On November 4, 2023, the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM) showed up and showed out!
In preparation for the Black People’s March, leaders of InPDUM’s International Executive Committee, including President Matsemela, Outreach Coordinator Kobina, Midwest Representative Kabula and Black Community Control of the Police Chair Sydney held an outreach training. In this training we emphasized the importance of mass mobilizations, demonstrations, rallies and protests, to African Internationalist organizing.
The role of organizing mass events such as the Black People’s March is the tactical importance of advancing the African Liberation Struggle and achieving our ultimate objective: freedom. In this study, we discussed how marches and mass demonstrations are effective ways to raise public attention to a specific cause. The cause for the Black People’s March was embodied in the theme: Drop the Charges on the Uhuru 3! Not One Step Backwards! Build the Anti-colonial Free Speech Movement! In fact, any theme or slogan should give clear direction to the masses, especially directing our pursuit of power.
InPDUM helped organize the marches and rallies in Washington DC, South Africa, London and Los Angeles. The November 4 mobilizations were an important springboard into the 2023-2024 international campaign for InPDUM planned at the 2023 InPDUM International Convention.
InPDUM Convention directed the way
InPDUM held its International Convention in St. Louis, Missouri from September 9 – 10, 2023. The theme for this year’s convention was “Deepening the Counteroffensive! Completing the Black Power Movement! This Time We Will Win!” We defined deepening the counteroffensive as building membership and branches, bringing the masses of African people back into political life and leading campaigns in defense of the African Working Class.
This is why it was of strategic importance that we won the Comrade Sydney of Lexington, Kentucky to the leadership of the Black Community Control of the Police campaign. We also won Comrade Makemba (Lisa) of Newark to leadership of the Africans Charge Genocide campaign.
Chairman Omali Yeshitela opened the InPDUM convention by reading and discussing his keynote address to the founding convention of the National People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement (NPDUM) on April 6, 1991 in Chicago, Illinois. In that speech the Chairman identified the purpose of NPDUM (now InPDUM):
“The National People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement, like components of the liberal African petty bourgeois-led Civil Rights Movement of the Sixties, will be a direct action movement that will engage in acts of civil disobedience and other tactics employed by democratic mass movements worldwide. However, even as we struggle to defend the national democratic rights won by our people in the past rights which are constantly being abrogated by the U.S. government in the name of fighting a war against drugs, the National People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement will struggle to extend the question of democracy beyond the definition of the liberal African petty bourgeoisie.”
So, while InPDUM may engage in civil rights struggles, we do so under the leadership of the vanguard party of the African Working Class and within the ideology of African Internationalism.
InPDUM did not leave empty-handed. In all of our mobilizations, InPDUM won new friends, new members and new cadres.
In DC, Comrades Kobina and Kabula led the InPDUM outreach teams. In Pretoria, South Africa, the work was led by Comrade Tafarie. In West Africa, Comrade Morlai leads the work and in London, Secretary General Luwezi Kinshasa is leading the most serious resurgence of InPDUM in recent years as they defend comrade Chenniah and organize a pushback against gentrification.
InPDUM Presidential address to the Black People’s March
In Los Angeles and in DC, President Matsemela and Comrade Lauryn respectively, delivered variations of the following address:
“InPDUM was organized under the leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party in 1991 to bring the masses of African people back into political life and to defend the African community against the counterinsurgency war waged against the African community by the US colonial state.
“The work of InPDUM is guided by our platform, the Revolutionary National Democratic Program which directs our campaigns in defense of the democratic rights of the African Working Class – Black Community Control of the Police, Africans Charge Genocide, African Community Control of Housing and Education, the list goes on. In InPDUM we say that “self determination is the highest form of democracy.
“Through the leadership of Chairman Omali Yeshitela and the ideology of African Internationalism we know that the primary contradiction that African people face today is colonialism. We know that the attack on Africa in the early 1400s produced a single world economy of colonial capitalism that ensnares the African, Arab, Filipino, Indigenous people of the Americas and Asia, and other oppressed people around this world.
“The colonial assault on Africa was the impetus for the assault on the Americas, Asia, and the Middle East. But we are not only bound by our oppression, we are bound by our resistance to that oppression. This is why today is so important. Today represents African and other colonized people deciding our destinies for ourselves.
“The International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement salutes the Black is Back Coalition’s 15th Annual Black People’s March because we know that when everyone was jumping on the Obama train to nowhere, it was the Black People’s March and the Black is Back coalition who knew that Africans needed a political program directed towards liberation.
“The US attack against the Uhuru Movement and the attempts at imprisoning Chairman Omali Yeshitela, Penny Hess and Jesse Nevel is recognition of the leadership of the Uhuru Movement in the anticolonial struggle.
“Revolution is not a single event, it is a process and that process is unfolding all around the world-in Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, and in Palestine. The colonized are rising up. And what happens when people who have been forced to live on their hands and knees so colonizers can live on our backs rise up? The system falls.”
November 4 was a strategic victory for InPDUM and the Uhuru Movement as a whole. Follow up with the contacts. Turn those contacts into members. Build those campaigns and grow the branches. This is how we will win!
Hands Off Uhuru! Hands Off Africa!
Drop the Charges on the Uhuru 3!
Not One Step Backwards!
Build the Anti-colonial Free Speech Movement!