SAHEL: THE BLOOD OF THE MARTYRS AND THE TWILIGHT OF IMPERIALISM
Comrades! Brothers in struggle, anti-imperialists of the World Anti-Imperialist Platform! Builders of the new world dawn, revolutionaries gathered here, in the heart of the land that gave birth to the MAU-MAU revolt and from where the famous remark of Jomo Kenyatta reached us, and I quote: “When the missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the missionaries had the Bible. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them again, they had the land and we had the Bible.” I raise to you the fist of revolutionary and militant greetings. Today I address these words to you not as a simple observer, but as one voice among the millions of African voices that reject the imposture of imperialism and protest against seeing our land, our continent, once again become the doormat of History.
The situation in Mali in recent days has revealed to the world the limits of the moralizing discourse of the Western powers and their purely imperialist and fascist character. Indeed, following the attack by barbaric hordes on several positions of the Malian people’s army, which cost the life of our hero, the conqueror of Kidal in 2024, Army General Sadio Camara, along with several compatriots, no condemnation or concern emerged from France or the Western chancelleries. No more was needed to understand what would have happened had this occurred in Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, or any other country under the orders of imperialism. Françafrique is indeed in its final death throes.
Farewell to the stainless, inalienable, ordered, controlled, and inviolable backyard. Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso are sounding the horn of revolt. “The revolution of the poor,” they say! “It will go nowhere,” we hear! Yet the AES (Alliance of Sahel States) has carried the torch for nearly three years already. At its side stands all African youth, from East to West and from South to North, against all the rulers who refuse to understand that one era has ended and another has begun. Basta! Enough! Stop! cry the African youth. From Arab-Berber slavery to colonization, through the slave trade and the battlefields of the First and Second World Wars, Africa has given enough to deserve respect, if indeed humanity were the issue. Unfortunately, it has never been about humanity, but about capitalism and domination, and worse still, imperialism. It was not so yesterday, as witnessed by the martyrdom of our ancestors during colonial penetration and the struggles for independence, and it cannot be so today in this 21st century, which clearly and distinctly signals the internal contradictions of the Western capitalist and imperialist bloc.
The revolt is simultaneously carried by the civil-military coalitions in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, which merged in order to carry resistance against the brutal, unjust, inhuman, and illegal reaction of the so-called international community, which is nothing but Western fascism using and abusing narratives such as human rights and international law in order to better alienate peoples. The barbaric attack on Mali of April 25, 2026 stems from this refusal to admit that peoples considered backward are emancipating themselves from the omnipotence of the “international community” and carving out for themselves a destiny other than the one traced for them. Worse still is that they found no better ally than the Russian Federation, heir to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which defeated them during the Great Patriotic War, whose 81st anniversary we celebrate this May 9, and which sounded the death knell of colonial empires, apartheid, and capitalist and imperialist exploitation.
What an opportunity the Sahelian theater represents—Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Sudan, and the Central African Republic—for revenge against the Russian Federation, which continues to hold them in check in Ukraine despite more than a thousand economic and political sanctions. It is the return of the old recipes of identity claims brandished as scarecrows every time the backyard is threatened by revolt. Such is the case of the Front for the Liberation of Azawad (FLA), which is being instrumentalized and has just revealed all its ugliness and that of its Western supporters by associating itself with terrorist groups such as the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (GSIM/JNIM), a jihadist alliance affiliated with Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State (IS), Ansar Dine, and who knows what else, in order to sow terror and desolation among populations already martyred by a hostile environment: the desert and unpredictable climatic conditions resulting from capitalist activity and imperialism. France, Ukraine, and the imperialist West no longer hide themselves in the Sahel, either in their narratives or in their actions supporting terrorism, especially when it comes to inflicting blows they could not deliver against the Russian Federation in Ukraine. This barbaric attack on Mali has finally convinced even the most skeptical regarding the double standards of the Western bloc.
Yesterday, if support for the terrorist Ahmed al-Charaa, also known by his terrorist name Abu Mohammed al-Joulani, in Syria could be justified through a carefully orchestrated propaganda campaign against Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian people, in Mali such propaganda does not work. Nothing justifies rebels who claim to be such allying themselves with terrorists in order to bring hell upon a people engaged in a struggle for political liberation and sovereignty over their wealth and natural resources for their own benefit. Nothing, except a France driven into a corner and throwing all its cards onto the table at the risk of compromising itself in an alliance with terrorist groups—the very same groups that plunged Paris into mourning in the November 15 Bataclan attacks, Spain on March 4, 2004, and from August 17 to 18, and the USA on August 7, 1998 in the Nairobi bombings. Be that as it may, cowardice is matched only by the narrowness of memory of those guilty of it. The West has been exposed! And this has not escaped the African people, particularly the youth, who, as soon as the martyrdom of Comrade Sadio Camara was announced, flooded social media to denounce the imposture and call for broad mobilization against terrorism and its Western backers.
The Africa-France Summit promises to be more than difficult for Macron and his neocolonial and imperialist bloc. The African leaders attending it are not going there of their own will, but because of the will of the youth demanding clear answers regarding the instrumentalization of terrorism in the Sahel, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in Sudan, and in the Central African Republic. The Nairobi Anti-Imperialist Conference is the materialization of this will of African youth through the anti-imperialist and pan-African movements and organizations gathering from May 9 to May 18 under the aegis of the Kenyan Communist Party, raising high the protest for full African sovereignty beginning in the Sahel and spreading across the continent like the cries for independence after the Second World War. Nairobi signals the awakening of Central and Southern Africa for the immediate and unconditional expulsion of all American and French military bases—indeed all foreign military bases—and for the denunciation of all leonine agreements that alienate our freedom and sovereignty. Nairobi is the refusal of a fragmented Africa, trapped within borders that guard our alienation; it is the refusal of Africa as a battlefield for rival powers and as the terrain of the next global conflagration. The Third World War that the battlefields of Ukraine and the barbaric aggression against Gaza, Iran, and Lebanon did not allow them to achieve. Nairobi is a united Africa coming to the rescue of peace and humanity.
Glory to the martyrs of the Great Patriotic War!
Victory to the Special Military Operation in Ukraine!
Glory to our martyrs!
Down with imperialism! Long live socialism!
Full success to the Anti-Imperialist Conference of Nairobi!
Fatherland or death, we shall overcome!
ALASSANE Aboubakar
