A Call To Build AISO
Uhuru! Comrades, Friends, Sisters and Brothers,
We are calling for you to participate in the student Conference of the African Internationalist Student Organization (AISO) at Alabama A&M University in Huntsville, Alabama on Wednesday and Thursday, April 16-17 2008. The AISO is a student wing of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP). We are writing you with the urgency of bringing students back into a revolutionary process. This is a period in which white power is suffering a serious crisis, which is rooted in the uprising of oppressed people throughout the world reclaiming our resources and struggling for control over our own lives.
Students, who represent the highest aspirations of African people, must be determined to use our skills and resources to forward the African revolution, develop the African world and deepen the crisis of imperialism. During the 1960’s we witness students participating in the struggle for Black Power. Due to the military defeat of the Black Revolution of the 1960s Africans were pushed out of political life.
This attack on Africa and African people manifested itself in the assassinations of some of our brightest and most courageous leaders like Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, Bobby Hutton and Patrice Lumumba, just to name a few. Others were incarcerated, while even more were tortured and/or forced into exile.
One aspect of the military defeat of our revolution was the elevation by white power of a sector of the African petty bourgeoisie or middle class to institutions of authority or prominence, often in the government, while white power continued to control the economy of the country and the economic life of black people. White rule through these black “leaders” is referred to as indirect rule or neo-colonialism.
These combined efforts to crush the revolutionary aspirations of our people, referred to as counterinsurgency, was also at play on the college and university campuses. This allowed for the neo-colonialists to return to the campuses and silence the students while The US was terrorizing Africans in the community. This served various purposes in which the US succeeded in pushing the masses out of political life.
The two primary purposes served by the extension of the counterinsurgency to the campuses were, separating the students from the African community and, two, transforming the revolutionary energy and curiosity of the students into mere cultural practitioners and information hoarders of African History.
As a result of the lack of practical involvement with revolutionary organization and process the resulting student formations of study groups and cultural movements became alien even amongst other students, leaving these groups to be small segments of the campuses, detached from the conditions that Africans were faced with in the world.
Left to these circumstances, potential revolutionaries who graduate from these institutions with great skills that could be used to develop the African world end up selling their craft to the U.S. and other colonial governments in order to make a living.
For African people this is a period of great danger, yet great opportunity. However, what will enable us to emerge from this period victorious is the work we do now. It is in this context that the Uhuru Movement is organizing the student wing of the APSP in the founding AISO Conference.
We have much work to do, Africans. We can no longer afford to be closed in on these campuses shut out from what is going on in the world. We must use our skills to further the African revolution and deepen the crisis of imperialism. We must organize ourselves as students with the intention of contributing to a new period in history-- a period in which the African will know freedom, dignity and pride. Building a successful founding conference of AISO is just one of the many steps we must take towards bringing students back into a revolutionary process and Africa’s liberation.
The student conference of AISO is scheduled to be held in Huntsville, Alabama on Wednesday and Thursday, April 16-17, 2008. It will be two days full of speaking and performances as well as strategizing and organizing. There will be AISO campus committees in several cities throughout the U.S., including Washington, D.C., Tallahassee and St. Petersburg, Florida. We are calling on all freedom-loving Africans to endorse and participate in what is sure to be a historical event. For more information contact info@aisouhuru.org or call 256-489-8715.
In Unity and struggle,
Kobina Bantushango
Chairman of the AISO Committee