Omali Yeshitela | African Internationalism

“So InPDUM has exposed this whole question of the drug economy. You got folks who are stuffed into these prisons all around the country who don’t even understand why they are there. Many of them think it was their idea that they are there. They don’t even understand that a drug economy has been imposed on our community where the legal capitalists deny African People the right to work in the legal capitalist economy. Then these same legal capitalists impose an illegal capitalist economy in the form of the drugs and you can’t get a job anywhere else.

I’m told the Native People in the Arctic, in order to kill wolves take a sharp knife, melt the ice, and bury the handle in the ice and let it freeze over with the blade projecting up. They would cover the blade with blood. Wolves would smell the blade and come to try to eat. They would lick the blade. When they licked the blade they would cut their tongues and they would drink their own blood. They really were thinking that they had a lot to eat then, and of course they were drinking their own blood and killing themselves in the process.

That’s what imperialism has done to our communities. It takes away the ability for you to live in a normal situation and then they bury a blade in the ice and put some blood on it. you come to lick the blade thinking that you’re getting nourishment, and actually what you’re doing is killing yourself in the process.” – Omali Yeshitela

Excerpt from, “Resistance of African People, Crisis of Imperialism : Why We must Build the National People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement”

African Socialist International Chairman Omali Yeshitela gives the keynote address at the 2012 African People’s Solidarity Committee National Conference, January 8, 2012 at the Uhuru House in St. Petersburg, FL.