By Noah Weight, The Seattle Medium
On the wood-slatted pavilion of Estelita’s Books in Seattle’s Central District, a group of 30 or so people gathered for a screening of “Thomas Sankara: The Upright Man,” hosted by the newly formed Seattle-Tacoma organizing group of the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (A-APRP).
Thomas Sankara, the Pan-Africanist and Marxist revolutionary from Burkina Faso, is known for his wide-spread reforms around environmental protections, women’s rights and access to healthcare and education.
This screening on Aug. 2, 2024, was the first public event hosted by A-APRP Washington. Before the movie began, children colored in pictures of Sankara, giving him green or blue skin, and a pink beret. A projector propped on a pile of books projected images of the African states of Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. Speakers discussed the recently formed Alliance of the Sahel States with the importance many reserve only for domestic policy.
Based in Africa, A-APRP is a revolutionary, socialist, Pan-African political party founded in 1968 in Guinea by Dr. Kwame Nkurumah. It has now expanded to include Africans across the world. A-APRP believes that capitalism and imperialism are among the primary factors oppressing African people across the globe, and that Pan-Africanism and socialism are the only legitimate paths forward for genuine freedom and sovereignty.
Sisters Véronique Harris and Dr. Collette Harris, working with a few others in the Pacific Northwest, began the groundwork to launch a Washington state organizing group in the summer of 2023 before officially launching in October of that year.
“The root of our struggle lies in the homeland, in Africa,” says Véronique Harris. “Even if Africans free ourselves [here], our freedom is presupposed on the exploitation of Africans on the continent and those are our siblings.”
In A-APRP, no distinction in African identity is made between more recent immigrants in the African diaspora and those descended from enslaved people in America.
“We don’t identify as American. We were kidnapped and stolen and brought here by European slavers. We don’t want to have anything to do with American culture,” says Véronique Harris. “There’s no need to put the asterisk of ‘American’ in there.”
And though internationalism plays a central role in A-APRP’s ideology, members of A-APRP Washington have also immersed themselves in addressing the needs of people in the Puget Sound area.
“It’s about building that bridge, that material connection between the struggle here and the struggle in the continent,” says Terrence McCall, another A-APRP Washington member. “I think that our people have always been international…[but] because of the suppression and repression of imperialism, it’s something that we have to remind ourselves to attempt.”
They maintain an active relationship with the Black Panther Party of Washington, holding political education events or providing food and supplies to houseless encampments in Tacoma. In July 2024, they worked in conjunction with Super Familia and South King County & Eastside Mutual Aid, two grassroots organizations based in Seattle. They gathered and delivered gasoline, propane, ice and food to asylum seekers at an encampment next to the vacant Econo Lodge in Kent, where unbearable conditions and sweltering weather combined.
At the encampment, asylum seekers from Africa were getting fewer resources than those from South American countries. A-APRP stepped in to address the disparity, which Veronique Harris said helped ease some of the tensions that were growing in the camp. The camp was later swept by King County authorities on Sept. 24, destroying many asylum seekers’ personal belongings and leaving some without shelter.
Mzuri Pambeli is an elder of A-APRP, and the coordinator of the U.S. region’s women’s wing of A-APRP, the All-African Women’s Revolutionary Union (A-AWRU). Pambeli lives in Southern California, and has been in A-APRP for nearly 50 years, joining during her junior year at University of California, Berkeley in 1976.
Pambeli recalled how the political struggles of the time became internationalized because of Vietnam and the South African anti-apartheid movement, and because of leaders like Malcolm X and Muhammed Ali. Pambeli said the 80s and 90s brought a decline of that revolutionary internationalism and a shift of focus to representation in popular culture and more centrist policies.
“There was real concentration on getting people to focus more on reform…trying to repair the situation–as Kwame [Ture] used to say, ‘putting a bandaid over cancer,’” Pambeli says. Across the world, groups like A-APRP are intentionally reinvigorating that internationalist spirit through political education, mobilization and service in their communities.
In the six months since their first public event in August 2024, A-APRP Washington has held a teach-in on the University of Washington’s campus, a memorial with the Black Panther Party for Sonya Massey, a 36-year-old Black woman who was shot and killed in her home by police officer Sean Grayson in Illinois, tabled at a punk show to raise money for a family in Gaza, and flyered at high schools within the Seattle school district with Veterans for Peace to counter military recruitment events.
“The goal should be long-term planning, organizing and coming up with solutions,” Véronique Harris says. “That could look like creating community safety nets, food systems, etc. That’s what the Black Panther Party has been doing down Tacoma.
“Sometimes we are so browbeat and conditioned to not dream, to not even think that a better world is possible. We need to push that into community, and we can create the systems we want to see.”
Source: Seattle Medium