Trump’s America is not so different from the America African people have been experiencing for our entire existence. From the inception of this colonial project, our labor has been stolen and exploited for the benefit of the colonizer. 

At any given time, African people may experience pockets of job growth, but even when the parasitic economy appears to be doing well, African unemployment has consistently been the highest of any group since the federal government began publishing labor statistics by race and gender, in 1970.

The August 2025 Jobs Report

So while it may seem staggering to some, we are not surprised at the rate at which African women are being pushed out of the labor market. Every month, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) publishes the Employment Situation Summary (often referred to as the “jobs report”). 

In August 2025, the U.S. economy added just 22,000 jobs. Economists noted that this was a sharp slowdown reflecting deep structural instability in the labor market. Amid this fragility, the unemployment rate for Black women soared to 7.5 percent, nearly double the national average of 4.3 percent.

Federal job cuts (97,000 positions lost since January) have disproportionately impacted agencies where Black women are overrepresented.

Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley highlighted that over 300,000 Black women have lost jobs since February, calling it “a staggering loss of economic security and generational progress.” But this framing reflects the outlook of the African petty bourgeoisie.

Petit Bourgeois Illusions vs. Working-Class Reality

The African working class cannot afford illusions of reform or inclusion. For us, real “generational progress” will not come from climbing the colonial ladder but from tearing it down by reclaiming our stolen resources, building African self-reliance, and overturning parasitic capitalism itself.

The U.S. economy was built on the stolen labor of African people. From the enslavement of African women to the underpaid domestic and service work that continues today, African women’s labor has always been a primary pillar propping up this system.

The Vivid Truth about Poverty Programs

The African working class bears the brunt. It is African women in hospitals, schools, social service offices, and federal agencies who are being cast into unemployment lines, forced to choose between food and rent.

Take social services, for example. These are the very institutions where African women are concentrated both as workers and as recipients. 

During one of my recertification appointments for WIC—a federal program that provides food, health referrals, and nutrition support to low-income pregnant women, new mothers, and young children—the worker admitted that my income, though low enough to qualify for assistance, was still higher than her own paycheck. This is the colonial contradiction laid bare: African women employed by the state to administer poverty programs are themselves trapped in poverty wages.

The colonial state uses our labor to administer its scraps while locking us in the same cycle of deprivation. It demands that African women prop up its welfare system while ensuring that neither the worker nor the recipient can ever escape dependence on a parasitic economy. This is colonial capitalism waging economic war on African women, forcing us to subsidize the very system that exploits and discards us.

The Nature of Parasitism

This is parasitism. The wealth of the white ruling class is fed by draining the blood, sweat, and tears of African people, while leaving us in permanent instability. The jobs report is a reminder that African people must build our own future outside the colonial economy.

That means advancing African self-reliance by creating cooperative economic systems and community-controlled institutions that serve us rather than the colonial state. It requires organizing the African working class, with African women workers at the forefront as leaders who experience the sharpest edge of colonial oppression and who hold the clearest vision of liberation.

Rejecting Reform, Embracing Revolution

We must also reject the petty bourgeois illusion that assimilation into the colonial system can ever deliver freedom. No individual achievement or professional advancement will overturn the conditions of colonial exploitation. Liberation demands the destruction of the system itself.

As a recent Time article put it, “Black women are the canary in the coal mine on the health of the economy.” The authors warn that rising unemployment among Black women is a signal of what’s to come for other workers. While this framing makes clear that African women workers are among the most vulnerable, it ultimately reduces our suffering to a benchmark for the broader economy.

It fails to grapple with the deeper reality that African working-class women are not simply indicators of crisis but the very foundation of the colonial parasitic system, a system that extracts our labor and discards us when convenient. By stopping at reformist prescriptions for policymakers, the article reflects the outlook of the petty bourgeoisie, seeking to better manage African women’s exploitation rather than overturning the system that produces it.

The Path Forward: African Internationalism

For African people, the lesson is not that we are early warnings for others, but that our lived experience exposes the colonial economy itself as unsustainable, demanding its complete destruction and replacement with African-controlled systems of power and life.

Our struggle must be carried out under the banner of African Internationalism. African women in the U.S., Latin America,  the Caribbean, on the continent of Africa, and across Europe are united by a common oppression under colonial capitalism. Only by wielding African Internationalism as our guiding theory can we claim a common victory.

RESOLUTION

Honoring and recognizing Uhuru Furniture & Collectibles and the African People’s Education & Defense Fund for defending the rights of the African community; providing affordable furniture and home goods to Philadelphians; providing jobs, job training, and volunteer opportunities; and committing all profits to supporting economic development and self-determination programs for Black communities across the country. 

WHEREAS, Uhuru Furniture & Collectibles, located at Broad and Parrish Streets in North Philadelphia, is a Black-owned business that has operated since 1994 reselling affordable furniture and household goods, providing free furniture donation pick-up services, and providing moving services to Philadelphians. Through its work, Uhuru Furniture has saved thousands of tons of furniture from landfills, helped furnish the homes of thousands of Philadelphians, and provided volunteer opportunities, job training, and work experience to its community; and 

WHEREAS, For years, Uhuru Furniture has been a mainstay resource for thousands of Philadelphians and was voted “Best Home Furnishing Store in Philly” multiple times by local Channel 17 viewers. After 29 years in business, Uhuru Furniture will be closing its Philadelphia location on October 31st, 2023; and 

WHEREAS, Uhuru Furniture has served Philadelphia as an economic development institution of the civil rights nonprofit the African People’s Education & Defense Fund (APEDF), which strives to develop and institutionalize programs that defend the human and civil rights of the African community and address the disparities in education, health, health care, and economic development in the African community; and 

WHEREAS, Since 1994, the APEDF has established institutions and programs that put African people in control of their own community life. By building institutions that put economic, political, and cultural power in the hands of the community, the APEDF seeks to combat the colonial conditions that challenge their people’s ability to clothe, feed, and house themselves; and 

WHEREAS, Through on-the-ground institutions like Uhuru Furniture, the APEDF has shown what self-determination for the African community looks like. It is a monumental victory and testament that Uhuru Furniture has succeeded for three decades through conditions that normally keep Black-owned institutions out of the economic arena; and 

WHEREAS, Uhuru Furniture has been instrumental in supporting the creation and growth of other APEDF initiatives that continue to enact the APEDF mission. The Black Power Blueprint programs in St. Louis, MO continues to expand, contributing an African farmer’s market and community garden, a community basketball court, a doula training program, and a women’s health center to the North St. Louis Black community; and

WHEREAS, Under the slogan “Our Labor, Our Future”, the APEDF is launching a new initiative, the African Independence Workforce Program (AIWP), that aims to reverse the negative economic impact of the colonial economy and the prison system. AIWP will train members of the African community, in particular formerly incarcerated members, to contribute to a prosperous future through the development of an independent liberated economy; and 

WHEREAS, The AIWP emerges from the real, material need to reverse the impact of the past 40 years of mass incarceration that has torn apart families, left African communities impoverished, and left families without fathers, sons, mothers, daughters, sisters, and brothers. The AIWP seeks to receive brothers and sisters back into communities and reverse the damage done by the prison system that has been used as a colonial tool against African families; and 

WHEREAS, Uhuru Furniture is one of a network of initiatives that have contributed toward the creation of the AIWP and the enactment of its mission. AIWP now serves to create opportunities for formerly incarcerated African men and women, alongside all its community members, to receive training, gain employment, and become stakeholders in a prosperous economy; and 

WHEREAS, The City of Philadelphia recognizes the powerful work of Uhuru Furniture, the African People’s Education & Defense Fund, and the African Independence Workforce Program. In particular, we recognize and commemorate Uhuru Furniture’s impact on Philadelphia, as a small Black-owned business dedicated to economic development and self-determination for its community; now therefore be it 

RESOLVED, THAT THE COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF PHILADELPHIA, Honors and recognizes Uhuru Furniture & Collectibles and the African People’s Education & Defense Fund for defending the rights of the African community; providing affordable furniture and home goods to Philadelphians; providing jobs, job training, and volunteer opportunities; and committing all profits to supporting economic development and self-determination programs for the Black community across the country. 

FURTHER RESOLVED, That an Engrossed copy of this resolution be presented to the African People’s Education & Defense Fund’s Board President Ona Zene’ Yeshitela, as evidence of the respect and recognition given by this legislative body.

Introduced by 

Council Member Kendra Brooks Cosponsors – 

Mark Squilla 

Sharon Vaughn 

Mike Driscoll 

Curtis Jones 

Jamie Gauthier 

Anthony Phillips 

Isaiah Thomas 

Katherine Gilmore Richardson October 26, 2023

The following article is the transcript from the presentation given by President Yejide Orunmila during the Black is Back Coalition’s February 18th livestream 

African people have been fighting for our freedom since Africa was first attacked by Europe.  This has always pitted our struggle for self-determination against the colonial mode of production. We are talking about a mode of production that raped, pillaged, enslaved and colonized people and lands using both ends of the rifle, machetes and any other weapons of mass destruction they could think of.

The colonizer is always developing strategies to infiltrate and destroy our efforts to free ourselves from their grip.  Why?  Because without us they wouldn’t survive.  

During his 2023 State of the Union address, Joseph Biden highlighted how much his administration has accomplished for the people of this country.  He capped it off by saying that the United States is the only country that has faced adversity and come back stronger than it did before. He alluded to the United States being a great beacon of freedom. 

The United States is still the Greatest Purveyor of Violence 

Of course, this is the narrative of the colonizer.   What do the colonized say?  Martin Luther King Jr. said the United  States was the greatest purveyor of violence.   That was in 1967 and they killed him. This was a man who touted non-violence  in the face of violence and the United States killed him. 

In 2023 we started the year with the murder of Tyre Nichols at the hands of the colonial police.  It doesn’t matter that the police were black. It matters that they are agents of the colonizer, carrying out colonial law.  Unlike their white counterparts, however,  who can kill and get off; they go directly to jail. 

In my lifetime there has been constant war managed by U.S. imperialism.  I was a child, but remember Oliver North and what the U.S. government called the Iran-Contra Affair.  They called it a “scandal” attempting to minimize the gigantic scope of what occurred. 

The Iran-Contra Affair was a serious network of U.S. agents and government officials that attempted to undermine the Nicaraguan fight for self-determination by developing an opposition (The Contra)  and  supplying them with guns and money in exchange for cocaine that was sold in the United States as a fundraiser in support of the the U.S. campaign against the Sandinistas. 

This influx of cocaine in the U.S. led to the crack epidemic in African communities. This scandal had horrific consequences for millions of people around the world.  It’s like defining Christopher Columbus “discovering” America as a little white lie.  The colonizer trivializes its impact on the people they devastate. 

The Chairman says they are not devils and that we must be dialectical ,but, this is diabolical. Right? 

Colonial Policy has always opposed African Self-Determination 

The United States, the place where they say you can “bring your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore”, was just a call for desperate Europeans who sought  a better life for themselves and did so on the backs of Africans.   

In order to get that better way of life, they had to stand at the feet of every hanged negro, rape every black woman, call every black man a rapist, burn a cross at every home, bomb every church and drop bombs on thriving African communities.  

The poor wretched colonizers, coming from desperate, starving, filthy and violent places,  to a land that was carved out of the blood native people. They enthusiastically became settlers establishing their little house on the prairie as long as they were willing to defend it by fighting and killing native peoples who have used that prairie for centuries.

No, Joe.  The United States is not the beacon of freedom you say it is.  It is, as the Chairman says, a prison of colonized nations. 

FBI is an agency of the colonial U.S. Gov’t

So, when the FBI created this indictment against the Uhuru Movement they were attacking the ongoing struggle for African self-determination.  The African Freedom Struggle.  A movement that had set a goal to extricate ourselves from the binds of colonial domination. 

Like Harriet, Nat, Marcus, Malcolm, Nkrumah, Sankara, the Panthers, Bishop and so many other African people that had fought for freedom,  the Party has set a course and are organizing our way out. The Party and the Chairman are the Vanguard.  

What is the freedom are we talking about?  We are talking about a freedom that overturns the current social world order. A freedom that destroys the colonizer and by doing so destroys the designation of the colonized. A freedom that frees people and lands up to determine our own future without the ever-looming threat of violence that comes from the colonizer nations.  

The colonizer nations who have historically waged massive campaigns to infiltrate, subvert, kill, and destroy our struggle to protect their parasitism. Without this parasitic relationship to the colonized they would shatter when faced with adversity.  Their success is dependent on our oppression. 

Freedom means overturning the social system 

The Uhuru Movement believes African people should be free. We have rejected the status quo.  We have rejected the centuries long war against our very existence and have the audacity to tell the world that we want our freedom.   Not by cowering in the night.  By organizing a response to the colonizer in every community that we can.  Building organizations and institutions that have become the beacon of light to the African working class. 

We are doing it out in the open. In every community we can, we create Burkina Fasos  (lands of upright men and women). What we create now in times of serious crisis and oppression is  just the baseline of what we can achieve.  Imagine if we had access to all of our resources and land, the incredible things we could accomplish for ourselves.  To know that when we free Africa we  free the world.  

Obviously this is a challenge to the colonizer. This is why they constantly develop strategies to undermine our efforts.   So when they created this indictment and attributed our freedom struggle  to the Russians and not to U.S. colonial violence and the prison of nations they’ve created, they are opening up another campaign of untruths.   

Dangerous Negroes are reborn through the struggle for African Liberation 

Well, they’ve made a mistake, haven’t they?  The Uhuru Movement is prepared to put the colonial state on trial if they ever try to pursue their delusionary indictments. 

We are dialecticians.  Political Scientists.  Oppressed people with eyes, ears and brain that can figure stuff out.  All we have to do is look back at our history.  In every nook and cranny, around every corner, the presence of the colonizer is there.  Foot on neck, squeezing the life out of us.  They have targeted entire movements like the UNIA and The Panthers, Sojourners for Truth and Justice  or individuals like Claudia Jones and Paul Robeson, Ida B. Wells, MLK Jr., Assata – these were the dangerous negros. 

Well, the Uhuru Movement are the dangerous negros now.  Pushing back on every front. Moving ahead to accomplish our mission and create steeled cadre forces to bring Africa its liberation.

Watch Now

The stolen labor of African people and the theft of the world’s resources is the pedestal upon which the entire colonizer white world stands on.   Hence capitalism was born parasitic, demanding the necessity of colonialism to sustain itself in countries throughout the world.

Though this comes as no surprise to African people who have been under the assault of colonial capitalism for centuries, the theory sets Africans and any others on the path toward ending the oppression and exploitation that robs us of our humanity – this requires that we destroy the parasite. 

This is the genesis for African women who want to end the oppression we have endured. 

We recognize that the assault on Africa happened to our whole people. African women as a sector of our people experience special oppression that came about as a result of being colonially dominated.  

The attack on Africa brought about the worldwide system of terror that used our bodies as the factories for the production of new workers, slave labor for the production of raw material, and made patriarchal policy in the colonies – patriarchy that had existed as a system of oppression in Europe for thousands of years.  Now Africans are trapped by it.  

What had been transitional communal roles such as caretakers, food producers and preparers had become societal edicts for women,  on top of which we were now forced into producing for the colonizers.  

African historian Wunyabari.O. Maloba in his book, African Women in Revolution says:

“It was colonial policies that  reshaped African social norms, that ‘unlike the precolonial period, where ‘in many parts of Africa, women who farmed had rights over land,’ under colonialism the imposition of private ownership of land left most women without their ‘customary right’ to land.’” 

The conditions that African women experience today are not a result of natural development but an attack that shifted us away from being self-productive to producing for the colonizers and this resulted into the change of the entire economic and social landscape of the world and the relationship that African people have with one another.

African people were forced to participate in the colonial mode of production that upholds parasitic capitalism as Chairman Omali Yeshitela so brilliantly explains in his 2022 report to the African People’s Socialist Party Plenary:

“Our theory [African Internationalism] provides us with the scientific proof that our colonial oppression is the origin of the parasitic capitalist system that rapes, humiliates, and exploits Africa, Africans, and the majority of the world. Eventually, we came to understand that this rape and pillage of Africa by Europe matured into a global, colonial mode of production that rescued Europeans from feudalist ignorance, poverty, and oppression.”

Pan-Africanism and Neocolonialism the perfect storm

African flag independence did not bring relief as it gave rise to neo-colonialism and the ascendency of the African petty-bourgeoisie, the most radical of them using pan-Africanism as the rallying cry to organize itself. 

Luwezi Kinshasa Secretary-General of the African Socialist International writes of the failures of pan-Africanism to meet the needs of the revolution in his article, The historical class struggle within the African Liberation Movement, published in the Burning Spear Newspaper:

“The 5th Pan-African Congress did not mobilize Africans to fight the United States, which emerged out of the second imperialist world war as the new imperialist world leader. The main target of this PAC was the colonial powers from Europe like France, Germany, Portugal, and others. The Pan-Africanist pacifist approach left Lumumba vulnerable in the face of his enemies from within his own organization. Since the Pan-Africanists in Manchester were never concerned with class interest inside the African community, their non-violent method meant that they did not anticipate that they would have to fight the colonial state to get to power. This meant that our best leaders, like Lumumba, Sobukwe, and others, were vulnerable at the hands of our class and national enemies who had control of the State and were prepared to strike at our leaders at any time. Nkrumah himself, who failed to grasp the class question, was overthrown by the same social forces that murdered [Patrice] Lumumba five years earlier.”

Abdulrahman Mohammed Babu who worked with Lumumba and Nkrumah was a Zanzibar-born Marxist and pan-Africanist who played an important role in the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution. He too came to realize that neo-colonial pan-Africanism did not serve the interest of the masses. He was a minister under Julius Nyerere until he was jailed by Nyerere in 1972 for being critical of Nyerere’s model of African socialism failing to address Tanzania’s reliance on raw material exports and for irresponsible and unsustainable nationalization.  He writes in his 1981 book,  African Socialism or Socialist Africa: 

“The main characteristic of [so called] post-colonial Africa is the struggle between the forces of justice equality and self-reliant development (in short, socialism) on the one hand and, on the other, the forces of neo-colonialism, comprador tyranny, arbitrary military-civilian dictatorship, class aggrandizement of social and economic resources and oppression of the people in the name of national progress and development.  The political consciousness of the African masses has developed, by and large, in a social and political environment characterized by an uneven development…”

Socialism is what we are calling for!  A United Socialist Africa is the only way forward and the path to it is painted in black. 

Not only should we destroy colonial capitalism; we have to replace capitalism as the colonial mode of production with socialism to ensure the forward progression of society. 

Socialism is when the workers control the state and own the means of production. That way there can be an assurance of redistribution of wealth, contributing to a more equal society. 

Under socialism, we will be jolted out of the fog of mysticism and economic depravity and driven toward a future that will require the rapid development of the people. 

Practices that had previously been the only source of economic stability, sex work, female genital mutilation (FGM), and other practices that trap women primarily, will fade away as society is opened up to new opportunities.  Worker-owned production will ensure that all of our people can make a living contributing to the development of our nation and most importantly provide financial security for women and other vulnerable sectors of our society, making us less vulnerable.

The need for a revolutionary African women’s organization

You’ve heard us say many times that there is no such thing as women, in general.  There is a difference between the women of the oppressor colonizer nation who benefit from colonial domination and the women of the oppressed colonized nations who suffer as a result of colonial domination.  

Colonizer women, although oppressed because of the patriarchy that existed in Europe, came into the colonial mode of production at the side of their oppressors and reinforced it in the colony. They were the missionaries, the teachers, and the madames who offered strategic points of entry into the colony.

They benefitted from having African women in their homes as servants which gave them the pedestal upon which they launched their struggle for equal rights to their male counterparts.  

They’ve created this narrative that all women are in the same boat.  That patriarchy, male domination over women, is our primary barrier.  However, it has been impossible for them to win this position alone as colonial white women and they have created strategies to adopt colonized and oppressed women to their fight by pandering to the experiences of those women. First with the bourgeois woman’s movement and finally through feminism. 

Feminism encourages equality in order to maintain the status quo within the existing parasitic social structure.  It has African women fighting for equal pay for “women”, while oppressor nation women continue to earn more than African, Indigenous, and Latinx men and women in the U.S.   

Essentially, colonized oppressed people within the U.S. colony are fighting just to catch up to white women,  while white women are fighting to be equal to white men.  Patriarchy cannot explain this dichotomy nor can it explain the many other issues that impact poor working-class colonized people. 

Patriarchy does not explain the overrepresentation of African prisoners in the U.S. Europe, and Canada,  state violence, the overrepresentation of African children kidnapped by the state,  dumpster babies,  neo-colonialism, infant and maternal death, poor healthcare, food deserts, gentrification, ethnic cleansing, proxy wars; just about everything else.  

Yet still, they’ve worked hard to force the false narrative that all women suffer from patriarchy and must band together, using the conditions of the poor and oppressed people they dominated as a springboard for their bourgeois women’s issues.   

White women in the U.S. catapulted from abolition to the fight for women’s suffrage to struggles for equal pay, reproductive rights, and ending sexual violence;  all of which was happening as African women were fighting off sexual violence as low-wage workers in the homes of white women.  

From the very public cases of  Recy Taylor a mother and wife,  who was kidnapped and gang-raped by six white men in 1944, sparking the Movement in Defense of Black Womanhood to Megan Williams who was kidnapped, raped, and tortured by white women and men in West Virginia in 2007;  the sexual violation of black women and girls never garnered the rallying cry of any of bourgeois women’s activism. Especially if white women couldn’t capitalize on it.

In fact, black women have often been depicted as liars or worse, complicit in our own assaults. 

The white women who help their male counterparts win local and national political victories, feign ignorance about the long-standing culture of rape and violence inherent in this parasitic social system, founded on rape and violence. 

The rape of African women benefits white women as much as it does their male counterparts. The children produced are capital that supports the entire white nation.

Only when it is to white women’s political advantage, is the victimization of African and other colonized women used as a prop to bolster their own objectives. 

As expected white women’s adoption of our issues did not improve the material conditions of African and other colonized women, solely because white women sit on the pedestal of colonial capitalism, which robs African people of self-determination.  

This reality laid the groundwork for Black Feminism to use the momentum of the bourgeois feminist movement and the gains and contradictions of the black power revolution of the ’60s to:

1. Make the case for patriarchy as the primary contradiction  based on the misogyny within black organizations up until that time
2. Align African women of the petite bourgeoisie to the bourgeois call for “all women” to fight against patriarchy. 
3. Take the focus away from anti-imperialism to anti-racism.  
4. Try to resolve the contradictions of oppression while upholding the system that oppresses them.   
5. Attempt to use feminism to change the system by becoming part of the system

It doesn’t require the pre-condition of revolution, the destruction of the capitalist system as a motive force leading to the liberation of women.  Black feminism is a petit-bourgeois divisive, unproductive, political line that leads African women away from African liberation and toward an unrealistic stance of self-preservation under white power imperialism.  For these reasons, feminism is not a liberation ideology.  African internationalism is. 

This conclusion laid the foundation for building a revolutionary anti-colonial anti-imperialist African women’s organization that could contend with the popularism of feminism.

The Party creates the African National Women’s Organization 

The African National Women’s Organization (ANWO) is guided by the political theory of African Internationalism, not feminism. African internationalism informs us that colonialism, not patriarchy, is the root of African women’s oppression.  

Making our fight against patriarchy obscures the colonial reality of African women.  

Our existence comes as a result of the attack on Africa, the enslavement and colonial domination of Africa and African people, not because of patriarchy. 

The African National Women’s Organization was born as a strategy of the African Revolution. We were founded by the African People’s Socialist Party in 2015 after having successful African Internationalist conferences on African women in Washington, D.C. in the U.S.  and London England, which were attended by African women from the Caribbean, Africa, the U.S., U.K., and other places in the diaspora.   

These women voted to establish an international organization of African women, to forward our revolutionary aims and objectives.  

Although, the mandate to create an African women’s organization had been written into the resolutions of the African People’s Socialist Party decades earlier. 

We understood that the pursuit of the economic, social, and political emancipation of African women is a vital part of the struggle to free the African nation and defeat white power imperialism. 

I was appointed as the president of ANWO  by Omali Yeshitela the Chairman of the African Socialist International and our first International Executive Committee (IEC) was voted in by the body of the conferences. 

Our initial priorities were to work on the resolutions that were adopted during the conferences which were to:

1. Protect and defend Assata Shakur
2. Organize against African mass incarceration U.S. and U.K.
3. Form Uhuru Kijiji Childcare Collective 
4. Expose the colonial contradiction regarding Immigration and organize against it
5. Organize against  Horizontal Violence (intimate partner violence) 
6. Develop political education to stop the harmful practice of Female Genital Mutilation 
7. Organize against the imperialist wars targeting women, children and men in the Congo and Africa
8. Develop Birth and Reproductive Justice initiatives
9. Develop Economic Development project

The International Executive Committee (IEC) is the highest body of ANWO. It leads the day-to-day affairs and political activities of ANWO including making sure that our work adheres to the resolutions set during our conventions. 

Growth marked by the fight for the African working class 

This year marks seven years of the African National Women’s Organization’s existence. We are still a small organization, led by members who commit to carrying forward the mission of bringing African women into revolutionary life. Our smallness, though not ideal, carries the stretch marks of growth and struggle. 

From the outset, we struggled to define who we were to the world, however, that revealed a lot of internal struggles. ANWO was and remains to be a confusing organization for many feminists and feminist-leaning activists because while we are in favor of equality for African women on one hand;  we are against colonialism in all of its forms including in the form of petit-bourgeois feminism. 

Initially, feminists thought they could carry feminism into our ranks. This became a point of contention because, while feminists aren’t excluded from our membership, the petty-bourgeois class characteristics of feminism required us to spend a lot of time struggling with them to abandon petty-bourgeois aspirations and contribute their skills to the interest of the African working class.   We fought for structure, accountability, and action.  

What was exposed was that some women joined not understanding that they aspire to be the African petty bourgeoisie – a  sector of the African colony that maintains the status quo and who are not particularly interested in becoming the leaders of the African revolution, shapers of our new society.

There are also women who we consider the radical petty bourgeoisie. These women are unhappy with the current social system and are constantly voicing outrage or protest in order to initiate reforms within the capitalist system.

In either instance, the outcome is African women who do not believe that African liberation is possible but join ANWO because it represents the militant politics that they hope to embody.

Liberation requires organization, not anarchy

We are a mass organization which means that any African woman can join.  

We do, however, have objectives that we expect members to contribute to.  

The highest expression of membership is action either on the ground or by supporting with dues.   The African working class demands a flexible self-funded organization that will carry out its interests. 

What we find is that some women are opposed to the strategizing, organizing, and execution that is required to get us closer to our mission; and are drawn to groups or individuals who do not have structure and where political theory does not exist. 

That is anarchy and we are not anarchists.  

This struggle constantly emerges because the characteristic of the African petite bourgeoisie is to be liberal.  

Since they do not believe in African liberation they do not have a vision of a free future. So every action item is tedious, inconvenient, “confusing”, or too hard.  

They do not help solve problems, they present problems.  They suddenly don’t have convertible skills and they do the bare minimum or nothing at all.    

In some cases, they have contempt for the African working class, evidenced by their unwillingness to engage in basic organizing in our communities.

They would rather work hard for capitalist industries or in bourgeois institutions, rather than work hard for the revolution. 

They fear “coming out” as revolutionary, but are ok with being an activist.

We have to engage in the long, hard, important work to build power amongst African women who suffer immeasurably inside the colony. 

The conditions of African women demand organization

There are over 1 million African women who live in combat zones as a result of colonial exploitation.  

Many of us are poor and without access to resources. Many of us are illiterate and are victims of violence on a daily basis. 

There are hundreds of thousands of African girls who are missing. They are forced into prostitution just to make ends meet.  

There are mothers, right now, looking for their children or crying over the bodies of their children.  

This is the world we live in because of capitalism.  

It’s in the interest of African women to destroy parasitic capitalism. In the process of destroying capitalism, African women learn to solve problems and emerge as leaders in the African revolution. 

ANWO remains committed to building that legion of African women who will birth a new world free from colonial domination and parasitic capitalism.

So we have been building campaigns like ArrestCPS and Uhuru Kijiji Childcare Collective in addition to what Erika mentioned in my intro because this is the training ground under which people, our women, and our communities, learn how to become revolutionary. The struggles we engage in while fighting to get our children back,  building community control of welfare, or building our own economic development institution, are all capacity-building for the African revolution. 

These struggles build our political fortitude and bring us to a place where we can come to the final conclusion that regardless of what we do under capitalism, we will continue to struggle for hundreds of years in the future if we don’t destroy colonialism.

We cannot avoid the inevitable that we have to become conscious active revolutionaries. We cannot add any value to this system. 

The only redemption that is worth having is the redemption of the African working class when we burn this system down, wipe it out and begin anew to create a structure where African people and other formally colonized people can live free without having this exploitative parasitic relationship with the colonizer that we have today, as once stated by Comrade Demetrius.

The crisis of imperialism defines our politics

We’re living in a time where the entire imperialist world is targeting Russia because of the Russian-Ukraine conflict. The imperialist targeting of Russia is nothing new because Russia, having developed outside of the colonial mode of production, has been an outlier in Europe for over a century.  

The Party put out a position in support of Russia’s defensive war against Ukraine and ANWO, as a member of the Uhuru Movement, is in support of this position. 

This created a struggle within our own organizing efforts to build the Black Mothers March in Washington, D.C. scheduled for Mother’s Day May 8, 2022.  Two of the 7 black-led “activist” organizations decided to abandon this important work because they did not agree with ANWO’s position.  

One of these organizations that identified itself as a “Black Queer Feminist,” while abandoning the effort to bring black families to Washington D.C. said their position is anti-imperialist, even though their decision to join the worldwide condemnation of Russia is fomented by U.S. imperialism which means that they sided with the U.S. and European imperialism by default.  And their ultimate decision to leave the efforts to organize this March for black families targeted by U.S. imperialism through colonial state-sponsored kidnapping of black children means that they have no interest in the struggles of the African working class. 

This struggle shows that the crisis of imperialism doesn’t escape any part of our existence and thus we must articulate our position.  We must be prepared to not only struggle to find a better understanding but also win people to the correct position. 

African Internationalism leads us to an understanding rooted in dialectics. It isn’t based on feelings but on historical facts that place the interest of the African working class at the center.  We are no longer sitting on the sideline as the objects of history, we are the subject of it. As black women, we have to learn how to explain the world that we are living in so that we can give leadership to anybody.

It’s African women’s responsibility to be the leaders, shapers, and makers of human history.  We must be involved in the revolutionary project to win liberation for our people. It cannot be limited to specific projects like anti-cps. We have to see further than that because if it’s just about getting back this one child back or getting this one family back together;  down the street, somebody else’s child is being taken away.  So, while we are out here, helping and assisting and organizing and fighting with these parents, we are also struggling to come to the final realization that the system must be destroyed in order for this terror to end. 

The African National Women’s Organization is here to be an avenue for African women who have abandoned their allegiance to this social system and want to be a part of the work to find and define what our worldview is.

African internationalism, not feminism, gives us the political acumen to contend with anyone on any issue.  I am so appreciative of the Chairman for studying and for developing this theory and arming the masses of our people with it to use it at our disposal, to fight for the unequivocal freedom and liberation of African people.

Not only that but also to fight on behalf of the African working class, which is the motive force to transform, change and destroy the system of colonial capitalism.

In struggle! 

Uhuru

Yejide Orunmila is the President of the African National Women’s Organization and a leading member of the African People’s Socialist Party. This report was presented at the March 2022 Black Women’s Convention.

At the point when ANWO became involved, the APSP investigators had already collected evidence from the victim, an indigenous woman, and the accused; and made a determination that resulted in Muambi Tangu being expelled from the African People’s Socialist Party and removed from his post in InPDUM.

ANWO stands in complete unity with the decision made by the Party.  While we will not go into the details of the incident, it was clear from the testimony of both parties that boundaries were crossed when the accused imposed his will on the victim.

The thoroughness of the investigation and the consideration given to all the facts, confirm that the African People’s Socialist Party is truly creating a new world dedicated to ending the oppression of African and other colonized people.

What we expect from leaders in the fight to end colonial domination is to destroy all traces of the colonizer in us.  This includes rejecting harmful tendencies that have been used as a method of control and oppression; particularly when it comes to the special oppression of African and other colonized women.  

As colonized African and indigenous women our experience under domestic colonialism is one wrought with sexual violence, hyper-sexualization, and sexual exploitation.

We serious are stamping out this colonial behavior. We must refuse to keep quiet, especially, when it involves someone who claims to be a leader in the fight for our liberation. Silence does not give us the opportunity to struggle against behaviors that threaten our ability to make the revolution.

As we fight for a world free from colonial terror, we expect that our efforts we will destroy the tendencies of the colonizer within the oppressed colonized masses.  It will be through these efforts that we will build a world where the special oppression of African women will be no more and the liberation of colonized people around the world will mean the complete and total eradication of the colonizer outside and inside of us. 

This was a real situation in one of the richest cities in the United States,  New York City, where the cost of living is skyrocketing and jobs that pay a living wage for poor and working class women are hard to come by. 

Fortunately for this mother, she approached a member of the African National Women’s Organization (ANWO) who is the founder of the Watoto Freeschool in Brooklyn, NY and is in the midst of organizing ANWO’s Uhuru Kijiji Childcare Collective to complement the paid services she offers at her facility.  

Fortunately for the mother, an African centered therapist was at the facility and was able to help de-escalate the crisis.  Together these African women were able to work out a preliminary plan to help minimize the strain this mother was under, which included enlisting the support of the African father. 

This is just one incident of many that exposes the dire situation of African mothers, not just in the United States but in many places around the world.  

The splintering of African communities 

Gone are the days when the community contributed to the raising of our children.  It wasn’t just mother, it was aunt, uncle, cousin, neighbor, friend, grandparents, who came together to ensure that every African child could grow up supported by the community. 

In the United States, where 60 years ago the main employment for African women was private domestic labor as maids taking care of white women’s homes and children which often meant that mothers had to trust the oversight of their children with someone in their family or from their community.

Following desegregation and changes to laws following the Civil Rights wins of the 1960, different opportunities opened up for African people. As African people chased the resources that brought us out of the protection of African communities and into white neighborhoods and businesses that were previously closed off, we saw a fraying of our communities and a breakdown in the social structure that we created out of necessity. 

The State became the substitute for community. Don’t have enough money to survive in the City they gave it to African women, with requirements that made it nearly impossible for households with African men to be given enough resources.  

No community to help take care of your children? Child Welfare offices sprang up in poor and working class African communities to monitor and exploit situations where working single African mothers struggled to keep their family together. 

Decades later, as the rigors of surviving under a growing oppression spurred by the crisis of imperialism, we are suspicious of each other and fearful of the State.  In the absence of community, our children have had to fend for themselves.  

The Uhuru Kijiji Childcare Collective is the answer

As a dual power do-for- self institution, run by ANWO and our volunteers, the Uhuru Kijiji(Freedom Village) Childcare Collective (UKCC) takes the childcare and education of our children out of the hands of the State that colonize, oppress and kill us and our children and empowers the parents and our community to assume responsibility for the welfare of African children.

UKCC addresses a basic and fundamental need of, specifically, though not exclusively, poor and working-class African women, who, more often than not, are single mothers with the sole responsibility of caring for their children and for whom, the question of securing help with childcare is difficult and in most cases, non existent.

The UKCC in addition to helping organize a community response to childcare so that women can be freed up to take care of different needs, seeks to provide education and cultural enrichment teaching our kids their true culture. The UKCC allows our entire village to share in the dignity of knowing that we have resumed the responsibility for the welfare our own children.

Like the situation earlier in the article,  our aim is to help bridge the gap in community and bring all resources together in a holistic impactful way.   

We believe that if we don’t do this, then we are leaving our communities open to attacks from the state.  And we know all too well, that when African mothers are trapped in the clutches of the State, it is nearly impossible for us to be involved in the work for national liberation when we are fighting to get our children back or figuring out how we survive the next week.  

The African National Women’s Organization is currently in the process of helping to establish the Uhuru Kijiji Childcare Collective in New York City,  Maryland/DC, and North Carolina. 

Find out more about how you join the Uhuru Kijiji Childcare Collective as a member or volunteer and anwouhuru.org/uhuru-kijiji-childcare-collective.

African women in colonial South Africa refuse to live another 26 years in false democracy. This democracy is not visible in the dirty and downtrodden townships, squatter camps and rural areas of colonial South Africa. 

We are women who must raise children with a minimum government social grant of R400, which is equivalent to $24,57. We cannot get ‘proper’ jobs because of the underdog position the system has relegated us to; therefore, we settle for precarious work that doesn’t afford us a livelihood beyond the poverty line.

African women in colonial South Africa just like African women everywhere on the continent of Africa are up against a neo-colonial government, whose primary role is to maintain and protect the smooth functioning of the plunder of Africa’s resourses, both human and material. We are up against a neo-colonial government that cares little about the daily plights of African women or any African people in the colony.

Our Political and Economic circumstances have made us vulnerable, first and foremost to the settler-colonial State and also to our African brothers – who face the same colonial contradictions but have no structures in place that help them deal with the issues they face. 

Being colonized women – meaning we do not own and control our capacity to produce and reproduce material life – we have become perpetual victims of the vertical and horizontal violence.

This is our reality as African working-class women, as well as poor peasant women living in both rural and urban areas of south Africa. We do not have access to proper healthcare facilities, which makes us victims of the broken, corrupted and fragmented public hospitals. 

We suffer from the terrible after-effects of the commodification of basic services in both the city and rural areas.

We are the women who carry the heavy consequences of all neo-colonial policies in south Africa.

THEREFORE, WE HAVE DECIDED TO ORGANIZE OURSELVES AND BUILD ANWO

African women in colonial south Africa refuse to live on without a plan of action for our own lives. We have taken the responsibility to organize ourselves and build our own desired reality. We are fed up with the colonial capitalist social system that robs us off a livelihood, while it maintains the lives of white people at our expense. Enough is enough! This is where the line is drawn!

This can be seen in our efforts to build the African National Women’s Organization in the townships of colonial south Africa. 

On the 7th of March 2020, we organized and hosted our successful debut ANWO pre-convention conference in preparation for the International convention that will be happening in the month of July in the USA, the headquarters of international imperialism.

The ANWO pre-convention conference that took place in historic Soweto was indicative of the working class character by its fervor and declarations coming from the participants. African women of varying age groups declared that “We are African women who have consciously decided to break the bestial Eurocentric view of African working-class women that are portrayed in mainstream media”. 

We are women who are called “gold-diggers” by bourgeois informed individuals when they describe the relationships that we sometimes partake in as a recourse for us to afford the necessary means of life. 

We are labeled as lazy and unmotivated by the African petty-bourgeois class, because of their close-minded and bourgeois aspirations that requires them to exploit other women. 

The building and organizing of ANWO is the only escape for African women who must face such harsh judgment and insults from the world. 

Therefore, it has become a historical mission for the same women who are being portrayed as nothing but useless to decide and organize ourselves; to be able to tell our own narratives and make decisions about our own lives in the process of overturning the social system that oppresses us. 

We are the true definition of revolution and rebellion, in a context where some sectors are working hard to save the master’s burning mansion. It is us the African working-class women who took on the journey to truly live out the African proverb that says, “Mosadi o tshwara thipa ka fa bogaleng”, which tries to explain that a woman handles all difficulties and faces all challenges head-on.

We acknowledge our journey and the hardships that will come with it, but we don’t back down or get demotivated by that. 

We understand that the capitalist social system in place will not truly be overturned without the active participation of African women alongside the whole African Nation. 

We are African women who know what we are facing and know what to do, we do not let the world dictate to us what freedom looks like, rather we envision it for ourselves and know what is going to be required for us to attain it.

We are organizing for self-determination and self-governance for African women and African people. We demand death to colonial south Africa and a united Africa where every African eats and live off our own resources and labour in our continent, Africa.

We stand firmly opposed to neo-colonialism put in place by imperialism to compromise our work towards achieving true self-government and independent socialist state.

We recognize that there is no other genuine organization for African women in the world either than ANWO, which puts the struggles of African working-class women and poor peasants at the centre of organization. 

ANWO is the only organization for African women that promotes self-governance and self-determination because it understands that we can craft out a future for ourselves, unlike popular feminist organizations that fight for integration into the dying system of capitalism. 

ANWO is our organization as African women wherever we are located, because of slavery and colonization. We understand that no matter the separation, we are one nation, and we face the same conditions imposed on us by the social system of colonial parasitic capitalism. Therefore, we unite with the agenda to free Africa and unite African people everywhere.

BLACK WOMEN UNITED WILL NEVER BE DEFEATED

Join ANWO Occupied Azania today

Contact: Connie Hutchison 0613198765

Email: UHURUAZANIA123@GMAIL.COM

UHURU!!!

The Strength of Theory

Our strength lies in our theoretical development. 

Using the theory of African Internationalism, we are able to better articulate how African women who join the African Liberation fight are engaging in and working toward a world free from the oppression of African women and girls.

The socialist theory of African Internationalism is a theory of practice which can be seen throughout the ranks of the Uhuru Movement organizations. 

Women are visibly part of the rank and file and they are integral to the development of campaigns and the Movement’s leadership. 

As deserved leaders, African women have led and are leading areas of the work, which requires people under her leadership to report their work to her – Democratic Centralism.

African Internationalism, for the masses of African women not in the Party, offers a future where the leadership of women is not tokenism but necessary to the growth of the nation. 

African women will be released from the expectations of colonial roles and duties, ushering in a new African woman responsible for the birth of a free African Nation where women and girls are protected, because we will be the part of the revolutionary State. 

Our theoretical development has also pushed away from gender pop politics which splits us into multiple identities. Gender politics have become all the rage in academia, where it is taught. 

Whereas before, African women were trained in the struggles of our people to fight for their independence through liberation. 

Theory without practice is meaningless 

Our weakness has been that our membership has been overrun with petit bourgeois feminists or feminist leaning women who would get in the way of progress. That is due to how we’ve recruited women into the work. 

A heavy concentration of our members over the last five years have come through their attraction to us on social media. 

Less comes from what we are doing on the ground. However, not all of our members who meet us online are the petit bou. 

But their expectations of the type of work they will be engaged in is limited to social media content and “thought work”. 

For us, the measure of our effectiveness and recruitment will be in how we politicize and recruit from women who are the poor and working class. Front line women whose close proximity to the State has resulted in micro and macro confrontations that deeply impact the African community. 

Opportunities lie ahead

Our opportunities rest in going back to the basics. 

Organizing 101, how to build a branch or unit. It requires the constant measured work of contact collection, calling, and engagement that allows the working class to lead on the issues that impact us. 

This process creates leaders of African proletariat women. 

So ANWO will be creating activities that will get our members in the streets. 

We will organize and continue to build monthly events and create strong committees that can expand the work of our economic development projects which are geared toward the benefit of African working class women. 

Summary and moving forward

This Plenary more than many others before it represents a shift in the trajectory of our Movement. It is rooted in the intensity of the time and a recognition of a dying imperialism. 

African workers have to be poised to take power in our hands in our own interest. 

The Black Women’s Convention happening in Philadelphia, March 27-29, 2020 is following the example of the Party’s Plenary providing a big picture opening to the lives of African working class women and our leadership. 

Our Pre-Convention Conference is happening in Soweto, Occupied Azania (South Africa) on March 7, 2020, organized by ANWO forces and Party forces who live in the settler colony of South Africa.

We recognize that much of what is written about women doesn’t offer us a future, however, ANWO is strengthening ourselves so that we can lead ourselves to the future of our own.  

Join us at our convention and conference by registering at convention.anwouhuru.org and/or call us if you have any questions at 240-326-3959 (U.S.) or 061 319 8765 (Occupied Azania).

We are sisters united by revolution uniting to win bread, peace and Black Power for the entire African Nation!

African women must lead!

African working class women to the forefront!  

Webster defines colonialism as “the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically.”

We think this is a little too clinical a definition that doesn’t really say anything about what colonialism really entails and who it affects.

Colonialism emerged within capitalism – a worldwide system of exploitation and violence that began with the European assault on Africa.

It was the rape of Africa which led to the rape of African women, whose wombs became the human factories upon which parasitic capitalism depended.

It is a brutal system that imposes the white ruling class’s will on the people they have oppressed.

It does this through violence, but also by erecting governments, rules, laws, schools, ministries, economies that protect the interest of the ruling class.

Colonialism is embedded in all aspects of our life. The food we eat, the air we breathe, the music we listen to, the way we raise our children; all of it serves to sustain the life of the colonizers.

Under colonialism the white ruling class determines the trajectory of society, directly or indirectly. Sometimes using members of colonized groups as their agents (ie. Barack Obama and Nelson Mandela).

This is called neocolonialism, a term first used by Kwame Nkrumah to describe white power in black face.  I won’t go into this too deeply because Chairman Omali has written on this extensively. I mention it to help you understand that capitalist colonialism is a chameleon and has been successful in reinventing itself.

Long gone are the hokey characterizations we associate with colonialism, of an old-timey curly mustached british officer mistreating meak peasants in some far off place circa the imagery of the early to mid 20th century.

Today’s colonizer is a smooth-haired hipster, feminist who listens to Taylor Swift and has a black girlfriend.

Colonialism didn’t just disappear. It changed because oppressed people forced it to change.  What we’ve failed to do, however, is to destroy it.

Therefore,  African people are still suffering; especially black women who hold a precarious position in society dealing with a special oppression from the state and from within the African colony.

Who is today’s colonized African woman 

She is struggling with whether to report her rape to colonial police because she knows it could result in increased police terror in the black community, on one hand,  or nothing will happen, on the other hand.

She is the office worker who endures characterizations of being “unfriendly” “antisocial” “mean woman.”

She is the mother who is fighting to regain custody of her child from the state, facing criminalization from the State and indictment from her community.

She is the girl carrying  the financial weight of her entire family, forced to marry a man for dowry.

They are the women who enjoyed themselves too loudly in a public space and had the police called on them for disturbing “white people’s” peace.

She is a mother who cannot afford to take care of her child, so she gives birth and dumps her baby in a sewer.

She is also a woman who is forced to make decisions about her body and reproduction based on  colonial conditions.

She is the woman, or girl, trapped by antiquated traditions that lock her into a life of servitude and isolation.

She is even the repugnant African petite bourgeoisie like Oprah, Michelle Obama,who still get followed in stores or called a monkey in the ruling class media.

She is the pig black cop, military or any employee of the colonial government including the workers that carry out their job  taking children from black families.

She is the mother that buries her child too soon, because of colonial violence from the state or from within our community.

She is the mother that dies in childbirth.

She is you, an African woman trudging through life, minding your business only to be stopped by a Burning Spear Newspaper salesperson talking to you about revolution.

Essentially she is every African woman on the planet today experiencing tough times or who is trying to live her best life, despite the circumstances.

African women are colonized because we have not destroyed colonialism.

African women workers must help destroy colonialism

African women workers have every reason to destroy colonialism.

It is the only way to ensure that we can be  free and that our children, don’t have to know a world where African nation is subjugated.

We have everything to gain and nothing to lose.

The African petite bourgeoisie woman, on the other hand, has less motivation to destroy capitalist colonialism because she benefits from it.

She needs the maintenance of capitalist colonialism to measure how close she comes to achievements celebrated by the white ruling class.

The Revolution is Calling

The African National Women’s Organization (ANWO) exists as that organization where African women workers can organize our efforts toward the destruction of capitalist colonialism.

Through organization, we help prepare ourselves and our communities for the emergence of a new world where African women are no longer fourth fiddle, but instead, are integral to the political running of our society.

All African women must prepare to transform society by joining ANWO at anwouhuru.org/join.

The Time is Now!

African Women Must Lead!