By Mwaivu Kaluka, National Chairperson, CPMK
[Recognition of the Central Committee, the Working Committee, the Ambassadorial Delegation, International Guests, Party Cadres]
Red Salute, Comrades,
We welcome you all to today’s African Liberation Day. Today marks the 62nd anniversary of African Liberation Day, commemorating the formation of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), renamed the African Union (AU), on the 25th of May, 1963.
Yet it would be ahistorical to reduce this Day to a mere date on the Gregorian calendar. The Struggle for African Liberation and Pan-Africanism long predates this moment. From the Haitian Revolution that overthrew French colonial rule and liberated Africans from slavery (1791–1804), to the early Pan-Africanist agitations of Alexander Crummell and Martin Delany, the seeds of resistance and unity were sown in centuries of struggle.
Historical Background
The Pan-Africanist vision did not begin with the formation of the OAU. It arose from the long decades of inhuman conditions under slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. Its earliest ideological expressions carried strong racial dimensions, a reaction to the white supremacy that subjected African people to barbarity during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and the colonial conquest that followed. These early forms were protests against racial domination.
Early ideological debates among Pan-Africanist leaders such as Sylvester Williams, Marcus Garvey, and W.E.B. Du Bois expressed the African people’s determination to chart their own path to emancipation. Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) emphasised Black pride, self-reliance, and repatriation, initiatives rooted in the experience of oppression and aimed at asserting African dignity.
Even the first Pan-African Congress, held in London and organised by Williams and Du Bois, sought only reforms within the League of Nations framework. These were necessary beginnings, but they remained reformist in content and idealist in orientation.
We do not dismiss these early attempts. Rather, we bring to light what has been buried by bourgeois historians: that it was the scientific ideology of Socialism that sharpened and elevated Pan-Africanism into a revolutionary weapon, providing it with a concrete programme for the total liberation of Africa.
The so-called “Negro question” had long been debated in the International Workingmen’s Association and the Second International, but it was in the Comintern, the Third International from 1919 onward, that the question was rigorously engaged and systematically addressed. Du Bois himself noted that the Negro problem was the greatest test for American Socialists.
At the Second Congress of the Comintern, Lenin’s draft theses on the National and Colonial Question became the cornerstone of its resolutions. Class struggle and imperialism were brought to the fore, and a clear programme was outlined for the liberation of African people across the continent and the diaspora, from the Caribbean to South America.
A milestone came with the Sixth Congress of the Comintern and its affiliated Red International of Labour Unions, which passed a resolution to form the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers. This affirmed the centrality of the African liberation struggle within the world communist movement.
This history is critical. There are persistent attempts to present socialism as a foreign ideology and to disconnect it from Pan-Africanism. Pseudo-Pan-African ideologues like George Padmore not only distorted but outright slandered the role of the Comintern. Others, including some postcolonial African leaders, concocted ideological mixtures such as “African Socialism” to reconcile the African past with anti-imperialist aspirations. But we know, that once something becomes a science, it assumes universal validity. Socialism, as the science of society, must be studied and applied just like all other sciences.
Pan-African Congresses
We must appreciate the role played by the five early Pan-African Congresses convened by Du Bois in 1919, 1921, 1923, 1927, and 1945. These Congresses created critical spaces for dialogue and unity among Africans from different parts of the world. The Fifth Congress, held in Manchester in 1945, was particularly significant. For the first time, it brought together African leaders like Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), Hastings Banda (Malawi), and Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya), who would later lead anti-colonial movements in their respective countries.
The first Congress occurred at the close of the First World War and the onset of global economic depression. The fifth met at the end of the Second World War and on the eve of the Cold War. These were historical junctures that shaped the tactics of liberation movements across Africa and the world.
All-African People’s Conferences
The First All-African People’s Conference (AAPC), convened by Comrade Nkrumah in December 1958, was another milestone. Held a year after Ghana’s independence, the conference brought together over 300 political and trade union leaders from 28 African countries.
In East Africa, revolutionary unity had already begun under the Pan-African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa (PAFMECA), formed in September 1958 under the leadership of Comrade Abdulrahman Babu. Notably, when the PAFMECA delegation travelled to Accra, they met Patrice Lumumba and paid for his travel to the conference, an act he was not aware of, a true gesture of solidarity.
At the conference and subsequent meetings, a major debate unfolded between Nkrumah and Nyerere over the path to African unity. Though their strategies differed, their goal was the same: the creation of a single federal African state. Nkrumah advocated for immediate unification, warning against regional blocs that would balkanise the continent and serve imperialist interests. Nyerere, on the other hand, preferred gradualism—proposing regional federations as stepping stones to continental unity. He even offered to delay Tanganyika’s independence to await a federation with Kenya, Uganda, and Zanzibar.
History has vindicated both. Most postcolonial states failed to realise the Pan-African ideal. Instead, they became puppet states for imperialist finance capital. Parochial nationalism was promoted, and even regional institutions like the East African Community (EAC), ECOWAS, SADC, and the AU were turned into instruments of imperialist penetration, funded and directed by external powers.
National Democratic Revolutions in the Neocolonies
Political independence across Africa did not end imperialist domination. While we honour the role played by our forebears in winning formal independence, we have a revolutionary duty to complete that process—to secure real independence through class struggle and revolutionary transformation.
In many postcolonial African countries, the national bourgeoisie was either non-existent or weak, parasitic, and incapable of developing the productive forces. To maintain indirect rule, imperialism cultivated a local intermediary class—the comprador bourgeoisie. These lackeys and running dogs were entrusted with managing the neocolonial economy and state machinery on behalf of international capital. As a result, the imperialist bourgeoisie remained the principal ruling class, with the comprador bourgeoisie as its local agent.
Thus, the principal contradiction in our societies remains the contradiction between the working masses of Africa and imperialism. The comprador class is our immediate enemy. It is the class we must confront, defeat, and disarm in order to seize state power and build a revolutionary state capable of enforcing the People’s Democratic Dictatorship and preparing the ground for socialism.
This is the objective content and character of our revolution—it is a National Democratic Revolution (NDR). And having identified both our class enemies and our class allies, we must build the United Front necessary to carry it through. The working class, though numerically small in the neocolonies, is the most advanced and revolutionary class. It must forge alliances with other revolutionary classes, especially the peasantry, which is numerically large and historically oppressed.
Because imperialist capital did not fully industrialise our societies, feudal relations persist alongside capitalist ones. This gives our revolution a dual character—it must overthrow both feudalism and imperialism. The persistence of these semi-feudal relations is central to our revolutionary analysis and strategy.
The NDR, guided by the strategy of the United Front, provides the path to achieve the Pan-Africanist objective: the creation of a single Socialist African Federal State, with a planned economy and a unified revolutionary military command. The heroic armed struggle of the Mau Mau remains our point of departure. Comrade Dedan Kimathi continues to inspire our Party’s mission to complete the NDR and transition to socialism.
The national question must be understood in relation to the Pan-Africanist goal and within the framework of the world proletarian revolution. We must reject parochial and territorial nationalism. The national and social questions are dialectically linked and must be resolved together.
Today, we see the countries of the Sahel—Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger—pushing back against imperialism and reclaiming sovereignty. While we may not yet define their movements as “New Democracy” in the Maoist sense, we recognise them as progressive ruptures in the imperialist order and essential contributions to the anti-imperialist front.
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Pan-Africanism and Internationalism
As Mwalimu Julius Nyerere aptly put it, an African is one who identifies with the collective struggle of the African people and participates in the development of Africa—regardless of skin colour or ethnicity.
Pan-Africanism must never be divorced from the global proletarian struggle. International solidarity has been crucial in the liberation of Africa. We pay revolutionary tribute to the Cuban people under the leadership of Comrade Fidel Castro. Cuba did not send troops, doctors, and educators to Africa out of charity, but out of revolutionary obligation. Over 30,000 Cuban volunteers stood shoulder to shoulder with African revolutionaries in Angola, Namibia, Mozambique, Algeria, Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and South Africa. Many paid with their lives.
To this day, Cuban doctors continue to serve across Africa, and Cuban institutions offer free education to thousands of African students. This sacrifice is precious to us. We must stand firmly with the Cuban Revolution—not out of charity, not as repayment, but because solidarity against imperialism is our revolutionary duty.
We also extend our solidarity to the peoples of Haiti, Lebanon, Congo, Sudan, Venezuela, Iran, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and most especially, to our Palestinian brothers and sisters. These peoples remain strangled by imperialism. And as long as one people is oppressed, no people can be truly free.
This is why African Liberation Day 2025 is dedicated to the people of Cuba as we mark the centenary of the birth of Comrade Fidel Castro. It is also a moment to reclaim Pan-Africanism’s revolutionary kernel: Socialism. Socialism is the engine that powers African unity. It is the software that drives the hardware of Africanism. Without Socialism, Pan-Africanism is directionless.
AFRIKA MOJA!
AFRIKA HURU!
AFRIKA YA KISOSHIALISTI!