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The International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM) will be holding its 30th Annual Convention from September 2 through September 4, 2022 in St. Louis, Missouri. Africans from around the world will convene at Akwaaba Hall in North St. Louis under this year’s theme: Defending the Black Community! We Are Our Own Liberators! The theme for the 2022 InPDUM Convention has historical and immediate importance to the liberation of African people.
InPDUM was officially chartered as a national organization on April 6, 1991 in Chicago, Illinois. This was the 23rd anniversary of the assassination of Little Bobby Hutton, the youngest founding member of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California. Chicago was also the place where Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were assassinated on December 4, 1969. These assassinations represented the counterinsurgency war that the US colonial state waged against the African Revolution of the 1960s (the Black Power Movement).
For all given purposes, the colonial-capitalists intended for this to be the conclusion of our struggle for freedom. Yet, thanks to the leadership of Chairman Omali Yeshitela and the African People’s Socialist Party, we know this is merely the prologue.
InPDUM salutes the 50th Anniversary of the African People’s Socialist Party
The APSP was formed on African Liberation Day May 25, 1972 with the expressed goal of reviving and completing the African Revolution of the 1960s. To complete this task, The Party organized the first mass campaigns that restored the mass character to the African Liberation Movement in the United States for the first time since the military defeat of our movement. This includes the Long March to Starke Prison, the movements to Free Joe Waller, Connie Tucker, Pitts and Lee and certainly the Dessie Woods Campaign.
In 1977, Chairman Omali Yeshitela outlined the tactics and strategies to complete the Black Power Movement and win African Independence. Winning African people to the position of independence is primary in this list of tactics and strategies. InPDUM is critical to achieving that task. The final objective is to build the African People’s Liberation Army.
The APSP has used the strategy of building mass organizations and campaigns to bring Africans back into political life and to push back US counterinsurgency. This includes but is not limited to the African National Prison Organization, the African National Reparations Organization, the 1984 Oakland Freedom Summer and Community Control of Housing campaign, as well as the formation of the People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement, a local organization in Oakland in the 1980s.
Defend the Black Community
InPDUM was built to defend the African community and now we are on the offensive.
Colonial-capitalism and imperialism are in a global crisis. Chairman Omali Yeshitela has summed up this crisis as “the uneasy equilibrium.”
For over 600 years, African people have been the pedestal for the white world. Africans have been forced to live on our hands and knees as Europe, the United States and other colonizers have used our backs as their stepping stone. Yet, we now see Africans around the world are rising up. As we rise up, their system begins to collapse.
There are material effects of the imperialist system in crisis and you all see them. Constant international conflicts, Gas prices are high, there are food shortages, and the state murder of Africans increases.
In spite of the plagues unleashed by the system in crisis, even as the price of houses are skyrocketing and Africans are unhoused and reduced to a nomadic lifestyle. The African working class continues to organize relentlessly in-itself and for-itself.
White nationalist powers, and their collaborators, have increased their assaults against Africans and other colonized people. This includes the May 14, 2022 mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, the May 24, 2022 mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, and the July 2, 2022 flamethrower attack on the Uhuru House in St. Petersburg, Florida.
The apex of this assault against African independence has been July 29, 2022 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) military assault against the Uhuru Movement. However, the FBI cannot stop this convention. They cannot stop the convention because it is powered by the will of African people.
St. Louis is the center African Revolution
In the 1980s, the Uhuru Movement moved into Oakland, Philadelphia, Chicago, and elsewhere in defense of the African working class and to push back the counterinsurgency. When the APSP defended the African working class of Philadelphia following the 1985 bombing of the Move Family Africa, the slogan was “Reinforcements Are on the Way.”
After the murder of Mike Brown on August 9, 2014, reinforcements were sent to St. Louis, Missouri. St. Louis is the center of the African Revolution in the US. St. Louis is the headquarters of InPDUM. All of the opportunists have hightailed it out of St. Louis after their descent on Ferguson in 2014. InPDUM has turned the spontaneous uprising of African workers into organization in St. Louis. Africans have rapidly moved from protest to Black Power.
InPDUM has seen victories in its campaigns to defend African workers in South Africa, to free comrades from prison in California, and to bring meaningful economic development to North St. Louis. InPDUM is a leader in the international struggle for African Liberation.
The work of InPDUM reverberates from St. Louis, to South Africa, to Europe, the West Indies and beyond.
An attack on Uhuru is an attack on Africa
The Burning Spear newspaper has summed up the FBI’s attack against the Uhuru Movement. On July 29, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) attacked the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) and Uhuru Movement. Early in the morning, they raided the homes of movement members as well as Uhuru Movement offices in St. Louis, Missouri and St. Petersburg, Florida with battering rams, flashbang grenades and drones, stealing files, computers, phones and other equipment.
Their claim was that this assault was because of political association with people in Russia. They claimed that the Party was forwarding Russian foreign policy, but the reality is that this is just a poor attempt to isolate the Party and the African liberation movement and disconnect us from other oppressed peoples around the world and any other anti-imperialist forces who support African peoples’ struggle against our oppression. It is a desperate lash out from a dying colonial-capitalist U.S. government, still reeling from its own instability, fragmentation and isolation.
Everywhere, imperialism is in crisis. The colonial ruling class has turned against itself in North America. In Africa, this attack was facilitated by theThe United States and the whole social system is facing an existential crisis. Where it was once an uncontested hegemony for the longest period of time. It is now being perceived by much of the world, rightly so, as a force that’s losing its grip on the world.
The United States has identified three strategic enemies. Russia, China, and Africa and African people worldwide. For the first time in its 246-year history the United States Marines has put forward their first four-star Black general. This general was given the job of presiding over Africa Command (AFRICOM), the organization from the United States military to control and contain Africa. This contest with Russia and China in Africa has also caused the U.S. to appoint the first Black secretary of defense in its history.
And Black people, if you remember, in 1969, the FBI declared that the Black Panther Party was the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States. And it was an organization dealing in international affairs, and it didn’t have the kind of organizational presence that we have throughout the African world. So that’s why the African People’s Socialist Party came under attack. This is an attack on the rights of Black people. It’s an attack on our struggle for the absolute, total liberation of every inch, square inch, of Africa and its unification, along with the African peoples around the world, in solidarity with oppressed and colonized people elsewhere.
We Are Our Own Liberators!
InPDUM knows that an attack against the Uhuru Movement is an attack against Africa and African Liberation. It is an assault against African Liberation. Uhuru, meaning freedom in KiSwahili, was the slogan of the anticolonial Kenya Land and Freedom Army also known as the Mau Mau.
The US attack against Africa and the Uhuru Movement is part of their Africa Plan. Everyone has an Africa Plan. Africa needs its own Africa Plan. With the presence of the Uhuru Movement and InPDUM, Africa has its own Africa Plan.
In the 1970s, the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army promoted the term, “We Are Our Own Liberators” as part of their anticolonial struggle against the white nationalist Rhodesian government of Ian Smith. This motto underscored the importance of African self-determination. It was a push back against white nationalist colonizers and the ideological imperialist liberal-left colonizers.
“Defending The Black Community! We Are Our Own Liberators!” is the appropriate motto for this convention. It underscores the programmatic character of our convention and what we need to do to get free.
On Friday September 2, 2022, we will host a Black Power Blueprint Bus Tour and lift up and celebrate the African Working Class at our awards ceremony. We will spend Saturday September 3, 2022 at the One Africa One Nation Farmers Market and witness Black Power in action. That evening, we will host a screening of the APSP 50th Anniversary Documentary, “Relentless! 50 Years of Leadership Toward African Redemption.” On Sunday September 4, 2022, we will hold workshops on African community defense, Black community control of the police and prison outreach and reparations. Constitutional revisions will be voted on, the new international executive committee will be elected and Chairman Omali Yeshitela will appoint the new president.