Pan Africanism is anti-nobody. It is pro-Africa. The mammoth task of liberating Africa from the ongoing imperialist exploitation and marginalisation can be achieved only through Pan-African unity. African people must understand that they have a common destiny.

In the 1930s, there was a global Pan African movement for a volunteer army that petitioned Haile Selassie to fight Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italy in occupied Ethiopia. What can this historical Ethiopia solidarity movement tell us about Palestine solidarity and the use of petitions today?  Whatever happens, after such a new petition movement to forge a volunteer armed force of Palestine solidarity gets off the ground, it will be a defining issue.

Assorted documents found in the FBI files of Stokely Carmichael from 1966 provide a glimpse of the degree to which the federal government under the Lyndon B. Johnson administration sought to curtail and liquidate the advancing civil rights and black power movements of the time period.

Che, the revolutionary thinker and organizer whosebirthday falls on June 14,  has left us two major elements of his legacy. One: Revolution is everything and we as individuals, in isolation, are nothing. And two: Injustice anywhere against anyone is injustice against all of us everywhere.

The BPP’s revolutionary legacy offers many useful lessons in organizing work to create a just and emancipated world. But radical organizations and organizers should be wary of the BPP’s top-down leadership approach. Moreover, the party was ill-advised in believing that the lumpen, especially the criminal elements, could serve as a revolutionary force.

Inspired by the victories of the past, a new generation of freedom fighters is rising to carry on the struggle for liberation of the Pan-African world from the stranglehold of capitalism. A new rallying call is going out against the destruction of black lives. As the eminent Pan-Africanist Tajudeen Abdul Raheem used to say, there is always something to be done.

Pan-Africanism as it once was dreamed is dead. In its place—instead of a transnational framework of solidarity deployed to give heart and direction to Africans during the independence and self-determination struggles—we have something that rallies to the defence of rich, powerful men but remains painfully silent about the suffering of the poor and dispossessed.

In Venezuela since 2005, we reindivicate every 10th of May the Afro -Venezuelan day. We reindivicate the uprising of Jose Leonardo Chirinos (1795), an afrodescendant rebel against slavery and in favour of equality. Another month of May that stimulates us and invites us to devote our words of encouragement to the African continent. is May 25th, 2016, we celebrate the Day of Africa, we celebrate its resilience, the validity of those pro-independence ideas that forged the birth of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), now African Union (AU). e Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and our people are committed to the future of Africa. 

Malcolm X is widely credited with spreading Black nationalism and revolutionary Pan-Africanism in the Western Hemisphere. On a visit to Nigeria, he was given the name Omowale, which means in the Yoruba language, “the son who has come home.”

Despite the continuing oppression of 45 million Blacks, the United States will open one of the largest of such institutions in the country.

A native of Grenada but with influence throughout the Caribbean, Franklyn Harvey, a civil engineer, made his mark in radical history by coordinating and facilitating the empowerment of everyday people through promoting their direct self-government.

There are numerous women in the African Diaspora who have worked for the liberation of Africans under the banner of Pan-Africanism. They must be rescued from political obscurity. Pan-Africanism as a revolutionary ideology must firmly embrace feminism.

At last, a major news organisation in the United States/West has come out to challenge the deafening silence that has pervaded the world over the genocidist Muhammadu Buhari regime in Nigeria, installed in office in March 2015 by the David Cameron and Barack Obama administrations. 

Africa is not yet free, despite formal independence. Most of the continent’s nations are in the grip of criminal regimes whose leaders belong in jail for widespread human rights violations. But those leaders always stand with one another to defeat justice.

The question of leadership of intergovernmental organizations in Africa has received inadequate attention in public discourse. The West African bloc ECOWAS has far-reaching prescriptions on how the organization’s top leadership should be constituted, but the provisions have often not been strictly observed. Politics and personal factors usually get in the way.

Pan-Africanism is not just a nice-sounding idea. It is a firm personal commitment to the lives of the peoples of Africa. When the latest Ebola crisis broke out in West Africa in 2014, Dr. Atai-Omorotu gathered some medical personnel in Uganda and headed to the region that everyone was running away from. She helped save many lives – only for her to die of pancreatic cancer two weeks ago.

Members of the Pan-African Parliament are handpicked by the executive of their country – by the same heads of state who retain the ultimate power at the African Union. And as if that is not bad enough, PAP is only a consultative organ. Efforts to change this, so that the people of Africa can have meaningful representation, continue to be resisted. African people must work hard for the transformation of this important AU organ.

All evidence points to humanity’s common origin and one destiny. Instead of history being a theater of class struggle, it is a history of globalization and a quest for unity. Africa, the cradle of humanity, must take the lead in promoting unity, not fragmentation. That unity cannot be based only on transient systems like economics and politics, but has to include deeper values and norms rooted in ontology, anthropology and belief systems.

Isn’t the time ripe for the African Union to create the space for true Africanisation of its institutions and ownership of its processes by the people at home and in the diaspora? There should be enough resources and incentives for all people to participate in the Pan-African project in our villages, communities, constituencies, campuses, and workplaces.

Only an upsurge from the left and anti-imperialist forces can fulfill the visions of a true united Africa in line with the work of Nkrumah, Gaddafi and other revolutionary leaders. The worsening economic crisis due to the decline in commodity prices and western sponsored destabilization is reversing the advances made in regard to growth and development over the last decade.