The African Nation
(In photo: Chairman Omali Yeshitela with Sam Nujoma, First President of Independent Namibia and leader of the liberation organization SWAPO)
Chairman Omali Yeshitela has written and spoken extensively on the question of the African Nation and has built the African Socialist International which exists in Africa, the U.S., Europe and the Caribbean. From his book An Uneasy Equilibrium: The African Revolution versus Parasitic Capitalism the Chairman states:
“The African nation, then, is a community of people whose core identity is based on historical ties to the equatorial continent of black Africa, contributing to a common culture, history and physiognomy.
“The African nation is also comprised of all those African people who have been forcibly dispersed to various places in the world through colonial slavery. Dispersed Africans were part of the process of the development of capitalism and the European nation, a process that requires our subjugation and national incoherence.
“Additionally, the African nation is comprised of many who experience a sense of sameness, a subjective connection to Africa, mainly because of skin color that helps to define their imperialist-inspired impoverished and oppressed state of existence.
“The Dalit in India, the Indigenous of Australia and other areas where the African presence goes back toearliest times, such as in the Asia-Pacific region, are included in this category…
“Africa is the national homeland of all black people worldwide. It is the land to which the identity of the African nation is firmly and irreversibly affixed.
“Our historical connection to Africa represents the critical element of the material basis for African nationality.
“For although we have been forcibly dispersed by colonial slavery and related factors subsequent to the initial European attack on Africa, our current conditions of existence, both in Africa and abroad, are essentially defined by the consequences of our forced dispersal.
“Here we remind ourselves that it was Europe that divided Africa with the illegitimate borders that now still function to facilitate the theft of Africa’s still vast resources by various imperial forces.
“The colonial division of Africa continues to separate Africans from each other and from our resources that are being expropriated without cessation.
“The 54 delineated territories currently characterized as African nations were created in a conference held in Berlin, Germany in 1884-1885, attended by contending European states that parceled Africa out among themselves, resulting in the map that is known as Africa today.
“The result of this European invention has been the evolvement of a false national consciousness that fits the interests of the imperialists who created it at the expense of Africans ourselves.
“There were no pre-colonial borders separating Africans from each other. Now borders surround 54 colonially-created entities, many of which cut right down the middle of ancient family or kinship territories, dividing and pitting against each other Africans that lived together for time immemorial.
“Clearly, this physical and psychological separation has facilitated false national consciousness, not to mention a myriad of other traumas.
“The practical significance of this clarification concerning the African nation and its relationship to the European imperialist nation was discussed in our book, One People! One Party! One Destiny!:
Basis for the current crisis of imperialism
“The anti-imperialist struggles of the world’s peoples for repossession of our sovereignty and resources, both human and material, are the basis of the current, deep crisis of imperialism.
“They are struggles to remove the pedestal upon which the entire rotten edifice of imperialism rests.
“They are struggles that enlist the vast majority of humanity, the laboring masses of every nation, in the creation of a new world without exploitation and oppression, without slaves and slave masters and, ultimately, without borders.
“We recognize that the struggle for the liberation and unification of Africa and African people, the struggle for the consolidation of the African nation is ultimately a struggle that undermines the solidarity of the European nation-state.”