Aboubakar Alassane | West African Peoples Organisation (WAPO)
From Africa to Other Continents
From the Sahel to the Plains of Russia, the Cry Is the Same,
We Call for Action: For a United Global Front
Comrades! Brothers in the struggle of the world proletariat! Architects of the new world dawn, Revolutionaries gathered here, at the heart of the land that witnessed the spark of 1917!
I take the floor today not as a mere observer, but as a voice among the millions of African voices, who—from the banks of the Nile in Egypt to the heights of the Fouta Djallon in Guinea Conakry, from the shores of the Mediterranean to the cliffs of the Cape of Good Hope, passing through those of the Sahel, the forests of Central Africa, Mount Kilimanjaro, and the Kalahari Desert—refuse to see our land, our continent, become once again the doormat of History.
They tell us, in the gilded salons of Geneva or New York, that “World War III” is a distant threat, a specter haunting the borders of Eastern Europe or the waters of the Pacific. They tell us that Africa, in this great tectonic game, is absent, neutral, or a mere spectator.
Lies! Illusion! Criminal blindness! Comrades
The truth, comrades, is that World War III is not ahead of us. It has already begun, and its epicenter—its most fierce and decisive battlefield—is African soil! This land, wounded by more than five hundred years of the most barbaric exploitation, inflicted only by barbarians draped in the ignorance of their own barbarism erected as civilization, upon a people whose only fault is their hospitality and humanism. The African people.
Nkrumah Was Right
More than sixty years ago, the great Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah issued this warning, which today resonates like a clap of thunder in the silence of our nights: “Africa must unite or perish.” He also proclaimed: “It is impossible to separate the life of Africa from that of the world.” Thus warning us that if we marched in scattered ranks, trapped within borders that guarded our own alienation, Africa would become the battlefield of rival powers and the ground for the next global conflagration. World War III.
Comrades, listen closely: this World War III is not a distant threat. For us Africans, it has already begun! It does not manifest only through nuclear mushroom clouds, but through manufactured terrorism, through the looting of our natural resources both above and below ground, through criminal economic sanctions, and through the sabotage of our sovereignty. Where is democracy? Is it not an act of barbarism to wage war on a civilization? It does not surprise us that the proselytism of democracy inevitably leads to fascism.
Imperialism, that supreme stage of capitalism, has mutated into a global fascism disguised as the “rules-based order”. It is this same fascism that attempts to encircle Russia, that attempts to suffocate China through violent, cowardly, and barbaric aggression that openly threatens a 5,000-year-old civilization (Persian Civilization), and that seeks to transform the Sahel into one vast “hunting ground”.
Look around us today. What do you see? What is hypocritically called the “war on terror”, “regional instability”, or “humanitarian crises” is nothing other than the hybrid, outsourced, and vicious form of this World War III. It is a war for lithium, for uranium, for gold, for rare earth minerals. It is a war for the control of strategic corridors.
Imperialism, in its phase of decomposition, is aggressive, but it can no longer afford frontal wars between great powers that would destroy one another. So it displaces the violence. It outsources the chaos. It finances militias, arms terrorist groups to destabilize our sovereign states, and uses the financial blackmail of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank as invisible bombers.
Strengthening the Anti-Imperialist and Anti-Fascist Front
Why are we in Moscow? We are here because the ideals of the Bolshevik Revolution belong to us as well! Social justice, the abolition of the exploitation of man by man, the primacy of the collective good over private profit—these are the values that will advance Africa and the world. We are not here to beg for aid; we are here to build a PERMANENT FRAMEWORK FOR WORK AND EXCHANGE. Let that be heard!
We are here to stop reacting sporadically. Imperialism is organized—the Revolution must be even more so! We are not reactionaries; we are Revolutionaries. The permanent framework we are creating today must be the general headquarters of the global counter-offensive. We must coordinate our economies, pool our technologies, and above all, unify our doctrines of popular defense.
In the face of this multidimensional aggression, a new front is essential. And this front is born from pain, but above all from consciousness.
Seen from Africa, imperialism is not a theory—it is a boot on our neck. And fascism? Modern fascism is not only the one that bears the swastika. It is financial fascism; it is the fascism of human rights; it is technocratic fascism that decrees from the West who has the right to govern our countries and who must be sanctioned, starved, or assassinated.
But times have changed. Africa is awakening. The awakening of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES)—Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger—is the signal that the African anti-imperialist front has reached a decisive stage. These countries are not simply demanding the withdrawal of foreign troops; they are breaking mental chains. They are telling the world: “We prefer freedom in dignity to servitude in apparent comfort.“
Strengthening this front, comrades, means three urgent things:
Breaking with the Economy of Exploitation: One cannot be anti-imperialist while continuing to use the currency of the oppressor, while continuing to export our raw materials only to buy back finished products at exorbitant prices. Monetary and industrial sovereignty is our first line of defense. Let us affirm this in Africa.
Unity of Defense: Nkrumah said it, Cabral repeated it. None of our micro-states can resist alone against an imperialist coalition. The AES must be the nucleus of a continental popular army, capable of responding blow for blow to aggressions, whether terrorist or conventional. Let us decree this.
Alliance with the Global South: We must strengthen our ties with all those who struggle against unipolar hegemony. From Maduro’s Venezuela to multipolar Russia, from China to the struggling peoples of Asia and Latin America. The anti-fascist front is global, but its heart beats here. In Moscow.
Let Us Choose Our Generation
Comrades,
They accuse us of being radicals. But what is more radical than seeing our children die in makeshift boats in the Mediterranean because their wealth is being plundered? What is more radical than seeing our lands transformed into lawless zones by armed hordes financed by those very same people who lecture us about democracy?
The world war was already being fought and continues to be fought in our African villages since the West discovered its self-proclaimed divine civilizing mission. It never ceased. They speak of a third world war—in Africa, we no longer even know which war we are at. It is certainly not the third; it is far more than that. But since the world speaks of the third, then so be it—the third it is. Every time a South African, Congolese, Sudanese, Liberian, Mozambican, Gabonese, Malagasy, or Nigerien peasant refuses to surrender his land; every time a Libyan, Algerian, Sierra Leonean, Beninese, Central African, Chadian, Somali, Zambian, Mauritanian, or Malian soldier reclaims a strategic position; every time a Senegalese, Nigerian, Ghanaian, Botswanan, Egyptian, Ivorian, Cape Verdean, Bissau-Guinean, or Burkinabé intellectual deconstructs the colonial lie—that is a battle of World War III won against imperialism.
The time for observation is over. The time for action has come. “A slave who is not capable of revolting does not deserve pity.” So said Thomas Sankara. We are not slaves. We are the heirs of Patrice Lumumba, of Moumié, of Sékou Touré, of Gamal Abdel Nasser, of Moctar Al Moctar, of Modibo Kéita, of Houari Boumediene, of Amilcar Cabral, of Fidel Castro, of Che Guevara, of Mao Zedong, of Ho Chi Minh, of Marcus Garvey, of W.E.B. Du Bois, of Aimé Césaire, of Frantz Fanon, of Cheikh Anta Diop, of Mondlane, of Muammar Gaddafi, of Thomas Sankara, of Karl Marx, of Engels, and of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known as Lenin—of all those who held high the cause of peoples struggling against capitalism and imperialism, of all our martyrs.
Let the world know this:
Africa’s struggle for its sovereignty is the same struggle as that of Russian workers, the same as that of the revolutionaries of Latin America and the Caribbean, of North America, of Asia, and of Europe. The enemy is one: this hegemonic bloc that refuses multipolarity, that refuses dignity, that would rather burn the world than lose its privileges.
Let the world also know:
We no longer want a United Nations that is nothing but a theater of shadows. We want a living body, an action front where the voice of the Sahel carries as much weight as that of any nuclear power. We no longer want Africa to be the “hunting ground” denounced by Nkrumah. We are now the hunters of our own destiny!
Let the world finally know:
Africa is no longer the passive battlefield of the capitalist and imperialist ambitions of any hegemony. Africa is the graveyard of imperial pretensions. The cradle of humanity, of socialism, and of humanism—which we inherit from our predecessors in struggle—under the vocabulary: PAN-AFRICANISM.
We assure you that the strengthening of the anti-imperialist and anti-fascist front has already begun from the Sahel, with the Declaration of Niamey at the 7th Anti-Imperialist Conference held on the banks of the Niger River, under the theme “Solidarity with the People of the Sahel, Unity in Struggle” from November 19 to 21, 2024, under the high patronage of Comrade President, General Abdourahamane Tiani, President of the Republic of Niger, President of the National Council for the Safeguard of the Republic (CNSP)—and it will set the entire continent ablaze. We will transform this global crisis into an opportunity for total liberation. Under the slogan: We no longer want your “aid” that strangles us. We no longer want your “protection” that kills us. We want our land, our dignity, our future, and our world at peace—freed from capitalism and imperialism.
People of Africa, rise! People of Asia, rise! People of the Americas, rise! People of Australia, rise! People of Europe, rise! Workers of the world, unite! Glory to Our Martyrs! Long live the Alliance of Sahel States! Long live a united and sovereign Africa! Down with imperialism, down with neo-fascism!
The homeland or death—we shall prevail!
Thank you.
