forced dispersal in a world defined
by artificial borders has served to undermine our common identity and
dilute our collective strength.
We are everywhere! We are in
Chicago, Illinois; in Florida, Texas, California and New York in the United
States within North America, as well as Toronto and Montreal in Canada.
We are in Brasilia in Brazil, Caracas in Venezuela, Bluefields in Nicaragua,
in Central and South America. We are in Trinidad, Haiti, Jamaica, Guadeloupe,
Martinique, Dominica, the Bahamas, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic,
Barbados and all the islands of the Caribbean.
We are in London, Birmingham,
Manchester, Liverpool and Nottingham in England. We are in Paris, Lille,
Lyons, Marseilles and Nice in France. We are in Brussels, Belgium; Amsterdam,
Holland; Berlin, Germany; Rome, Italy; as well as Spain, Portugal, Russia,
Turkey and all of Eastern Europe.
We reside in the hundreds of
millions in our ancient Motherland which was the birthplace of humankind
more than 150,000 years ago and which served as the cradle of human civilization
more than 10,000 years ago.
The life and historical experience
of our people over the last 500 years constitute the primary force, which
has given shape to the modern world. It is a world where the vast majority
of the people of the planet Earth are living in starvation, misery, disease,
ignorance and terror. At the same time, Europe and North America control
the world's wealth at gunpoint and rest upon the prostrate, bloody and
abcessed backs of the workers and peasants of Africa, Asia and Latin America.
The world capitalist economy
began with Europe's assault on Our Africa and the kidnapping, captivity,
colonial enslavement and dispersal of African people throughout what is
now known as the Americas.
This barbaric assault upon
African people depopulated our Motherland of hundreds of millions of human
beings. It destroyed our ancient civilization and it unleashed a European
wave of mass murder that killed hundreds of millions of human beings through
slave raiding wars.
It left a trail of human carnage
over the Middle Passage of the Atlantic Ocean and condemned the captive
African people of the Americas to death through torture, miserable toil
and cultural annihilation.
This initial assault upon Africa,
along with the genocidal extermination of the indigenous peoples of the
Americas and the looting of Asia and the Middle East has lifted Europe
out of millennia of disease, poverty, fratricidal warfare and mass murder.
Europe's militarism and aggression
was a part of a culture whose economic base was built upon warfare and
conquest between competing European tribes and kingdoms. Before this,
there was no concept of Europe or white people as a monolithic group.
Europe's nation-states and continental unity were forged through its assault
upon the world's peoples.
This unity was consolidated
through the conquest, invasion, enslavement of the peoples of Asia and
the carving up of the African Continent by European colonial powers in
the 19th Century.
Today, one billion African
people throughout the world are engaged in a desperate struggle for survival
within a world whose economic foundations were built through the theft
of our labor and resources.
African people comprise half
of the world's population that live on less than two dollars a day. We
are subjected to genocidal biological warfare through the use of AIDS,
Ebola and other often curable diseases, some of which are manufactured
for our destruction.
Today our Motherland is undergoing
a frenzy of rape and looting more intense and insidious than slavery.
This takes the form of trade and so-called debt, which brings development
to Europe, North America and increasingly Japan, while it commits mass
murder against our people through artificial famine and the transformation
of our homeland into an economic wasteland.
However, we continue to struggle
and we will win!
The historical experience of
African people throughout the world has forged our people into a revolutionary
nation comprised primarily of workers and poor peasants. We continue to
form the critical army of labor for world imperialism in the mines of
Congo, South Africa and Zambia; in the plantations and farms of Ghana,
the Ivory Coast, the Caribbean; in the factories of Detroit, Manchester,
Lyons and Brussels, as well as the hundreds of prison dungeons throughout
the world, including those that hold one million African people captive
in the United States of North America.
Included among this massive
force of African workers are the hundreds of millions of unemployed African
laborers who constitute a massive reserve of labor pool for imperialism.
Hunger and starvation are used as weapons of economic warfare aimed at
suppressing the value of African labor power. Moreover, this labor force
is to work day and night and to migrate from country-to-country and continent-to-continent
just to eat.
The laws that govern nature
and the entire universe necessitate life, and death and determine the
rise of the new and the vanquishing of the old in an infinitely unfolding
struggle between opposing forces. In the same way we know that the resurrection
of Africa and African people is inevitable and it cannot be stopped.
The liberation of Africa will
be brought about through the coming worldwide upheaval of African workers
and poor peasants — a sleeping giant poised to seize our freedom,
happiness and wealth from imperialist white power and deal it the death
blow the world's people are awaiting Africa to strike.
While Our Africa has been formally
freed from direct colonial rule and European domination, it suffers from
an oppressive system that in fact maintains the domination of its former
masters, often in partnership with a consortium of imperialist economic
and financial interests based in the United States, Europe and Japan.
During the 1950s and 1960s,
a mass revolutionary upsurge took the world by storm. This revolutionary
motion was many times expressed in the mobilization of armed African worker
and peasant resistance in Africa.
African people forever defeated
the tyranny of direct white colonial rule and domination. However, our
victory was incomplete, for our movements succeeded only in defeating
the open imperialist rule known as "colonialism". The hidden
indirect form of imperialist rule, called "neo-colonialism"
by Kwame Nkrumah, has reduced Africa and her people to a state of destitution
and desperation not seen since the destruction and genocidal mass murder
of the Slave Trade or the colonial wars of conquest unleashed by Europe
during the late 19th Century.
The agents of neo-colonialism
— the extension of enemy power into the ranks of our own nation through
out the world — take the form of the African primitive petty bourgeoisie.
This tiny social class holds Africa in captivity in the service of imperialism
and serves as a cover for continued white rule and domination. This class
sees the fate of Africa and African people as forever under the subjugation
of white power. It has secured its own position of prestige and prosperity
as collaborators with imperialism, which continues to control Africa's
resources and loot Africa's wealth.
The African primitive petty
bourgeoisie, therefore, has no interest in Africa's liberation and unification
or the emancipation of the hundreds of millions of African workers and
peasants from famine and back-breaking toil.
The mighty awakening of African
workers and poor peasants has unleashed convulsions throughout the Continent
through the toppling of Mobutu, the retreat of French imperialism, the
upheaval and rebellions throughout Zimbabwe, Nigeria, the Central African
Republic, Ivory Coast, Kenya as well as in St. Petersburg, Florida. The
rising up of African workers has Africa's neo-colonial traitors and collaborators
trembling in their boots. It is the workers and poor peasants who will
overthrow the oppressive power the African petty bourgeoisie holds over
Africa in partnership with imperialism.
This awakening will constitute
an African Revolution that will consolidate our national consciousness,
culture and identity through mass struggle on an international scale.
It will constitute the final offensive against imperialism and white power
which will have nowhere left to run as the oppressed hundreds of millions
of African workers and poor peasants consciously pursue our historic mission
of the total unification of the African Continent and African people throughout
the world.
Never again will we allow our
people to be slaves or to be divided by languages, ethnic grouping, false
borders or false micro-nationalities.
This awakening African people
stand at the vanguard of the struggle of the world's oppressed people
to build a new world in which the currently endured humiliation, famine,
terror and disease becomes a distant, faded memory. We believe that it
is only fitting that the people who gave birth to world civilization,
and who are the primary victims of the barbarism that has established
hegemony throughout the world, take responsibility for leading the struggle
for liberation of the majority of the planet from the tyranny and despotism
of U.S.- led world imperialism.
Brothers and Sisters! "The
hour of Africa's redemption," which the great Marcus Garvey so prophetically
envisioned many years ago, is upon us! We must build the African Socialist
International (ASI) and unite our dispersed, oppressed and one-billion-strong
African nation under the slogan "Touch One! Touch All!" We must
build the ASI under the leadership of the African workers aligned with
the poor peasantry, for it is they who are the creators of social wealth
and value. It is they who are the only social force capable of waging
our liberation struggle to its victorious conclusion, African workers
and peasants must assume the leadership of our society as a condition
for our freedom!
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