- Imperialist Aggression and Global Struggles for Independence
- Southern Africa at the Centre of the Anti-Imperialist Struggle
- This presentation draws inspiration from Pan-Africanist and anti-imperialist traditions associated with Kwame Nkrumah, Thomas Sankara, Patrice Lumumba, Julius Nyerere, Amílcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon and Samora Machel
We gather here in Nairobi at a dangerous but decisive moment in human history. The old imperial order is trembling, but like every wounded beast, it is becoming more vicious, more desperate and more violent. Across the Global South — from Palestine to Cuba, from the Sahel to Southern Africa — the peoples of the world are confronting the same enemy in different forms: imperial domination, economic sabotage, political manipulation and the continued theft of African resources.
Yesterday, they came with gunboats, missionaries and colonial charters. Today, they come with sanctions, NGOs, military alliances, debt traps, media propaganda, cyber warfare, economic blackmail and regime-change operations.
Southern Africa remains one of the final bastions where former liberation movements still hold state power. This reality deeply disturbs imperialism because these movements emerged from armed struggles against settler colonialism and apartheid. They carry revolutionary memories that cannot easily be erased.
In Zimbabwe, the ruling party ZANU-PF emerged from the liberation war against white minority rule in Rhodesia. In South Africa, the African National Congress emerged from the anti-apartheid struggle. In Namibia, SWAPO led the struggle against South African occupation. In Mozambique, FRELIMO fought Portuguese colonialism. In Angola, the MPLA fought Portuguese colonial domination and foreign intervention. In Tanzania, Chama Cha Mapinduzi carries the anti-colonial legacy of Julius Nyerere and the project of African socialism.
These movements are not perfect. They have contradictions, weaknesses and internal crises. But imperialism does not target them because of corruption or democracy. Imperialism targets them because they represent historical memories of African resistance, state sovereignty and resource nationalism.
Across Southern Africa, imperialism seeks to dismantle liberation movements and replace them with comprador elites — local political actors loyal not to African people but to Western financial and strategic interests. Where liberation movements are defeated, foreign capital tightens its grip over land, minerals, banks, energy and political direction.
We have already seen examples where liberation movements lost power or became weakened and fragmented. In Zambia, the Patriotic Front was replaced by the United Party for National Development under Hakainde Hichilema, a government viewed by many anti-imperialist critics as more aligned with Western financial institutions and strategic interests. In Botswana, politics has increasingly shifted toward liberal economic models deeply tied to Western capital and multinational mining interests. Across the region, opposition movements are frequently financed, trained and amplified through networks connected to foreign foundations, international media platforms and geopolitical interests.
The battle for Southern Africa is fundamentally a battle over resources.
The Democratic Republic of Congo remains the clearest example of imperialist barbarism in Africa. Patrice Lumumba, one of Africa’s greatest revolutionaries, was assassinated in 1961 with the involvement of Belgian and Western intelligence interests because he demanded true sovereignty over Congo’s vast mineral wealth. Since Lumumba’s murder, the Congo has been trapped in endless instability, coups, foreign interventions and resource wars.
Congo is rich beyond imagination: cobalt, coltan, copper, gold, uranium and countless strategic minerals essential for modern technology. Yet its people remain among the poorest on Earth. Why? Because imperialism prefers an unstable Congo that can be looted rather than a sovereign Congo that controls its own wealth.
What happened to Lumumba was not an isolated event. Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana was overthrown. Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso was assassinated. Muammar Gaddafi in Libya was destroyed. Revolutionary leaders who attempted to chart an independent path were targeted because imperialism cannot tolerate genuine African sovereignty.
Zimbabwe became a major target precisely because it dared to challenge colonial land ownership.
Zimbabwe remains the only African country that carried out a large-scale expropriation of white settler-owned commercial farmland and redistributed land to the African majority. The Fast Track Land Reform Programme was not merely an agricultural reform. It was a confrontation with colonial property relations established through conquest and racial dispossession.
For the imperialist powers, this was unacceptable.
Zimbabwe was punished through economic isolation, financial exclusion and sanctions imposed mainly by the United States and its Western allies outside the framework of the United Nations Security Council. Many anti-imperialist scholars and activists, therefore, argue that these sanctions lacked international legitimacy and constituted unilateral coercive measures.
The effects on ordinary Zimbabweans were devastating. Access to international finance became restricted. Credit lines collapsed. Investment dried up. The currency came under enormous pressure. Inflation exploded. Hospitals deteriorated. Industries weakened. Millions of Zimbabweans migrated across the region in search of survival.
Yet Africa largely abandoned Zimbabwe.
Most African governments feared confronting Western powers directly. They feared aid cuts, diplomatic retaliation and economic punishment. Instead of mobilising a united continental defence of Zimbabwe’s land revolution, many remained silent.
That silence had consequences.
Zimbabwe became an example designed to terrify the rest of Africa. Imperialism wanted to send a message to every African government and every landless African peasant: if you attempt radical land redistribution, economic warfare will follow.
And indeed, many governments retreated.
Today, land inequality remains catastrophic across Southern Africa. In South Africa, despite the end of apartheid in 1994, the overwhelming majority of productive agricultural land remains concentrated in white ownership or under corporate control. Millions of Black South Africans remain landless in the country of their ancestors.
When movements such as the Economic Freedom Fighters demanded expropriation without compensation, panic erupted among domestic monopoly capital and Western interests. South Africa also came under growing pressure for its independent foreign policy positions, including its support for Palestine and its genocide case at the International Court of Justice against Israel.
At the same time, xenophobia has been weaponised to divide Africans against one another. Instead of confronting monopoly capital, unemployment and inequality created by capitalism, poor Africans are encouraged to blame migrants from neighbouring countries. Black workers are turned against black workers while the structures of exploitation remain untouched.
This is one of imperialism’s oldest tactics: divide the oppressed so that they never unite against the oppressor.
Mozambique has also become a battleground. Following major gas discoveries in Cabo Delgado, violent insurgency and instability escalated in the region. While the conflict is complex and cannot be reduced to a single cause, many anti-imperialist analysts argue that foreign interests benefit from the instability surrounding strategic natural resources. At the same time, FRELIMO — the former liberation movement — continues to face intense political pressure and allegations of external interference in domestic politics.
Namibia and Angola face similar pressures. In both countries, liberation movements remain in power, and both countries possess enormous strategic resources. Namibia holds uranium and other critical minerals. Angola remains one of Africa’s major oil producers. Everywhere there are strategic minerals, oil, gas or geopolitical importance, imperialism seeks influence, leverage and control.
Zimbabwe itself has become central to the global struggle over strategic minerals. The country possesses more than 60 commercially exploitable minerals, including one of the world’s largest lithium reserves. Lithium has become one of the most strategic minerals of the twenty-first century because it is essential for batteries, electric vehicles and the future energy transition.
China has invested heavily in Zimbabwe’s lithium sector, infrastructure and mining development. This has intensified geopolitical competition in the region. The growing presence of China and Russia in Africa has alarmed Western powers that previously enjoyed near total dominance over African economies.
This broader global conflict explains why Africa has become a geopolitical battlefield once again.
Imperialism fears a sovereign Africa aligned with emerging multipolar powers. It fears African states that refuse to obey Western dictates. It fears governments that attempt resource nationalism. It fears Pan-African unity.
And above all, it fears organised African masses.
Because history teaches us a simple truth: no empire has ever fallen through polite requests.
Colonialism did not collapse because Europeans suddenly developed consciences. Colonialism collapsed because organised masses resisted. Workers struck. Peasants fought. Students mobilised. Guerrilla armies advanced. Revolutionaries sacrificed their lives.
That is why the example of the Sahel has electrified millions across Africa.
In Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, mass anger erupted against French neo-colonial domination, military dependency and economic exploitation. Military governments in those countries expelled French troops, challenged old colonial arrangements and proclaimed the need for African sovereignty.
Whether one agrees with every aspect of those governments or not, the political significance is undeniable: the people of the Sahel demonstrated that imperialism is not invincible.
Southern Africa must draw lessons from this.
But the solution cannot simply be military change without mass political transformation. True liberation requires organised workers, peasants, students, women, intellectuals and revolutionary movements united around a socialist Pan-African programme.
Africa cannot defeat imperialism country by country.
A fragmented Africa of 54 weak economies can easily be manipulated. But a united Africa controlling its minerals, markets, labour, agriculture, science and energy would become one of the most powerful forces on Earth.
Kwame Nkrumah warned us decades ago: Africa must unite or perish.
Without continental unity, our minerals will continue to enrich foreign powers while our children remain poor. Without socialist planning, our economies will continue exporting raw materials while importing poverty. Without revolutionary consciousness, our people will continue voting against their own liberation.
We therefore need a new revolutionary programme for Africa.
First, Africa must pursue complete economic sovereignty. Strategic minerals, land, banks, energy and natural resources must serve African development, not foreign profit.
Second, Africa must build continental industrialisation. We cannot continue exporting lithium, cobalt and gold in raw form while importing finished products at enormous prices.
Third, Africa must reject IMF and World Bank dependency. Debt has become a modern instrument of colonial control.
Fourth, Africa must build continental defence and security systems independent of NATO and foreign military domination.
Fifth, revolutionary political education must become central. A people without ideological consciousness can easily be manipulated through propaganda, tribalism, religion and xenophobia.
Sixth, Africa must defend land reform and agrarian justice. Land belongs to the people, not to descendants of colonial conquest or multinational corporations.
Finally, we must revive the dream of a United Socialist Africa.
Not a symbolic African Union without power.
Not a collection of weak states competing against one another for foreign approval.
But a truly united revolutionary Africa capable of defending its sovereignty, controlling its resources and guaranteeing dignity for its people.
Comrades,
The struggle before us is historic.
Imperialism has looted Africa for centuries. It has extracted our gold, our diamonds, our labour and our humanity. It built skyscrapers in Europe and America using African blood. It financed industrial revolutions using African slavery and colonial plunder.
Yet despite centuries of exploitation, Africa still rises.
The spirit of Lumumba still lives.
The spirit of Sankara still lives.
The spirit of Nkrumah still lives.
The spirit of Samora Machel still lives.
The spirit of the liberation fighters of Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia, Mozambique and South Africa still lives.
Imperialism may possess weapons, banks and media empires.
But the people possess history.
And when the masses of Africa awaken with revolutionary clarity, no empire on Earth will stop them.
The future of Africa will not be decided in Washington, London, Brussels or Paris.
It will be decided in the mines of Congo, the farms of Zimbabwe, the townships of South Africa, the factories of Angola, the villages of Mozambique and the revolutionary consciousness of African youth.
Africa must rise.
Africa must unite.
Africa must reclaim its land, its minerals, its labour and its destiny.
Forward ever.
Backwards never.
A luta continua.