Two days ago, I lost my way in Shanghai and was attempting to navigate. A young man approached me and asked if I was from Africa. The intensity of his words prompted a brief reflection on my response. I confirmed I was from Africa, and he shared that he had spent the last three years researching and reading about Zambia and Tanzania, expressing his long-held dream to visit these two countries on the continent. After showing me the way to my hotel, he gave me a very long hug. We did not exchange contact, and I must tell all of you I am going to miss him dearly. It is possible that I may never see him again, or even if I do, I may not recognize him. However, in that brief fifteen-minute encounter, the young man rekindled the long, deep-rooted history of friendship that has existed between the Chinese and African people over the past few decades. Forces are now attempting to redefine this friendship, and it is our collective responsibility, especially in moments like this, to resist that narrative with all the force we can muster.
It is an amazing and exciting moment, once again, to be in socialist China, to engage with all of you, and to learn from the Chinese experience of constructing socialism, thereby guiding and deepening our own path to socialism in Africa. Our journey has been extensive. Our vibrant socialist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, extending through the 1980s and 1990s in Southern Africa, was significantly weakened by the death, destruction, and co-optation of our movement by U.S. and European imperialism during the protracted Cold War in Africa. We are now back on this path; movements and parties are growing, and the people are rising up in Kenya, Sudan, and particularly in Ghana, right next door to my home.
Our socialist movement in Ghana has had the rare privilege of coordinating the Mocha Brown School in Ghana and, along with Pan African, is today the primary school in South Africa. Over the last six years, we have worked closely with the International People's Assembly, learning especially from the rich revolutionary traditions of Cuba, Venezuela, and from our MSI comrades and their NFF schools in Brazil. Through the Cabral and Kumasi initiatives, we have engaged with more than 2,000 participants from West Africa and beyond. We are one of the founding members of the recently formed West African People's Organization (WAPO), an alliance of mass movements, trade unions, political parties, and women and youth movements that are at the center of organizing and resisting imperialism in West Africa.
The People's Resistance in West Africa, organized in part by our own WAPO and its constituent parts, but also by mass popular demonstrations, especially in the Sahel, has helped usher in an exciting new Pan-African movement in Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso. The new, massively popular governments of Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso have taken enormous and essential first steps to advance the cause of African sovereignty, firmly expelling French and U.S. troops from the region, taking back control of their natural resources, and establishing initiative after initiative to improve their people's self-reliance. They have begun to reject the artificial borders of colonialism by establishing the Alliance of Sahel States (AES).
Every day, new developments emerge, making it challenging to keep pace with all the changes, particularly in Burkina Faso, which borders Ghana and is merely 200 miles from my hometown to Mali in the north. It is with great pride, excitement, and humility that I recently had the opportunity to go to Niamey in Niger for a major anti-imperialist conference organized by some of our comrades who are here at this conference. Over 3,000 revolutionary activists crowded into the huge arena for our opening session, a session that included organizers, poets, rap artists, dancers, drummers, along with many distinguished leaders of the Nigerien government, including the prime minister and mayor of Niamey, Niger's capital city.
Given my participation on a panel concerning peace, I wish to address some of the challenges facing the region, specifically the prospects of war, violence, and destabilization emanating from surrounding countries, which unfortunately include my own, Ghana. Daily reports detail attempted coups and indiscriminate violence, particularly against the people of Niger and Burkina Faso, and against their leader, Ibrahim Traoré. These coups are organized by former military officers and so-called terrorists, many of whom reside in northern Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria. The pro-Western governments in all five of these bordering countries are aiding and abetting these terrorists and their destabilization efforts.
The United States has been preparing for unrest in the region for a while, aware of the damage that the destruction of Libya was doing to the entire Sahel. Hence, the U.S. set up a military base in Ghana in 2018, placing our country on the front line of the wars to come in the next decade. Consequently, Ghana, a historically peaceful, pro-Western, English-speaking, neocolonial nation, now finds itself at the center of a hotspot as the people of the former French colonial empire rise up to end French neocolonialism. It is our responsibility to ensure that our governments do not intervene in the Sahel by organizing our people to strongly support the new governments in Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso.
However, this situation is further complicated by another event scheduled to occur in two days. On Saturday, the day after my departure from this conference, a significant and highly contested election is scheduled in Ghana on December 7th. While a socialist option is not on the ballot, the struggle between the two main parties — one leaning slightly more to the right, the other slightly more to the left — is unfolding amidst intense economic suffering among the populace, particularly due to the austerity measures continuously imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on our struggling nation. This election is occurring at a critical juncture, both nationally and regionally. We are both worried and hopeful, yet we will not cease our organizing efforts.
The inspiring example set by Burkina Faso, Niger, and Mali to our north provides an opportunity for us to reassert our own proud Pan-Africanist tradition. Africa must unite, and we must utilize this election to steer our country away from its longstanding pro-Western orientation, instead making common cause with our neighbors and comrades to the north.
Our anti-imperialist conference was attended by two groups who suffer most from the severe economic devastation wrought by imperialism in the Sahel: working-class women and the large, growing, angry, poor, and unemployed youth. These women were notably fierce. They are organized within their communities to safeguard their countries and the new Alliance of Sahel States (AES). As Pan-Africanists, they will not permit the United States, France, and Western imperialism to halt their movement. The youth were robust and strong, proudly holding their flags for hours. They demonstrated innovation and creativity. Their poetry, music, and speeches proudly evoked the names of our historical heroes in the region, especially Thomas Sankara. They joined us in a march of solidarity under the hot sun for our Palestinian brothers and sisters in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Yemen.
The success of the Sahelian experiment is not yet assured. Our comrades will need to build internal structures, such as the Volunteers for the Defense of the Fatherland (VDP) in Burkina Faso. They will need to strengthen and better organize their grassroots organizations. They will need to work on grassroots political education, and they will require our international solidarity. They will require the solidarity of the people of West Africa, of all of Africa, and especially from the emerging global powers of China, Russia, Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela. Each of these powers is significantly involved in assisting the people and governments of Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. We must express our solidarity, particularly by halting the Western war efforts aimed at overthrowing the governments of Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso.
We must organize the people of the world to demand peace and to halt U.S., French, and Western aggression in Gaza, the Sahel, and Ukraine. This undertaking is substantial, but we, within the people's camp of resistance, are encouraged by the revolutionary ferment that has emerged in the Sahel and are assured of the support from socialist China and the entire Global South. We will march towards victory, defeat imperialism, free Africa, strengthen the alliance of the Global South, and build a new socialist future.
(Transcribed from a recording and edited.)