Omali Yeshitela

Since the founding of the African People's Socialist Party (APSP), Omali Yeshitela has understood the fact that African people, dispersed around the world, are one people and that the future of all African people is in the unification and liberation of Africa. This understanding can be found in the 14th Point of the APSP's Platform, which quotes Kwame Nkrumah in calling for the unification and liberation of Africa under an all-African socialist government.

Omali Yeshitela is increasingly becoming recognized by Africans around the world as the foremost leader in the struggle for Africa's liberation. He has taken the legacy of Marcus Garvey, who built a worldwide organization of millions of African people with the vision of an Africa for Africans, at home and abroad.

Born as Joseph Waller in 1941 in St. Petersburg, Florida, USA, Omali Yeshitela has spent more than 40 years in the service of Africa. In December 1966, as a SNCC organizer, Yeshitela led a group of young African people into the St. Petersburg City Hall and ripped down from the walls a demeaning racist mural that had hung for thirty years on the first landing. For removing the painting, Yeshitela was given a five-year prison sentence, of which he served two years. While in prison in 1968 Yeshitela formed JOMO, the Junta of Militant Organizations. Four years later Yeshitela organized the African People's Socialist Party, which built the Uhuru Movement.

As Chairman of the APSP, Omali Yeshitela has been responsible for solving many of the theoretical questions left unanswered with the defeat of the Black Power Movement of the 60s and the imperialist front of neocolonialism to push back the African Liberation Movement throughout the world. Yeshitela developed the theory of African Internationalism, which defines capitalism as a parasitic system that was born from the enslavement of African people and the oppression of colonized peoples worldwide.

In 1982, the African People's Socialist Party passed at its Congress the resolution to build the African Socialist International (ASI). From that point on, Chairman Omali Yeshitela began traveling around the world taking his theory of African Internationalism to organize African people around the world to build the ASI, an international party of African revolutionaries with one strategy that would take our struggles around the world out of isolation.

This work took Yeshitela throughout Europe, and in 1999 the APSP held the first Conference to Build the African Socialist International in London, England. Since then conferences have been held annually in London leading up to this year's conference that should set the stage for the founding Congress of the African Socialist International.

Yeshitela made his first trip home to Africa in December 2002 as the Keynote Speaker at the 8th Congress of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania. Since then he has been traveled throughout Occupied Azania (called by its colonial name South Africa) and Namibia, and more recently to Ghana organizing to build the African Socialist International. He has also traveled to South America organizing African people to the vision of a united, liberated Africa and the process to accomplish this vision.

Omali Yeshitela is indeed the premiere leader of the International African Revolution, carrying on the legacy of Marcus Garvey, Kwame Nkrumah and Patrice Lumumba. With the building of the African Socialist International, Africa's liberation is indeed on the horizon, and Omali Yeshitela is at its helm.