Africa World Now Project: Recent Episodes
Africa World Now Project
Is Africa a place? Is it the people? Is it politics, culture, art? What does Africa mean to you? What can Africa mean to us?
Africa World Now Project deeply engages these and other complex questions…
Africa World Now Project is a classroom on the radio. It provides actionable information that explores continuities and discontinuities in the history, culture, and politics of the entire African world.
AWNP does this by engaging in organic discussions with scholars, artists, journalist, activist, social justice engineers and others who examine, from a decidedly progressive perspective, various issues that exist in the entire African world.
AFrICa WOrLD noW PrOjecT [raDiO] is heard live every Wednesday @ 7PM EST on WSNC 90.5FM, an NPR affiliate & broadcast service of Winston Salem State University. Archived here.
Email: africaworldnowproject@gmail.com
Twitter: @AfWrldNwPrj
Image: John Biggers, Band of Angels: Weaving the Seventh Word, 1992-93
According to the Dogon, “in the beginning before anything existed there was the Supreme Being, Amma. Amma existed in the form of an egg divided into four parts by four bones [the clavicles], which were joined together. Apart from the egg, nothing existed, for Amma rested on nothing. The four arts of the egg represented the four elements: water, air, fire, and Earth. So, the fundamental elements already existed in the egg in embryo form. In the egg Amma had designed the world before it was created” [51]. Ultimately, Amma created the world through the creation of the signs and likewise will destroy it through the destruction of the signs …” [53].
We share this creation story, in part, for a number of reasons, but primarily because it is aligned with the assertion in Chukwunyere Kamalu’s, The Word at Face Value: An Abridged Account of Dogon cosmology, that “mainstream scholarship on the cosmological world of the Dogon of Mail in West Africa, has become a battleground over what an African people can and cannot know” [11].
Dr. Nubia Kia asserts that, “myths in Africa are similar to what Joseph Campbell calls “living myths.” He uses living myths to distinguish them from the connotative usage of myth meaning “a lie.” Living myths signifies the opposite of the connotative construct. J.J. Bacofen argues that the origins of history can only be revealed through myth since in myth “lies the beginning of all development.”
Dr. Kia, quoting W.T. Stevenson, further explains the primacy of mythological discourse. According to Stevenson, “the essential character of our personal and social lives are shaped by myth, or it is by the power of particular myths which determine by way of determining our fundamental presuppositions, the way we shape our cultural, social, political, and economic lives. We do nothing of significance which is not informed by myth in a fundamental way, and the more significant our act, the more this is true. It is the symbols within the context of myth which give rise to all thought [Kia, A River of Prophecy: Constructing a Sacred History of African Americans].
Mythic symbolism attempts to explain the spiritual nature of peoples and their inseparable connection to a universal order. Therefore, if someone wishes to pervert an idea, the most effective means is to reverse the sacred symbols or icons associated with the idea or ideas [Kia, A River of Prophecy: Constructing a Sacred History of African Americans].
Today, AWNP’s Tasneem Siddiqui sits down with Dr. Nubia Kia, to explore the relationship between myth & its continuities in sacred + secret histories.
Nubia Kai received a Ph.D. in African historical literature and film from Howard University, an MA degree in African Languages and Literature from the University of Wisconsin.
Her work has been published in Black Scholar; Black World; Essence Magazine; Black American Literature Forum; Catalyst; Obsidian; Moving Out, Journal of Black Poetry; Left Curve; Journal of African Literature Association, Black Camera: International Film Journal; Journal of African American History, to name a few.
Her book, Kuma Malinke Historiography: Sundiata Keita to Almamy Samori Toure, is an extensive study of the mythology, epics, poetry, and expository narratives of the Mali Empire. She has been an ardent researcher of comparative religion, anthropology, mythology, and Africana studies for over thirty years.
Professor Kai is also a poet, novelist, and playwright who has received a number of awards, including two National Endowment for the Arts Awards, six DC Commission on the Arts Awards, and the Larry Neal Writers Competition.
She has two collections of poetry, Peace of My Mind and Solos, a collection of fables, The Sweetest Berry on the Bush, and an historical novel, I Spread My Wings And I Fly.
Amadou Hampâté Bâ, quoting his teacher Tierno Bokar, suggest that “writing is one thing and knowledge is another. Writing is the photograph of knowledge but is not knowledge itself” [A. Hampâté Bâ, The Living Tradition, General History of Africa Vol. 1: 166].
According to Hampâté Bâ, “the world’s earliest archives or libraires were the brains of men [and I must add women] …
The written word is not without thought. The written word without being refined through action and interaction which is articulated through nommo is without power. Without nommo – the African conceptualization of the energy within the spoken word, the power that carries an energy that produces all life and influences everything is the principle upon which the world of meaning is built – power is debased [Nommo, Encyclopedia of African Religion, 2009].
According to Hampâté Bâ, “In African traditions … the spoken word had, beyond its fundamental moral value, a sacred character associated with its divine origin ... an exceptional conductor of magic, grand vector of 'ethereal' forces, it was not to be treated lightly.
Contrary to what some may think, African oral tradition is not limited to stories and legends or even to mythological and historical tales, and the ‘griot’ – what Bâ calls a wandering minstrel/poet as conceptualized by the French – is far from being its one and only qualified guardian and transmitter.
What does all of this point to … for what purpose … and to what ends does this introductory exploration provide our current engagement that you will hear next … how does it connect?
The simplicity of the answer is found in understanding its complexity.
The simple answer is that it provides a frame within which we can identify and extract the multiple points where spirit and Black resistance converge, whether it is evident as the spark of the Haitian Revolution or found interwoven in the vibrations of John Coltrane’s Love Supreme … deeper levels of spirit and Black resistance all always converging.
While the complexity is found in our willingness to map its evolution and stand in its genealogy as it is sparked across space and time, evolving itself as it propels African/a peoples to intrinsically seek liberation …
It is this space in between space, it is of spirit and Black liberation … one of the many places we can explore and utilize this ancient the praxis of nommo.
AWNP’s Tasneem Siddiqui recently sat down with Youssef Carter to discuss the interconnectedness of West African Sufi Islam and Black resistance … the embodiment of ancient ways of being articulated in forms of knowledge that 1st make sense of the conditions within which African/a peoples find themselves; and 2nd to struggle against the those conditions when moved out of balance.
Dr. Youssef Carter is an Assistant Professor and Kenan Rifai Fellow in Islamic Studies at University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill.
Dr. Youssef Carter holds BS from North Carolina A&T, an MA from North Carolina Central University and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California-Berkeley and is an expert in Sufism and Islam in West Africa and the United States. His book in progress, “The Vast Oceans: Remembering God and Self on the Mustafawi Sufi Path,” examines the discourses and practices of a transatlantic Sufi spiritual network through detailed ethnographic work.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native/indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana; Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
Listen Intently. Think deeply. Act accordingly.
Enjoy the program.
Image: M-Eating, Sufi - Artist: https://marianeibrahim.com/artists/36-maimouna-guerresi/biography/
The history of the geographical region now called, Eritrea is deep and rich.
Eritrea has been occupied in turn by Ottoman Turks, Egyptians, Italians (from 1886 until 1941), the British until 1952 (who defeated Italy in Eritrea during the second world war) and the Ethiopians ever since [Pateman 1990:51]. In 1 952, the British and the United Nations determined on a federation of Eritrea and Ethiopia.
In the first 10 years after the federation was formed Ethiopia's direct rule over Eritrea was imposed. Towards the end of 1952 La Voce de' Eritrea, a newspaper critical of the federation, was banned. In 1956, following the suppression of the opposition waged by workers and the peasantry, the Eritrean General Union of Labor Syndicates was banned. In 1960, the Eritrea flag was lowered, and separate courts were established. In 1962 Eritrea was forcibly annexed by Ethiopia [Worku Zerai, Organising Women within a National Liberation Struggle: Case of Eritrea, 1994; Pateman, 1990: 6].
The national struggle for national liberation began in 1961 with the formation of the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF). The ELF and the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) which split from the ELF in 1970 gained control over many towns in the country, but as the Soviet Union intervened on the Ethiopian behalf, independence could not be achieved in the late 1970s. The Soviet intervention forced withdrawal from the towns that were controlled by the EPLF to the northern part of the country.
The EPLF continued fighting against the Ethiopian occupation until it liberated the whole of Eritrea in May 1991. Eritrea became an independent country officially in May 1993.
Many have highlighted that "although women in many countries have struggled together with men for national liberation, at the end of that revolutionary struggle their position in society as women improves little as the era dawns" (Worku Zerai, Organising Women within a National Liberation Struggle: Case of Eritrea, 1994).
While this view is correct in one sense, it forgets the objective reality of the stages of the socio-economic and political development of formerly colonized nations. There are many contradictions embedded in the structures, systems and institutions between the people and the colonisers, between the different liberation movements that led the national liberation front, between the different classes in the society.
As a consequence, national liberation does not mean that all contradictions are going to be solved at one go. It is here that Fanon and Cabral adds sharp clarity the pitfalls of national consciousness without the implantation of class suicide.
Women’s struggle for freedom cannot be seen in isolation from the larger struggle for liberation.
Today, we will hear a talk that was given by Seble Tsehaye, Secretary of the National Union of Eritrean Women, USA, member of the Central Committee and member National Public Diplomacy Taskforce.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native/indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana, Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
Listen intently. Think deeply. Act accordingly.
Sources: Worku Zerai, Organising Women within a National Liberation Struggle Case of Eritrea, 1994; Victoria Bernal, Equality to Die For?: Women Guerrilla Fighters and Eritrea's Cultural Revolution, 2000; National Union of Eritrean Women: http://www.nuew.org/
Image: EPLF freedom fighters. There is no independent Eritrea without Eritrean women. available here: http://www.madote.com/2017/03/nuew-national-union-of-eritrean-women.html
Saladin Muhammad argues in an article titled Black Workers for Justice, Twenty-year of Struggle, in Against the Current that:
“The national oppression of African Americans in the U.S. South makes Black workers in the South the most exploited section of the U.S. industrial working class. Black Workers for Justice [BWFJ] thus bases its trade union and political perspectives on the principle of the centrality of the Black working class.”
“The struggle against racism, for political power and self-determination for African descendant people are key aspects of this principle in forging the unity of the Southern and U.S. working class. BWFJ has tried to create an identity, confidence and political presence of the Black worker and trade union organization in the U.S. South.”
BWFJ believes that the struggle against African American national oppression must take on sharper Black working-class and internationalist features. It must put forward a perspective for, and be active in building, a strong rank-and-file democratic and radical labor movement in the U.S. South” [Saladin Muhammad, Black Workers for Justice, Twenty-years of Struggle, Against the Current, No. 101, November/December 2002].
With this, Saladin Muhammad, firmly situates Black Workers for Justice in the continuity and long arc of Black liberation movements that center the Black working class/workers, such as, but not limited to: Ad Hoc. Committee of Concerned Black Steel Workers; the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement; League of Revolutionary Black Workers, to name a few.
What you will hear next is Pt. II of our conversation with Baba Saladin Muhammad. Be sure to tap into Pt. I to pick up the flow of our conversation!
Saladin Muhammad is an organizer, theoretician, writer. He published a number of articles that explore issues ranging from exposing the structural and systemic racism in labor to ways to understand the interdependence of human rights and Black internationalism.
Saladin Muhammad is the co-founder and national chair of Black Workers for Justice and until his retirement, he was an international representative for the United Electrical Workers [UEW].
His praxis has been forged in Black freedom work for than three decades.
The idea is not to replicate, but I understand there is a path. To see that there is a way. A way – a genealogy...
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native/indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana; and Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
Listen intently. Think deeply. Act accordingly.
Enjoy the program!
Abdul Alkalimat writes on a multimedia project that explores the work of Saladin Muhamad that “our movements for social transformation have often fallen victim to the tendency to oversimplify the struggle.
Moreover, there is far too little self-criticism to learn from our “right” and “left” errors. This is particularly dangerous as we are at the beginning of a new generational awakening. We need to think about the past few decades of struggle by listening to those who have marched on and maintained a revolutionary perspective.”
Labor, whether force or extracted through coercion has been a consistent cause of struggle for African/a peoples, globally.
James Boggs, in a speech given at a Political Science Seminar in Atlanta University on February 17, 1974, argued that “we must be ready to recognize that as reality changes, our ideas have to change so that we can project new, more advanced aspirations worth striving for. This is the only way to avoid becoming prisoners of ideas which were once progressive but have become reactionary, i.e., have been turned into their opposite. The only struggles worth pursuing are those which advance the whole society and enable all human beings to evolve to a new and higher stage of their human potential”.
Expanding this assertion, Boggs goes on to suggest that “knowledge must move from perception to conception; in other words, knowledge and struggle begin by perceiving your own reality. But it must have the aim of developing beyond what you yourself or your own group can perceive, to wider conceptions that are based upon the experiences of the whole history of Mankind. The only way that anyone can take this big step of moving beyond perception to conception is by recognizing and struggling against your own internal contradictions and weaknesses. Of these weaknesses, the most fundamental and most difficult to overcome, as a result of the specific history of United States society [and I will add the evolution of the global racial capitalist system], is the tendency not to think at all but simply to react in terms of individual or ethnic self-interest” [Boggs, 1974].
Reflecting more on the praxis of Saladin Muhammad, Abdul Alkalimat asserts that “there are many theoretical and practical issues involved in the experiences covered by the life of Saladin Muhammad and his experiences in struggle. Saladin is a proletarian cadre of the revolutionary movement. He served as chairperson of the Black Workers for Justice for over 20 years. While being retired from full time union organizing, he remains active on many battle fronts including the Southern Workers Assembly.”
This is Part I of our recent conversation with Baba Saladin Muhammad.
Saladin Muhammad is an organizer, theoretician, writer. He published a number of articles that explore issues ranging from exposing the structural and systemic racism in labor to ways to understand the interdependence of human rights and Black internationalism.
Saladin Muhammad is the co-founder and national chair of Black Workers for Justice and until his retirement, he was an international representative for the United Electrical Workers [UEW].
His praxis has been forged in Black freedom work for than three decades.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native/indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana; and Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
Listen intently. Think deeply. Act accordingly.
Black Liberation and Social Revolution: The Life and Legacy of Saladin Muhammad
http://theblm.net/saladin/
The way we remember; the forces and institutions that nurture or place barriers on the processes of remembering are not without great contradictions and opportunity. All of which are directly related to the interdependence of legitimacy and consent…the terrain upon which a contestation of power is played out on a daily basis.
Understanding what is at stake in this contestation, is a duty and responsibility. It is science as well as an art. It is real and imaginative.
Mapping and following the continuities in genealogies of phenomenon, mapping the materiality of memory allows us to grasp an understanding of the interconnectedness of power, memory, & resistance.
To be clear the system and structures that prohibit, discourages, and/or award us to move away from mapping memory, to move on, to forget, to leave it in the past…have plans. And those plans have nothing to do with freedom nor liberation.
It is a strategy that uses concepts like race, class, gender citizenship, rights—all essential components to the maintenance of the myth of the nation-state, to distort and create memory.
Nevertheless, in the web of human history, the most articulate expression of a people’s humanity is found in the way they resist…the most vibrant platform that allow visions of the future to connect with now moments.
Just as the complexity and vast scope of oppression finds an expansive terrain to evolve with the suppression and distortion of memory, so too is the complexity and vastness of a peoples resist to it.
Accordingly, there are stories and necessary continuities that we must identify and once identified, we must map. We must create a platform to construct memory, not for the sake of remembering. But organized to understand where in the long processes of resisting sociopolitical and economic inequities inherent to the current global social order can we follow to their logical conclusions.
Today, we will present a conversation that AWNP’s Mwiza Munthali had with filmmaker Enver Samuel, director of Murder in Paris, which tells the story of Dulcie September.
Image: https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/dulcie-evonne-september
Film/Take Action: https://murderinparis.com/home
The Erasure of Dulcie September - https://africasacountry.com/2019/08/the-erasure-of-dulcie-september
Labor has changed. Its production. Its definition. Its control. But one thing that has not changed are the parameters within which labor has been defined, value extracted and dehumanized – mechanized – automated – artificially intelligeized.
What does "labor" mean in a settler imperial world fortified by racial capitalist sociopolitical structures that maintain a social order that places the African/a worker, beyond the periphery of benefiting from their labor? What about decolonizing labor and labor movements?
What about a world without work----What are the ideological frameworks that ‘labor’ is using to attempt to construct the material realities of our current world? What does (or will) this world look like in two-years…and what are its implications for the African/a world? What are the implications for the Earth and now more than ever, the heavens—space?
Questions around black labor, usually pivot on the role of black education. However, most explorations are neither critical nor intellectually honest.
Today, Dr. Kamau Rashid joins us in conversation where we meditate on black labor and 'the white architects of black education'.
Our thoughts are centered on William H. Watkins work, the White Architects of Black Education: Ideology and Power, 1865-1954. In the White Architects of Black Education, Watkins “explores the body of ideas that undergird social, economic, racial, and educational beliefs about Black education in the U.S.: therefore, it is an ideological study.
His stated objective is to "investigate the ideological construction of colonial Black education by examining the views, politics, and practices of the white architects that funded, created, and refined it” [1-2].
Therefore, “colonial education in the South must never be confused with the educational agenda of blacks in the south. In fact, these agenda conflicted” [2].
The central question asks: How far have we moved away from these foundational ideas and their ideological grounding?
Dr. Kamau Rashid is currently Professor and Founding Director of the Urban Education, Ed.D. program at Northeastern Illinois University. Dr. Rashid earned his Ph.D. and BA from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Master of Arts degree from Northeastern Illinois University.
Dr. Rashid work focuses on African American history and culture, particularly on the inter-generational dynamics of African/a social critique, which includes an exploration and theorizing of W.E.B. Du Bois as well as contemporary African-Centered scholars and critical race theorists.
He is co-developing an oral history and archival project focused on African American social movements in the Chicago area from the 1960s to1980s with Dr. Richard Benson of Spelman College. And is currently working on Finding our way through the desert: Jacob H. Carruthers and the restoration of an African worldview as well as the critical theory of W.E.B. Du Bois: The Struggle for Humanity.
He has published a number of peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and received various grant awards to support his work.
Lastly, likely most importantly, Dr. Rashid is active in a number of community organizations in the Chicago-area including the Kemetic Institute of Chicago, a research and educational organization focused on mapping, exploring and applying the ancient and contemporary contributions of ancient Nile Valley civilizations.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native/indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana; Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
Image: Romare Bearden - Factory Workers - 1942
The range and scope of manifestations in the Black freedom struggle are varied yet connected by a common thread…it does not matter where you look, pick a point on the map of human geography, pick a geographical landmass or region -- the continent of Africa, the Caribbean or somewhere in Northern part of the Americas, you will find a common thread.
And that thread is the radical imagination of young people. You will find a historical path that reaches into the present. You will find the beginnings of a road built with vibrancy of young folk who envisioned a world beyond struggle.
SNYC
We can see the materiality of this fact in the continuum of African/a resistance. In 1937, the Southern Negro Youth Congress [SNYC] was created [We demand Our Rights: Southern Negro Youth Congress, 1937-1949].
Assembled in Richmond, VA, for the first Southern Negro Youth Congress were some 534 delegates representing 250,000 young people in 23 states, and an estimated crowd of 2,000 observers. They represented "sharecroppers from Alabama and Mississippi; domestic workers from Georgia…and every other representative of Southern Negro life." [We demand Our Rights: Southern Negro Youth Congress, 1937-1949].
SNYC lasted for 12 years, 1937 to 1949.
SNCC
On February 1, 1960, Black students in Greensboro, North Carolina launched sit-ins challenging segregation in restaurants and other public accommodations. SNCC was founded just two and a half months later on the campus of Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. Ella Baker was the gathering’s organizer. [SNCC Digital Gateway].
On SNCC’s international dimensions, highlighted by Fanon Che Wilkins, in his article The Making of Black Internationalists: SNCC and Africa Before the Launching of Black Power, 1960-1965, were embryonic as “the founding conference of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, the delegates declared unequivocally: "We identify ourselves with the African struggle as a concern for all mankind" [468].
To add more clarity, Miss. Baker organized the conference which led to the formation of SNCC “just three weeks after the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa” [Wilkins, 2007: 471].
I present this snapshot, paying attention to historical continuity in African/a student resistance to provide an impetus to engage in more intentionally and consciously mapping of the range and scope of the Black freedom movement.
Today, we present a conversation with SNCC activist: Courtland Cox.
While a Howard University student, Courtland Cox became a member of Nonviolent Action Group [NAG] and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He worked with SNCC in Mississippi and Lowndes County, Alabama, was the Program Secretary for SNCC in 1962, as well as the SNCC representative to the War Crimes Tribunal organized by Bertram Russell.
In 1963 he served as the SNCC representative on the Steering Committee for the March on Washington. In 1973 he served as the Secretary General of the Sixth Pan-African Congress in Tanzania.
Additionally, he co-owned and managed the Drum and Spear Bookstore and Drum and Spear Press in Washington DC.
In our conversation we explored: Freedom Schools; CLR James; Jamil Al-Amin; Black internationalism; Sterling A. Brown; scholars w/o portfolio; independent political parties; Sékou Touré; Tanzania; Marion Berry; and the Sixth Pan African Congress.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native/indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana; Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
Image: Courtland Cox (second from right), Marion Barry, and others sitting-in at Atlanta Toddle House, December 1963, [https://snccdigital.org/people/courtland-cox/]
[produced & aired, 2017]
This past weekend over a 150, 000 people were in Washington, DC to protest and call attention to the ever-increasing violent reality of climate change.
The devastating effects are already being felt across the planet and can no longer be denied, despite the best efforts of those who choose to ignore the facts. And the continent of Africa is feeling every bit its violent effects.
The 2011 drought-induced famine in the Horn of Africa affected more than 10 million people, claimed 257,000 lives and cost over $1 billion in damages. The Africa Adaptation Gap Report by the UN Environment Programme warns that climate change could reduce total crop yields in sub-Saharan Africa by as much as 20% by 2070. Additionally, a projected sea-level rise in Tanzania of 70 centimeters by 2070 could devastate the port city of Dar es Salaam, its largest and richest city and a major player in East Africa trade, and cost the country about $10 billion in property damages and related losses.
Environmentalists warn that rising sea levels could cause severe flooding, submerge land and destroy African coastal ecosystems.
Africa World Now Project’s executive producer; international journalist and human rights advocate recently sat with activist Matheca Mawinda, Executive Director at Pan African Climate Justice Alliance and Cecile Ndjebet Coordinating African Network of Community Management of Forrest, to discuss this crisis in greater detail.
Next, you will hear a presentation on the Africa-China question from a symposium titled Africa and World in the 21st Century.
Howard French in his work, China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa estimates that there are currently at least a million Chinese living in sub-Saharan Africa and says that may be a conservative figure. Several countries alone (Zambia, Tanzania, and Mozambique) have a hundred thousand each. Others have fairly decent sized enclaves or Chinese towns, often of ten thousand people. Africans have said for years that the Chinese isolate themselves, that they don’t integrate, though French shows that there are numerous exceptions to that, especially when Chinese males have married African women and started families. There is little question, however, that often these enclaves have sprung up because in many places Chinese companies have brought their own workers to complete a specific project.
What is the role of China in Africa? How do we understand the implications of this role in the context of a 21st century global economy? What are the new social, economic, and potential political formations that are being produced from China in Africa? What about Africa in China? Africa has a long historical record of interacting with China…what are the contemporary possibilities of Africa reversing the influence?
After all, W. E. B. Du Bios writing in his 1947 work: The World and Africa suggests that Chinese ships traded directly with Africa from the 8th to the 12th centuries.
These and a myriad of other important questions come to mind when exploring the China-Africa question.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, Palestine, South Africa, and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
[produced and aired, 2016...note...our production is getting better...: )]
In a 1968 in the March edition of Negro Digest titled, the Nature and Needs of the Black University, Gerald McWorter [Abdul Alkalimat] writes…and I must quote in its entirety here: “Revolutionary change for the liberation of a people from oppressive social structures is not the special function of one course of action, but, more likely, the result of several. And while education is generally hoped to be a liberating force on our minds and bodies, often it has been used as a debilitating tool in the interests of an oppressive society."
Quoting Kwame Nkrumah, from his work Consciencism, McWorter, compares the colonial student who is educated for "the art of forming not a concrete environmental view of social political problems, but an abstract `liberal' outlook," with the revolutionary student who is "animated by a lively national consciousness, (who) seeks knowledge as an instrument of national emancipation and integrity."
The university is alive for people in the world (including all of the socioeconomic and political contradictions involved), and so must meet the challenge of responding creatively to whatever needs exist now for those people…
I wanted to highlight this one article of a series articles that was printed in the Negro Digest from 1968 to 1969, primarily to show the continuities and salience of the questions that were overtly presented then.
To be clear, the center of this historically-bound, contemporary discussion with a long genealogy in attempts to solidly build responses to expanding notions of justice and equality in a highly racialized society still asks: What is the role, in this present moment, of Diasporic institutions in African world resistance? In part 1 of this series, we explored the intellectual praxis of Diasporic thinkers…
Today, in part 2…We will explore, more deeply, the ideas presented those historical conversations about nature, function, and role of the Black University with Josh Myers.
Dr. Josh Myers is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. In addition to serving on the board of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations and the editorial board of The Compass: Journal of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations, he works with a numbers of community-based social justice and cultural restoration organization. His research interests include Africana intellectual histories and traditions, Africana philosophy, and critical university studies. His work has been published in The Journal of African American Studies, The Journal of Pan African Studies, The African Journal of Rhetoric, The Globalization and Human Rights Law Review, Liberator Magazine, and Pambazuka, among other literary spaces. His current book project is a history of the Howard University student protest of 1989.
Enjoy the program!
We are living in a time of great challenge and opportunity. Across the African world people are challenging their historically rooted contemporary conditions. The practical work of the long tradition of African and Diasporic freedom fighters has provided the frame work for these various manifestations of Africana resistance to find a way forward---to think, reason, and see that another world is not only possible, but absolutely necessary. The current sociopolitical, economic, and cultural organization of global society is truly not sustainable.
Amie Cesaire writing in 1950—in Discourse on Colonialism brings this notion to sharp clarity when he asserts that “A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it created is decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization…” (Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism: 31)
Thinkers and fighters such as Amilcar Cabral, in a 1972 speech during one of his visits to the US argued that: “An objective analysis of imperialism insofar as it is a fact or a “natural” historical phenomenon, indeed “necessary” in the context of the type of economic political evolution of an important part humanity, reveals that imperialist rule, with all its train of wretchedness, of pillage, of crime and of destruction of human and cultural values, was not just a negative reality. The vast accumulation of capital in half a dozen countries of the northern hemisphere which was a result of piracy, of the confiscation of the property of other peoples and of the ruthless exploitation of the work of these peoples will not only lead to the monopolization of colonies, but to the division of the world…” (Cabral, 1972: 57 in Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral).
How are we to understand this long tradition…that is finding material expression in the various movements around the African world? What is the role of Diasporic institutions, such as the HBCU? More importantly, as Vincent Harding once asked what is the vocation of the Black scholar and their praxis? I would expand this question to include what is the vocation of the Black and their praxis in relation to the entire African world?
I recently sat down with Corey Walker, Dean of The College and the John W. and Anna Hodgin Hanes Professor of the Humanities at Winston Salem State University for a wide-ranging discussion of the role and responsibility of the Black scholar in this current phase of global African resistance.
Enjoy the program….
Audio credit: Africa is a Country - mini-documentary - Shutting Down the Rainbow Nation - available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksgrJyOrd7A
Image credit: Rob Siebörger. The Rhodes Statue at the UCT-ground. Photo taken 28 March 2015.
Originally produced and aired in 2016...:
The great political theorist, cultural philosopher, revolutionary, C. L. R. James once said that he is black, number one, because he is against what they have done and are still doing to us; and number two, he has something to say about the new society to be built because he has a tremendous part in that which they have sought to discredit.— C. L. R. James, C. L. R. James: His Life and Work.
In the article The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses (The—sees), Fred Moten and Stefano Harney start their analysis with this powerful quote: “To the university I steal, and there I steal.”
They go on to write that this is the only possible relationship to the university (American) today. In fact, this may be true of universities everywhere. It cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment.
Their analysis is centered on a sharp critique of how we produce and reproduce a certain forms of knowledge. And the role and responsibility of those who step into this dialectical process of who has the right to know and what they should do with what they know.
Moten and Harney go on to suggest that in the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what we can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in, but not of—this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university.
The authors are attempting to peel back the cover of knowledge for knowledge sake. They suggest that in this present moment, we must begin to take the path of heretical thinkers.
The "maroons knew something about possibility. They are the condition of possibility of production of knowledge in the university—the singularities against the writers of singularity, the writers who write, publish, travel, and speak. It is not merely a matter of the secret labor upon which such space is lifted, though of course such space is lifted from collective labor and by it. It is rather that to be a critical academic in the university is to be against the university, and to be against the university is always to recognize it and be recognized by it, and to institute the negligence of that internal outside, that unassimilated underground, a negligence of it that is precisely, we must insist, the basis of the professions. And this act of against…always excludes the unrecognized modes of politics, the beyond of politics already in motion, the discredited criminal para-organization, what Robin Kelley might refer to as the infrapolitical field (and its music). It is not just the labor of the maroons but their prophetic organization that is negated by the idea of intellectual space in an organization called the university" [31].
Next we will hear an further elaboration of the ideas set out by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney with Dr. Claudrena Harold, author of New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South from University of Virginia, Dr. Will Boone, Dr. Corey Walker, and myself of Winston Salem State University.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, Palestine, South Africa, and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Enjoy the program…!
Image: Toward a Black University Conference 13-17 November 1968. Hilltop, 8 November 1968...available here: https://www.dc1968project.com/blog/2018/12/27/12-november-1968-amp-toward-a-black-university-conf-hu-begins-tomorrow
Image: Female literacy volunteers return to Havana at the end of the literacy campaign in December 1961
On June 23, 2021, a total of 184 countries on voted in favor of a resolution to demand the end of the US economic blockade on Cuba, for the 29th year in a row, with the United States and Israel, being the only countries voting against resolution. Three countries - Colombia, Ukraine, and Brazil - abstained.
Wednesday, July 7, of last week, the world received news of the assassination of then Haitian president in the midst of already tension conditions on the ground.
On this same day, a historic press conference with the Cuban Permanent Representative to the UN, H.E. Ambassador Pedro Luis Pedroso Cuesta presented a review and response of the recent vote against the blockade as well as the challenges and promises of the recent development of the Cuban COVID vaccines.
On Saturday, July 10, reports via mainstream media outlets began proliferating images and a narrative that suggested that the Cuban people were protesting against the ineffectiveness of the government. However, more detailed and clear journalism shows this was not the case, as the mass majority of the protestors were clear in their disdain for the embargo which in turn has caused deleterious impact on the population.
According to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, “the economic sanctions on Cuba were imposed by the United States of America in 1960 and were subsequently amended by the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992 and the Helms-Burton Act of 1996. These acts essentially ban all commercial ties between the United States and Cuba and severely impair the right of United States citizens to travel, to communicate with or carry out cultural exchanges with Cuba. Every year since 1992, the General Assembly has passed a resolution calling for an end to the embargo. The most recent resolution on this issue (A/67/4) was adopted on November 13 2012 by 188 votes against 3, with 2 abstentions. Since the United States is the major regional economic power and the main source of new medicines and technologies, Cuba is subject to deprivations that impinge on its citizens’ human rights. Moreover, the US makes its own foreign trade policy extraterritorial, through a system of secondary sanctions which force third-party countries also into imposing an embargo on Cuba.”
For your benefit, and in accordance to the central mission of Africa World Now Project which is to provide a platform that allows you to intentionally organize information toward understanding the root causes of issues that impact historically and ethnically marginalized peoples, paying specific attention to the African/a world, today we will play the recording of the historical press conference organized, in part, by yours truly having nominal input, under the leadership of Obi Egbuna, Jr and a collection of other concern communities and organizations.
Next, you will hear the Cuban Permanent Representative to the UN, His Excellency Ambassador Pedro Luis Pedroso Cuesta present a review and response of the recent vote against the blockade as well as the challenges and promises of the recent development of the Cuban COVID vaccines.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native/indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana and Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
The clear and intentionality in the processes of violence carried out upon African/a peoples as they are constituted around the world and its symmetry in form and function upon people who are categorized as native in the Americas is not without precedent.
European modernity is responding to its disintegration and has been for over the past 500 years. A process that has its origins in the formation of the entity known as Europe, as it began to organize the loosely tied collection of tribes into nations all built upon continuities in a worldview that propel the interdependent logics that animates its systems, structures, and institutions: separation, intolerance, imperialism, colonialism, racialism, materialization, objectification, othering…dehumanizing, redefining human.
But what must not be lost in this fact, its disintegration—the disintegration of a limited and flawed view of what it means to be human as promoted through the praxis of European modernity—is that at various times-specifically when people are most organized, this disintegration has been sped up by the forms of resistance that develop not simply as a reaction to the forces of violence that are used to maintain positions of authority [or limited notions of power], but are in fact responses birthed from deep ancestral duties and historical responsibilities toward humanity, nature and universe, that African/a people have demonstrated in thought and action across time and space.
Of all the places we can look in the African/a world to see the conflict between the continued exertion and last gasps of legitimacy of a particularly limited understanding of what it means to be human and the ancestral and historical duty and responsibility to resist it, we look to Colombia. A battlefront, in all manifestations of the theoretical and practical application of the concept, between an imperial worldview and the continued resistance to the logics of this worldview.
What we will hear next is a wide-ranging conversation that expands on the premise above, paying attention to the current state of Afro Colombian resistance.
AWNP’s Mwiza Munthali recently caught up with Charo Mina-Rojas and Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli where they explored the continuation of violence through the militarization of the police; the continued attacks on and killings of human rights defenders in indigenous and Afro-descendant communities; the historic role of the U.S. in arming the Colombian army; and much more.
Charo Mina-Rojas is an Afro-Colombian human rights defender with more than two decades of experience in activism in national and international arenas. As the National Coordinator of Advocacy and Outreach for the Black Communities Process (PCN - Proceso de Communidades Negras) and a member of the Afro-Colombian Solidarity Network, she works to empower Afro-Colombian women by educating them on their rights, increasing their access to justice and collecting accurate data on violence against Afro-Colombian women. Charo participated in Colombia’s peace negotiations and has delivered talks and lectures across the world. Charo has addressed the United Nations Security Council on behalf of the NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security and is a member of the Black Alliance for Peace.
Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli is the leading Colombia human rights advocate at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA). Ms. Sánchez is an expert on peace and illegal armed groups, internally displaced persons, human rights and ethnic minority rights.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native/indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana; Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
Listen intently. Think critically. Act accordingly.
According to 'Trane himself, as written in the liner notes to A Love Supreme, “The music herein is presented in four parts. The first is entitled "ACKNOWLEDGEMENT", the second, "RESOLUTION", the third, "PURSUANCE", and the fourth and last part is a musical narration of the theme, "A LOVE SUPREME" which is written in the context; it is entitled "PSALM".”
It is also this Psalm, this meditation, part of which I read at the outset, that Coltrane would place on a stand and play as he performed, producing/reproducing what he said is a musical narration of the – Love Supreme.
Alice Coltrane, a multi-instrumental genius and enlightened spiritual leader is not just Coltrane’s wife. She started her journey before meeting Coltrane. And because of this set her path to cultivate rhythms that can heal the world just as John Coltrane discovered he could do. It could be surmised that her presence in John Coltrane life was divine. It was guided by universal law - a law that states everything is in rhythm, everything is in constant motion. Everything is vibrational. And as we move through life this constant hum, this vibrational hum is sure to attract its tonal partners.
In the November 1967 issue of Ebony in an article titled: Requiem for ‘Trane, Archie Shepp suggests that “he [‘Trane] was a bridge…the most accomplished and comprehensive of the so-called post-bop musicians to make an extension into what is called the avant-garde…” (Shepp, 1967).
Something else to consider, specifically in relation to John Coltrane being a bridge, standing in a deeper tradition, according to Youngquist in A Pure Solar World Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism, “in the mid-fifties Sun Ra gave a broadsheet entitled “Solaristic Precepts” to John Coltrane. On the broadsheets Sun Ra wrote “Warning this treatise is only for Thinking Beings..." (238).
A thinking Being, indeed…
In an interview years later, Coltrane would state that, “I think music can make the world better and if I’m qualified, I want to do it. I’d like to point out to people the divine in a musical language that transcend words. I want to speak to their souls”.
And it was with Alice Coltrane who not only accentuated and amplified Coltrane’s ability to synthesis the rhythmic patterns he put together, as he listened to vibrations most of us are unable to, they both became eternal beings, thinking beings who were able to conceive of the Negative reminiscences of Space-Time, as is expressed in Is, Are, Be and reconcepted “AM”.
Today...: uninterrupted conversations with our eégún: thinking about the Coltranes [John and Alice] w/ Dr. Anyabwile Love
A Philadelphia native, Anyabwile Love completed his graduate studies in Africana Studies at Temple University, receiving his PhD in May 2014.
Currently he serves as Associate Editor for the literary journal A Gathering Together and is an Assistant Professor of History + Black Studies at Community College of Philadelphia.
Anyabwile is the founder of The John Coltrane Symposium-a community centered annual celebration of Coltrane’s life and his musical legacy, its second annual iteration will be in session, September 22-25, 2021 with a possible extended day until the 26th.
For more, follow the symposium’s Instagram page and/or visit the website - https://www.thecoltranesymposium.com/
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native/indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana, Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
Image: Original artwork by @ultravivre
There are many attempts to explore and examine who Malcolm X, El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, was and is. there are books, documentaries [focused on his life and his assassination], movies, songs, poems, etc.
They all explore and examine various aspects of El Shabazz, dissecting his very being. But no matter the complexity of or simplicity in the treatment of El Shabazz’s life, mind, or work…they all lead back to one answer: El Hajj Malik El Shabazz is all of us.
Many of us adhere to the idea that nothing ever dies, it only transforms. This is based on what many may call a universal principle, which says that: energy can neither be created nor destroyed.
If the idea articulated by this universal principle can be tested…made knowable, then it requires a deeper look into various phenomena.
The evolution of the human, its totality, is based on a few factors, which are related to geographical location, the groups understanding of their place, role and responsibilities in this geographical location and the range and scope of the group’s ability to evolve its philosophical and cultural foundations.
Important to note this is all based on the response to systemic implications caused by a balance/imbalance dialectic in the midst of this evolution.
Ok, ok…what does all of this mean?…the conditions within which a people develop is based on their understanding of their relationship to each other, the environment and the universe.
An interdependent process that directly impacts who they are in relationship to more than themselves.
What is important to note about this process of becoming is, its ability to imagine. To create ways of being...ways of knowing that transcend the structures of the current or immediate conditions one finds themselves, whether voluntarily, through coercion, or by force.
Key to any way of knowing is the ability to develop one’s imagination.
It was [and still is] the platform, upon which a people can adequately deal with the balance/imbalance dialectic.
It is the most attacked part of the African ways of being.
Why? Because we find that the Black imagination is the place best suited to find the most articulate expression of basic human capacities to create, maintain, evolve…to negate the negation.
I present this all to say, this is what is meant when we say El Hajj Malik El Shabazz is us.
He is the measuring scale upon which we deal with the balance/imbalance dialectic. He is the archetype and most articulate expression of a Black radical imagination. The most articulate expression Black possibilities.
What you will hear next is a recent discussion centered around an exploration of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz as critical Africana human rights consciousness with Tasneem Siddiqui, Josh Myers, with reflections from: Dr. Kamau Rashid and Dr. Iyelli Ichile.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native/indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana and Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
Listen intently. Thinking deeply. Act accordingly.
Link to article: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12111-020-09486-3
Image: Malcolm X in 1964, w/ leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Dr. Ahmad Shukeiri.
What we are witnessing, in this global moment, is not unprecedented, it is European modernity coming apart at its seams. The loosely tied myths that has kept it together are unraveling, delinking…but it intends to not go easily. The reverberating effect of it fits and fissures are being articulated in its violence. The contradictions are materialized through its human vessels, like a virus seeing its inevitable demise.
It is with the unity of struggle, that we can inoculate the praxis of liberation, to ensure this time, as with times we struggled and continue to struggle collectively against imperialism and its attendant colonialism/s, chattel slavery, Apartheid, to follow in the tradition of resistance set before us.
Today we look at a component of this unity of struggle…we pay attention to Black and Palestinian intersectional experiences with the violence of the colonial.
When thinking about Black and Palestinian liberatory continuities we have plenty to explore, but a good place that we can find its most articulate expression is with Brother Malcolm [El Hajj Malik Shabazz].
As far back as the late 1950s Malcolm had been speaking out in international support of Palestinian liberation. According to Michael Fischbach, “several factors accounted for this. As a member of the Nation of Islam (NOI), Brother Malcolm felt a natural inclination to cultivate a kinship with other Muslims, including Arabs. Arabs had long been involved or in contact with the NOI, among them Jamil Shakir Diab, a Palestinian who immigrated to the United States in 1948 and taught Arabic at the NOI’s University of Islam in Chicago. Of particular note in Malcolm’s pro-Palestinian leanings were two visits he made to the Palestinians’ homeland...He returned to Cairo and attended a press conference given by, Ahmad Shuqayri, the chair of the newly created Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), after which he published a scathing critique of Zionism titled “Zionist Logic” in Cairo’s English language newspaper, the Egyptian Gazette” (Michael Fischbach, The New Left and the Arab-Israeli Conflict in the United States; Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color.
Today, we explore Black and Palestine...its history, challenges, and opportunities with Ajamu Dillahunt and Dr. Tasneem Siddiqui.
Dr. Tasneem Siddiqui is an assistant professor in the Department of History, Politics, and Social Justice at Winston-Salem State University.
She has a PhD in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California (USC). She is currently working on her manuscript; Freedom is a Place: Black Self-Determination and Land-Based Struggles in the Lowcountry and Sea Islands.
Dr. Siddiqui is also a valued member of the Africa World Now Project collective where she is a senior researcher and associate producer.
Ajamu Amiri Dillahunt is a Ph.D. Student in the Department of History at Michigan State University. He is a member of Black Workers for Justice (BWFJ) and a board member with the Interreligious Foundation of Community Organizations (IFCO). He is also a former intern with the SNCC Digital Gateway Project at Duke University. In May of 2019, Ajamu graduated from North Carolina Central University with a B.A. in History and a B.A. in Political Science. Ajamu also participated in the historic Demilitarize! Durham2Palestine Coalition.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native/indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana and Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
Listen intently. Think deeply. Act accordingly.
Ayiti, in the Black radical imagination, is more than an idea. It is the material representation of African/a freedom. It is the exemplar of the promises, failures & potentialities of African/a liberation. It is the colonial knot that the African/a world must untied. Just as Ayiti represented freedom in the past, it also represents the potentiality of collective freedom today.
The question of Ayiti is intricately linked to the global African/a movement against oppression, as fortified by the colonial, in all of its forms.
I assert, that it is with Haiti, then and now, along with Afro communities in Colombia, burgeoning movements across the continent of Africa; Afro Brazilian communities, Afro and African descendant communities in Europe; critical thinking African descendants here in the U.S., along with our historically and ethnically oppressed allies who stand in the long tradition of collective resistance to the dehumanizing nature of racial capitalism to create another future.
Maurice Jackson in his article, “Friends of the Negro! Fly with me, the path is open to the sea”: remembering the Haitian Revolution in the History, Music, and Culture of the African American People, writes: “As early as 1797, Prince Hall, an African American who had fought in the war against Great Britain, applauded events in Haiti and reflected on their implications for the United States. In a speech to the Boston African Masonic Lodge he declared, ‘‘My brethren, let us not be cast down under these and many other abuses we at present labour under: for the darkest is before the break of day…Let us remember what a dark day it was with our African brethren, six years ago, in the French West Indies. Nothing but the snap of the whip was heard, from morning to evening (60).’’
Sixty years later and a few years before the first battles of the Civil War, in 1857, the Reverend James Theodore Holly, the missionary, emigrationist, and first African American bishop in the Protestant Episcopal Church, preached that the Haitian Revolution ‘‘is one of the noblest, grandest, and most justifiable outbursts against tyrannical oppression that is recorded on the pages of the world’s history (60).’’
Taking note of Ayiti’s interdependent impact on the sociopolitical conditions in the African/a world, specifically, Gabriel Prosser’s revolutionary program, Douglas Egerton has written: “Saint Domingue served as an inspiration to Gabriel and completed his development…The distant figure of Toussaint…seemed to clarify the domestic situation and told him that if he dared, success might be within his reach.”
At the trial of Rolla Bennett, one of Vesey closest friends and an enslaved African of Governor Thomas Bennett, another black identified as Witness No. 1 swore that Rolla had told him that white men ‘‘say that, Santo Domingo and Africa will assist us to get our liberty, if we will only make the motion first.”
Indeed, the ideas and material reality of freedom represented through the series of resistance filtered through Ayiti is important to contextualize for many reasons, reasons I will let you determine. But a clear historical consciousness is a prerequisite for addressing the inequities that pass, unabated, through time and space.
Where are we now?
Today, Africa Now World Project’s Mwiza Munthali recently caught up with our partners in Port-au-Prince, Ayiti to discuss what is happening on the ground.
Today, we look at the People's Movement in Ayiti with Vélina Elysée Charlier, member of Nou Pap Domí movement in Port-au-Prince, Ayiti.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native/indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana and Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
[originally produced & aired May 2018]
What is meant by the term “Pan-Africanism?” What do we – can we - make of “pan Africanism”? There have been various attempts by scholars, activist, artist, musicians, to develop a clear definition of Pan Africanism. While a clear and solidified definition of Pan Africanism has been the preoccupation of these thinkers, others have hesitated due to the vast diversity of thought and activity found among self-identified Pan-Africanists across time and space. According to Hakim Adi in his work Pan Africanism: A History, Pan-Africanism is considered a composed of ideas and movements “concerned with the social, economic, cultural and political emancipation of the peoples of Africa and the African diaspora.” Broadly speaking, it stems from “belief in the unity, common history and common purpose of the people of Africa and the African diaspora” and their interwoven futures. Finally, historically Pan-African “thought and action” emerges within efforts to connect and reconnect those in the African diaspora created, in particularly, through the forced dispersal of enslaved people from continental Africa simultaneously with the solidification and emergence of global racial capitalism, “European colonial rule and anti-African racism” (2). While containing a multitude of diverse ideological, political, cultural, and organizational expression, Pan-African thought and action share a commitment to resist “the exploitation and oppression of all those of African heritage,” rejecting anti-African and African-descent racism and celebrating “African achievement, history, and the very notion of being human through a positive construction of an “African” identity (3).
Today, AWNP’s Josh Myers is in discussion with Dr. Hakim Adi on his new book, Pan Africanism: A History
Professor Hakim Adi is Professor of History at the University of Chichester, focusing on the history of Africa and her diaspora. Author of a number of works, including West Africans in Britain (1998), Pan-African History: Political Figures from African and the Diaspora from 1787 (with Marika Sherwood) (2003), and Pan Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919-1939, Adi’s scholarship is grounded in understanding the historiography of various struggles for African liberation. We interviewed him about his latest effort to engage with the histories of that struggle, in his recent book, Pan-Africanism: A History.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
The 17th edition of the New African Film Festival takes place online April 1–18, 2021 presenting a lineup of outstanding contemporary African cinema for audiences in the Washington, DC, area and beyond. the festival is co-presented by Africa World Now Project, afrikafé and AFI. The New African Film Festival showcases the vibrancy of African filmmaking from all corners of the continent and across the diaspora, featuring 33 films from 26 countries, including six submissions for the Academy Award® for Best International Feature.
Opening with Mosotho filmmaker Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese's multi-award-winning drama THIS IS NOT A BURIAL, IT'S A RESURRECTION, winner of the World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and the first film from Lesotho to be submitted to Academy Awards®. The festival closes with a new 2K restoration of Tunisian director Férid Boughedir's landmark survey of African cinema, CAMÉRA D'AFRIQUE, which was originally selected to close the 2020 edition of the New African Film Festival. Almost all films in the lineup will be available to view online across the entire United States.
Link: https://naff.eventive.org/welcome
Audio: The Last Poets & Metropole Orkest; 50th Poetry International Festival Rotterdam, De Doelen, 13th June 2019
The question of land as a fundamental aspect of African/a liberation movements is an often-neglected point of inquiry. Nevertheless, it is indeed, ever-present.
Promisingly, there has been an uptick of more folk who are paying attention to the demands of Black radical thought and behavior that sought and seek to engage in understanding its role in material and nonmaterial ways. One such important treatment is Edward Onaci’s, Free the Land: The Republic of New Afrika and the Pursuit of a Black Nation-State.
In dominant discourse, however, the question around land as fundamental to liberation is often couched in a warped sense of capitalist ownership, which highlights the fundamental contradictions engrained in an imposition of a European modernism, and its attendant political philosophy of liberalism.
All of which has produced, limited discourses around the idea and practice of rights, a discourse rooted fundamentally in what does it mean to be human as the development and maintenance of private property; all contradictions that radicals must, also, seriously engage when exploring questions around land and freedom.
It cannot be lost nor taken for granted the totalizing nature of colonialism as a product of imperialist logics, as the neglect of internal critique often leads to the reinscription the very power dynamics that movements say they intend to disrupt.
Ultimately, land, in the epistemic and ontological purview of African/a peoples is understood not in the limited capitalist sense of ownership but the transmission of communal practices of human stewardship as being primary caretakers of the planet.
And when land as a fundamental component of Black liberation is centered, ideas around national identity, critical consciousness formation, human rights, citizenship…what it means to be human can be better mapped to understand the interconnectedness of the various manifestations of the global Africana (Black) struggle for freedom. a black internationalism becomes clearly defined.
Today, we will hear a recent roundtable discussion, exploring the questions that Kurt Oderson presents in his documentary, We Rise for Our Land.
Kurt Otabenga Orderson is an award-winning filmmaker from Cape Town, South Africa, whose work has been featured on Al Jazeera, SABC, ESPN, ZDF, and HULU. He has worked on six continents and has directed and produced over ten feature documentaries screened at international film festivals, universities, and colleges.
Kurt Orderson is the founder of Azania Rizing Productions, a company that aims to inspire young people through creative storytelling about Africa and African Diasporas and is a member of the Africa World Now Project Collective.
Others you will hear are:
Savi Horne, Esq. Executive Director of the North Carolina Association of Black Lawyers Land Loss Prevention Project;
Dr. Tasneem Siddiqui, member of the Africana World Now Project Collective and Assistant Professor of History in the Department of History, Political Science and Social Justice at WSSU;
Dr. Yousef Al-Bulushi, Assistant Professor of Global & International Studies at the University of California, Irvine;
Dr. Kamau Rashid, Associate Professor of Educational Foundations and Inquiry at National-Louis University in Chicago.
And yours truly…James Pope.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Enjoy the program!
I normally provide a textured, multi-leveled, quite frankly intentionally thick introduction to our programs. But today, we present a conversation I recently had with Amir Mohamed el Khalifa [aka Oddisee], as the conversation is textured, multi-leveled and thick itself…
The son of Sudanese and African descendant American parents, Oddisee was born and raised in Washington DC, spending summers in Khartoum learning Arabic and swimming in the Nile. Growing up amidst the sounds of New York hip hop, his father playing Oud, Go-Go, and gospel, Amir took his first steps as an MC producer in the analog basement studio of his legendary neighbor, Garry Shider (of Parliament Funkadelic).
Known for his independence, Oddisee consistently debunks myths, stereotypes, and limited ideas of what an artist, creative, curator is, or can become.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
Enjoy the program!
Links
https://oddisee.bandcamp.com/
http://oddisee.co/
https://www.mellomusicgroup.com/pages/oddisee-1
[Originally produced and aired in 2019]
Vodun, Voodoo, racialization into Black Magic as currently understood is a distorted figment of a Western imagination. Voodoo is narrated as a sensationalized ‘pop-culture’ caricature of voudon, which is an Afro-Caribbean spiritual system that was brought with enslaved Africans forced onto the plantations in Haiti, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, the United States and elsewhere. The fictitious associations with drinking blood sacrifices, voodoo dolls or zombies are directly a result of the same dehumanization processes innate in a system of chattel slavery, the lifeblood of racial capitalism.
To be clear at the onset, Voudon is "an assortment of cultural elements: personal creeds and practices, including an elaborate system of folk medical practices; a system of ethics transmitted across generations [including] proverbs, stories, songs, and folklore... voudon is more than belief; it is a way of life," wrote Leslie Desmangles, a Haitian professor at Hartford's Trinity College in "The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal" (Prometheus Books, 1996).
Voudon teaches belief in a supreme being called Bondye, an unknowable and uninvolved creator god. Voudon practitioners recognize many ancestral spirits (called loa), each one of whom is responsible for a specific domain or part of life.
Followers of voudon see a universal energy and a soul that can leave the body during dreams and spirit possession. In Western Christian theology, spiritual possession is usually considered to be an act of evil, either Satan or some demonic entity trying to enter an unwilling human vessel, unless of course you go to black worship services. This is in contrast to the fact that in voudon, possession by loa is desired. In a ceremony guided by a priest or priestess, this possession is considered a valuable, first-hand spiritual experience and connection with the spirit world.
In 1685, variations of a practice to forbid the practice of African religions and required all masters to Christianize their slaves within eight days of their arrival—which codified into various laws. Slavery was condoned by the Catholic Church as a tool for converting Africans to morally upright Christians.
Furthermore, one Haitian scholar notes, "Many of the African spirits were adapted to their new environment in the New World. Ogun, for instance, the Nigerian spirit of iron-smiths, hunting and warfare took on a new persona... He became Ogou, the military leader who has led phalanxes into battle against oppression. In Haiti today, Ogou inspires many political revolutions that oust undesirable oppressive regimes."
The practices of dehumanization and hiding Africans histories (it is a misunderstanding to say African histories are lost)…has contributed much to the survival of racist logics that promotes false notions and ideas of racial white supremacy. These practices were applied to Africana total existence.
Nevertheless, the spiritual practices of the various peoples who were forced across the oceans have ancient origins. In fact, we can see ancient links between the Yoruba peoples and ancient Egypt….
Today, we are pleased to have filmmaker Onuora Anthony Abuah back with us to talk about another one his films, a two-part documentary that explores the Danhomé Kingdom. Part 1 is titled, Danhomé & Vodun and Part 2 is titled, Voodoo in Togo.
As a filmmaker and under the banner of AEA Films UK, his projects include MONA, Catching a Thief, Woodfalls, Woolwhich Boys.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Film[s]: https://www.youtube.com/c/TalesFromtheMotherlandProductions/videos
The notion, assumption, and/or idea that the various peoples who were enslaved during the periods and processes of the solidification of the racial global economy that claims our ancestors were deprived of culture, strips of all associations with historical and ancestral groundings is a product of centering European historicity as the dominant expression of social, historical, political and epistemic knowledge systems.
This argument is rooted in the fact that one of the most vibrant places to find the most articulate expressions of African/a humanity is in the way we resist injustice—inequity—violence. The way we conceptualize and engage in struggle against systems of oppression, the foundation of which is an advanced understanding of the praxis of being human.
See everything Sylvia Wynter.
African/a struggles operate on multiple and simultaneous levels of human existence. It always was, always will be a struggle to realize a world beyond. The material and nonmaterial praxis to balance forces seen and unseen. The science of African/a fighting arts…a commitment, conscious or unconscious, to embody resistance.
Of becoming rebel.
Building on the work of Dr. Kamu Rashid, I assert that of becoming rebel can be understood in the Swahili tradition as, “Harakati za Waasi”, translated as “Movement of Rebels”.
For Dr. Rashid, it represents the tradition of radical resistance that is embedded in the history of Capoeira and other African Diasporic combat arts. These arts were used in the people’s resistance to state oppression throughout the Americas. Harakati za Waasi seeks to honor these traditions by seeking to engage in the rigorous study and practice of the theoretical and technical applications of African combat systems. Additionally, Dr. Rashid and the collective seek to broadly disseminate these arts within the African community for the sake facilitating cultural transformation.
Today, embodied resistance: the science of African/a fighting arts with Kamau Rashid.
Dr. Kamau Rashid is an Associate Professor of Educational Foundations and Inquiry at National-Louis University in Chicago. Kamau earned his Phd and BA from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Master of Arts degree from Northeastern Illinois University.
Dr. Rashid work focuses on African American history and culture, particularly on the inter-generational dynamics of African/a social critique, which includes an exploration and theorizing of W.E.B. Du Bois as well as contemporary African-Centered scholars and critical race theorists. Undergirding this, he studies art (Hip Hop and comics) as a radical public pedagogy.
He is co-developing an oral history and archival project focused on African American social movements in the Chicago area from the 1960s to1980s with Dr. Richard Benson of Spelman College. And is currently working on Finding our way through the desert: Jacob H. Carruthers and the restoration of an African worldview as well as The critical theory of W.E.B. Du Bois: The Struggle for Humanity. He has published a number peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and received various grant awards to support his work.
Lastly, likely most importantly, Dr. Rashid is active in a number of community organizations in the Chicago-area including the Kemetic Institute of Chicago, a research and educational organization focused on mapping, exploring and applying the ancient and contemporary contributions of ancient Nile Valley civilizations.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
Enjoy the program!
Image: Statue of Zumbi
Today, we will listen to a thinking session I had with students last year, where we engaged ideas around an argument I presented, that suggested Afrofuturism is an ancient idea that expresses itself as an African/a freedom principle. It is an articulation of a constellation of deep African/a ideas and practices of what I called Africa’s Ancient Future [a nod to Wayne Chandler’s Ancient Future].
Through historical and ancestral memories of magic; use of spiritual technologies; intentional philosophies of life; heretical temporality; creative nonlinear knowledge production; and a symbiotic connection with nature and the universe, Africa’s Ancient Future is articulated through a freedom principle, which implies a constant struggle to delink one’s collective self from now moments, reconciling past moments, in order to create future moments that allow the full expression of one’s humanity.
What was of specific importance to our interrogation of the time concept, was its arrested expression as a Western European construct. The temporal ticks used to mark the flow of human phenomenon/a are mapped from distorted perceptions of a limited reality, perceptions that were born from a historical and ancestrally specific cultural worldview…then forced upon the world through enslavement, colonialism, imperialism, language, and religious violence.
Therefore, to clearly outline the argument I am making, I do so now in order for you to follow the conversation you are about to hear, all while provoking and inviting you to think with me. Think beyond me. Think around me. Think over me. Think through me. But think, nonetheless.
The argument as presented, then and today, suggests that in order to understand Afrofuturism/African Futures as an intellectual/theoretical frame or lens through which to understand the place of Africa in a future as a very ancient idea. I argued that we must map its provocations at various moments to be extracted from the deep cultural fabric of African/a people, an interdependent relationship between the material and spiritual, a way of life to its development as an epistemic frame through which we can see all African/a ways of knowing reassert itself on a global stage as the progenitor of all human knowledge.
Communities, the peoples that inhabit the geographical spaces referred to as continental Africa have always been acutely aware of the future…the cultural practices in current religious forms and functions are rooted in a deep African spiritual understanding/worldview. This is not a profound acknowledgement. However, the future, the concept of the unseen, a moment that is to come, is prevalent and vital to highlight. The relationship to land, the universe, and ancestors are centered around an understanding of the seamless interconnectedness of past, present and future…and we have a duty and responsibility to maintain it in balance…which is and can be important to apply as a sociopolitical organizing principle [this is another point and foundation for another program altogether]. But important to highlight, nonetheless. Especially if we situate this argument in discourse around sociopolitical and economic relations will then highlight the limits of rights discourse, which are currently rooted in individualist notions where duty and responsibility can be negated by the rule of law birthed in the [re]conceptualization of the human as a justification for the maintenance of private property.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
Image: Madonna - by MANZEL BOWMAN (@artxman; support here: https://manzel.biz/ & https://society6.com/manzelbowman)
Analyzing the conditions which dictate the systems and institutions which also perpetuate inequities require the ability to identify and map. It requires the science and art of identifying genealogy. It requires the necessity to map memory-to [re]member. But not simply for remembrance.
African/a peoples oscillate between variations of a peculiar aversion to history or wanting to know everything about history, specific African/a history.
But few understand the purpose of history or its use as a tool for organizing.
Today, we will listen to a conversation I recently had with Obi Egbuna Jr., where we explore the question [in phase one of a series of conversations] which asks: How can history be a tool for organizing?
It is one thing to know bits and pieces of historical content, but a historical consciousness not being cultivated into a critical consciousness is without purpose. The notion of a tree without roots is often given as axiom to grounding African/a peoples on the path to learning history. But what is important to engage is the question for what? To what ends? For what purpose?
Knowing your roots [i.e. history] does not necessitate purpose [unorganized information is not knowledge. Knowledge is only power when organized, intentionally organized].
To move to the next level of historical consciousness, is to evolve it into a critical Africana consciousness. Association is not enough to be considered a functional component of a movement and proximity does not guarantee contribution. One has to struggle with ideas through practice, crafting this into a praxis for expressed objective[s] in order to find continuity with the past, to understanding the present, ultimately leading to creating a future.
Obi Egbuna Jr., was born in London, England, and raised in Washington, DC, spending time in Nigeria.
Obi is a founding member of the Pan-African Liberation Organization (PALO), established in Washington, D.C., from 1990-2007.
In addition to organizing and speaking engagements, Obi is a journalist, African/a history teacher and playwright. Obi is correspondent to The Herald, Zimbabwe’s national newspaper, and the first US correspondent in the country’s 32 years as an independent nation.
Obi has taught African History at Roots Public Charter School since 1990 and has also taught at Ujamaa Shule and Northwestern High School in Prince George’s County. He is the current African History teacher for the Sankofa Homeschool Collective as well as holds community-based African History Classes.
Obi is a founding member and executive director of Mass Emphasis Children’s History and Theater Company (2012).
He has written several resolutions and appeals to the United Nations, World Health Organization, and Southern African Development Community covering a wide range of issues, ranging from HIV/AIDS in Zimbabwe to police brutality in the United.
Obi has also organized around calling for the unconditional and immediate lifting of US-EU sanctions on Zimbabwe that went to the White House, U.S. Senate and Congress.
Lastly, in addition to forging his own path, Obi worked directly with Kwame Ture the last 8 years of his life and is the son of Obi Egbuna Sr, who was a Nigerian-born novelist, playwright and political activist, leading member of the Universal Coloured People's Association (UCPA) and the British Black Power/Black Panther Movement.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
Enjoy the program!
For more: https://battlecubazim.wordpress.com/word-from-the-producers/obi-egbuna-jr/
Image: Pauulu Kamarakafego
As we have explored in previous programs, in fact, as we have attempted to unpack in every program, Black internationalism is an intentional disruption; a radical intervention in the global terms of order [nod to Cedric Robinson].
In order to understand Black internationalism as a critical disruption, a radical intervention, we must unpack it. The concept, international, as understood in dominant discourse [opposed to discourse on the periphery, discourses from below] is related to the creation and forced imposition of the nation-state, birthed from a European historiography/historicity as the dominant mechanism that organizes human life. The imposition of mechanisms, such as colonialism and chattel slavery, for instance, rooted in a specific epistemology was necessary to structure institutions and forms of knowledge that [re]conceptualized what it means to be human as the justification for and maintenance of the idea private property. Being so, international indicates a relationship at various levels of communities of people across [artificial] boundaries.
It is from here, Black international/ism, then, is understood as a radical disruption of these systems and institutions. What must not be lost in this praxis, is the fact that this radical disruption is simultaneously a clear articulation and theorization of Black Power.
Cedric Robinson asserts that “[Physically and ideologically, and for rather unique historical reasons, African peoples bridge the decline of one world order and the eruption (we may surmise) of another. It is a frightful and uncertain space of being.] If we are to survive, we must take nothing which is dead and choose wisely among the dying. [The industrial nations are self-destructing. Others, too, of course, will be affected]” [Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition [1983]), 316].
This assertion is certainly true on many levels but requires a simultaneously developed alternative foundation to build upon, as the wise choices must be planted into something.
Today, we explore the ideas and argument in, Pauulu’s Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice as presented by Quito Swan.
Properly situated, we can see Pauulu's Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice presents a framework for that alternative. The possibilities of inventing the future.
Pauulu’s Diaspora is a mapping of Black internationalism across the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Ocean worlds, through the life and work of twentieth-century radical Pauulu [Powlu] Kamara-kafego.
In this work, Dr. Quito Swan is disrupting and challenging limited conceptualizations and understandings of Black Power by situating it, properly, in an international context. Dr. Swan offers us a map on how Pauulu was following in the long tradition of those who came before. A genealogy of Black internationalism’s praxis of resistance.
Quito Swan is Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he directs the William Monroe Trotter Institute for the Study of Black Culture. He is a historian of Black internationalism, global Black Power and the Black Pacific. Dr. Swan is the author of many articles as well as, The Struggle for Decolonization: Black Power in Bermuda.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
Enjoy the program!
Image: Jacob Lawrence Migration Series - Panel 4
Dominant discourses that explore and examine African/a phenomenon/a usually follow a trajectory set by colonialist, imperialist projects that seek to categorically define Africa through a racial capitalist epistemology. Rarely do these discourses allow African/a peoples to speak for themselves or intentionally provide the platform for African/a peoples voices to be amplified.
This perspective is even applicable to the U.S. Black left. Many of these Black “radicals” are not conscious of their epistemic colonization.
Decolonization is after all a holistic process that involves intentional internal [self] critique as well as external [social] critique.
All of this has led to distorted and convoluted analysis and definitions of African/a itself.
To understand the contradictory narratives that attempt to speak for Africa and offer analysis on the various phenomenon/a, the structural processes of extraction guided by philosophical and epistemic systems that justify the racial global economy must include the role of labor and labor institutions.
Labor institutions and movements must deal with its [re]inscription of inequitable power relations created by its often-limited perspective on or ignorance of the implications of racial capitalism’s ability to structure and guide its strategies.
Processes that drive a real, substantive, internal critique of its marginalization of Black women in its institutions are case in point.
How can any organization, which claim to fight for workers’ rights, in turn marginalize and oppress Black women who give their energy to its lofty mission sustain its façade? The answer is simple it cannot, it must then be concluded that these institutions are agents of the very system that it pretends to be resisting.
This is why African/a women who are expanding, [quite frankly] exploding limited notions that structure labor movement practices are important to center in any conversation around rights, labor or otherwise.
Labor, the forces of production, all production, material and non-material, as an essential part of social organization, does not, and cannot escape being examined as being apart or divorced the processes of European ‘othering’.
Therefore, organizing labor on continental Africa, the African/a world for that matter, must continually be situated into the long processes of decolonization. This is vital now more than ever, particularly in a global economy where the definition and processes of work has shifted, if one were not pay attention, seemingly overnight? All while, the means of production are guided by artificial intelligence.
Labor organizations and movements are not beyond critique and must be measured at fundamental levels of thought and practice.
Today, we will listen to a conversation w/ Emily Williams and myself [James Pope].
Emily Williams is a human rights activist and social justice advocate, who’s work intentionally addresses gender, race, and other inequalities and advance equity and inclusion through sustainable program design throughout the African/a world.
She has designed leadership programs for youth and women on continental Africa and has been actively involved in developing networks & programs that combine practice w/ intellectual inquiry; specifically, exploring the interconnectedness of race, gender, class, and other systems or oppression/marginalization as a critical foundation for work and action which advances justice, social and otherwise.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Enjoy the program!
[Program produced and aired 2016]
Image: Frontispiece to Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble….1829
Maroon derives from Spanish cimarrón. Cimarrón originally referred to domestic cattle that had taken to the hills in Hispaniola.
It was gradually expanded to be applied to enslaved Indigenous peoples who escaped from the Spaniards as they colonized South and Central America as well as the Caribbean.
By the end of the 1530s, the concept had taken on strong connotations of being "fierce," "wild" and "unbroken," and was transferred to be primarily applied to Africans and people of African descent---or the runaways as they were referred to.
For more than four centuries, the communities formed by escaped enslaved peoples dotted the fringes of plantations throughout the Americas, from Brazil to southeastern United States, from Peru to the American Southwest. Known variously as quilombos, mocambos, or mambeses, these new societies ranged from tiny bands that survived less than a year to powerful states the numbered thousands of members who survived for generations and even centuries.
Maroon communities consisted of escaped African/a peoples with origins from a wide range of societies in West and Central Africa...Their collective task was to create new communities and institutions, through various processes of integrating cultural elements drawn largely from a variety of African societies [never forget, home was their destination].
Kwame Gyekye work on the deep continuities of cultural elements that link African societies is important to note here.
For generations, historians believed that even the most remarkable of maroon settlements in the North America did not rival the achievements of maroon communities in South and Central America as well as the Caribbean.
However, according to a number of scholars such as Cedric Robinson; Gerald Mullin, as well as Hebert Aptheker, and most recently Sylviane A. Diouf, evidence of the existence of at least fifty such communities in various places and at various times, from 1672 to 1864, has been documented.
Herbert Aptheker’s points out that the 1st maroon communities pre-dated Jamestown settlements by 82 years. They were African insurrectionists who secured gained their freedom from abortive Spanish colonizing efforts in North and South Carolina. Maroon communities were a real presence in the U.S…as Aptheker documented their 19th century presence in VA; Georgia; Alabama; Louisiana; South Carolina as well as in Wake, Gates, Onslow, Bladen, Sampson, Jones, New Hanover, Dublin, Wilmington, Robeson, Nash counties, North Carolina.
Today, will listen to a conversation I had with Dr. Nubia Kia where we discussed her recent historical novel, titled I spread my Wings and I Fly. Dr. Kia is a cultural worker, artist, activist, scholar, retired professor from Howard University.
Her work has been published in Black Scholar, Black American Literature Forum, and Journal of the African Literature Association. As historian and poet, Dr. Kai has also won numerous honors, which include the Michigan Council Arts Awards, D.C. Commission of the Arts Awards, and National Endowment for the Arts Awards, just to name a few.
Her work is an important meditation and contribution on previous and current work that is being done to explore the connections between culture, resistance, the science of metaphysics [spiritwork] as a source liberatory practice as a historical and cultural product of the Maroons. All of which were cultivated within conditions that African peoples were thrust into. This process and its elements are found within every corner of African Diasporic sociopolitical thought and cultural practices from Brazil, to Colombia, to the Black Church to hip hop. Africa as more than a geographical landmass, lives. It lives in the mind, bodies, spirits, intelligence of African/a peoples.
Enjoy the program
[Program produced & aired in 2017]
While there have been many explorations of the histories and figures in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, little attention is paid to the role that Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe played as a leading thinker and activist in resisting its deeply entrenched racist structures.
While Nelson Mandela is normally given highest status in the discourse around the movement, often presented as the primary symbolic representation of South African anti-apartheid resistance. What is often lost is the deep influence and standard set by Robert Sobukwe not only on Nelson Mandela, but more importantly the youth movements within the struggle that coalesced into what we know as the Black Consciousness Movement. It is lost, in this dominant discourse, that Robert Sobukwe was a mentor to Steve Bantu Biko.
His inspiration, ideological leadership, and example to seeking an advanced framework toward liberation in South Africa was captured in the praxis of Steve Bantu Biko and his comrades. The framework as it was articulated by Biko and many young South Africans was the Black Consciousness Movement. For Biko, Black Consciousness and the defeat of the inferiority complex instilled by apartheid institutions is a necessary precondition for progress in South Africa (for the African world for that matter). For Biko and those young folk resisting, the fact that apartheid was interdependent with white supremacy; capitalist exploitation and deliberate oppression made the problem much more complex.
Black Consciousness both inspired and parallels decolonization in the African/a world; a decolonization process that is very much still in process.
Our show was produced, today, in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
The current national political climate, as we have been highlighting, at least for the past 4 years, on AWNP is rooted in the cultural practices inherent in the global imposition of structures and systems born out of specific experiences and communities of peoples on the geographical land mass called Europe.
These historical and contemporary experiences have evolved across time and space, all while these various groups attempted to grapple with their particular and collective inefficiencies through the violent spread of its worldview—the creation of a European modernity—and the proliferation of it institutions that extract the legitimacy and consent of its viability from the peoples and communities it deemed its God-given right to conquer.
In short, we are witnessing the entity called Europe, its philosophical, and nation-state children, attempt to discover a state that it cannot possibly understand on its own—that is a state of peace & equality. This is because of the 1000-year process to restructure what it means to be human as a justification for the creation and maintenance of private property.
The U.S. is a settler state, still trying to reconcile its birth, flirting with arrested notions and an limited imagination that can only understand ideas such as, democracy [even its own mythic creation], justice, and citizenship as exclusionary processes. There is no debate about this.
We, certainly, will not debate anyone about this fact. One will either take courage to see the materialization of injustice, inequities and invest their talents into addressing them, radically.
Or continue to be cowardice and turn a blind eye to the deep structural implications of these injustices and inequities. Because it takes a weak and cowardice person or group of persons to derive their sense of superiority to the determinant of creating the ‘Other’. It is a false and porous position at best.
The contradictions, its ethos, its worldview, rooted in anti-blackness, anti-indigeneity, anti-nature, anti-human, anti-communal was and is this nation’s Achilles heel [this Achilles-heel reference is with layered inference and intended critique]. But it must be made clear that no nation is an abstract entity, no institution exists in suspended animation. It is made up of people, who carry out its purpose. The institutions of a settler state require sacrifices. It requires the sacrifice of mind, body and spirit. It requires the non-living. But once those non-living, become living again, the survivability of such institutions and systems as birthed from the settler state, will ultimately turn on its keepers.
In an article titled, Among the Ruins of Victory, the argument presented suggests that “Donald Trump [a representation of a way of being] was a test run. Worse than him is coming down the road within the decade. Get busy building. Movement activists who supported Biden emphasized that his presidency would give the movement breathing room. Okay. We have maybe two years, tops, to prepare for an even more vicious, popular wave of reaction.”
Today’s program will explore the implications as just set out…
Next, you will hear, AWNP’s Mwiza Munthali contextualize today’s program, a recent discussion hosted by Transnational Institute [TNI] and the Institute for Policy Studies where scholars and activists analyze the global consequences of the recent U.S. elections.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
Enjoy the program!
Image: Fannie Lou Hamer & Ella Baker, Aug. 6, 1964 [https://snccdigital.org/events/mfdp-holds-state-convention/]
Knowledge is the intentional organization of information to meet an expressed objective and/or objectives. If this is, indeed, a viable conceptualization of knowledge, then the ability to correctly analysis the conditions within which a people find themselves must operate as praxis, consistently and constantly.
As stated before, European modernity rooted in the intellectual and material construction of a global order as founded in the creation of whiteness, supported by the culture of racial capitalism is rupturing. In reaction, this whiteness, as an organizing construct is attempting to hold its position of authority.
While the U.S. is currently in the middle of what to some is a peculiar national election cycle, to others, that critical thinking and radical vibrating other, this period is only peculiar in that we are once again in a cyclical discourse around voting in a settler nation that was organized on genocide; forced labor; systemic and institutionalized race/ism; and continuous imperial engagement with the world.
In order to maintain one’s sanity living in such contradiction, one can only think with those who provide sharp and penetrating clarity when analyzing the discourses of the moment.
“It isn't revolutionary or materialist to disconnect things. To disconnect revolutionary consciousness from revolutionizing activity, to build consciousness with political agitation and educational issue-making alone is idealistic rather than materialist....” (George Jackson, Blood in My Eye, 1972: 26-27).
Thinking through the binary, the either/or category of thought that limits our capacities for strategic praxis in Western capitalist democracies, we see how the dialectical processes operate throughout the Africana world to create contradictions [and opportunity].
For example, Senegalese political economist Ndongo Samba Sylla (2013), echoing the scholarship of Samir Amin (2004) in The Liberal Virus, demystifies the celebratory language of ‘free and transparent’ elections for ‘liberal democracies’ in Africa as fictitious systems that benefit the economic elite in-so-much as they create an impression (rather than a reality) of an emancipated collective.” (A Certain Amount of Madness: The Life, Politics, and Legacies of Thomas Sankara, 2018: 130-131; Sylla, 2013).
Said all this to say, we are at a juncture. An unavoidable fracture that is weaved into the sociopolitical and cultural fabric of the nation-state. The conflicts inherent in political discourse, that is the competing narratives between the political activity of the collective and the political act of the individual are a manufactured reality in a capitalist democracy.
Cedric Robinson provides more clarity for us on this arguing: “capitalist democracy” is one of the most powerful and enduring metanarratives of modern Western historiography. As an ideological formation it has inscribed discursive domains as distinctive as politics and science…As icon, its aura hovers over our institutions of knowledge and power, permeating inquiry and decision making with the counterfeit certainties of predestination” (Cedric Robinson, Oliver Cromwell Cox and the Historiography of the West: 7).
So, what is to be done? How do we make sense of all this?
Today…: of elections and beyond, thinking through the Crisis in Western Hegemony.
I recently sat down with Corey Walker, Professor of the Humanities at Wake Forest University.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
[Note: Produced and aired in 2016]
Image: Wise Two https://www.wisetwo.org/
Over the past week and a half…unless one has been locked away in a cave…with absolutely no access to technology of any sort…the world has been attempting to understand and rationalize the US election of Donald Trump. To be more clear, Donald Trump—the person—and his election is a euphemism for and declaration of…the existence and prevalence of racism, sexism, colonialism, imperialism as the modus operandi of the US.
Articles have been published with titles such as: Seven These on Trump; How Trump Won; welcome to the Fight; Donald Trump won on White-Male Resentment—but don’t confuse that with the working class; Abolish the Electoral College; Panic in America: People in Revolt; It’s Class, Stupid, Not Race; and lastly, The GOPs Attack on Voting Rights was the most under-covered story of 2016.
What does this have to do with the African world?
What makes this moment different from periods of protracted struggle to dismantle the institution of slavery; the fight against Jim Crow; the call for a fundamental restructuring of society during the Black Power Era; efforts to find Pan African solidarity and action during African and other nations of color struggle for independence?
To people of the African world, what is different in this moment than any other moment of struggle against some of the highest forms of human bondage—materially and spiritually? What is to be done? What steps need to be taken?
In an article published November 11, 2016 on the multimedia news commentary platform, Africa is A Country, titled, Trump’s America, Paul Zeleza asserts that: “The world and many Americans are reeling in shock and anxiety at the election of Donald Trump as the next president of this mighty, but deeply disunited and disoriented country. All but a handful of opinion polls pointed to the victory of the incomparably experienced Hillary Clinton. But they were utterly, unforgivably, embarrassingly wrong. They couldn’t pick up Trump’s ‘silent majority’ of ordinary white voters, not just the unapologetic alt-right that quietly cheered on the boisterous candidate, who openly said in public what Republicans and racist whites say in private."
The postmortems will be brutal on the other failures of America’s collective imagination that resulted in this stunning election result...In this popular American political sport of endless punditry and second guessing, few will take real responsibility for having enabled Trump, few in polite circles will own up to having voted for Trump, much as many whites in South Africa denied ever having been ardent supporters of Apartheid...”
Zeleza goes on to ask: What does it say about a country that could elect such an unsavory character? Zeleza answers: Countries get the leaders they deserve.
I would add that the myths that create false historical narrative of the United States maintain a false sense of belonging which simultaneously bolster the legitimacy of the rulers through the coerced consent from those they seek to rule …produce the necessity to demand that the nation—and its components—re-evaluate its functionality whether it wants to or not.
This program: discourse & explanations seeks to highlight new types of praxis in light of this current manifestation of a long process of global white domination.
I sat down with Corey Walker, [former] Dean of The College and the John W. and Anna Hodgin Hanes Professor of the Humanities at Winston Salem State University [now Wake Forest Professor of the Humanities]
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous African and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, South Africa, and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Enjoy the program!!
Religion or one’s spiritual practice are the center of one’s understanding of themselves in relation to the world within which they live. It is indeed the essence of who are. And for better or worse contextualizes and informs our identity.
The development of practices and/or rituals that seek to help us understand the relationship between humanity, nature, and the universe are both a science and an art.
When exploring the contours and continuities of Africana radical traditions, religion and/or spirituality or spiritual practices are often explored in relation to Western European traditions, in many ways, intentionally. The project to situate mainstream denominational formations at the center of the Africana religious experience began as a retort to those who claimed that Africa had no religion—only fetishism (Pietz 1988, 105–123).
More than this, it has operated to silence traditions that have fallen outside regnant post-Enlightenment understandings of religion as “faith”. This has meant that, for the better part of a century, religion has been deemed synonymous with Christianity, and the institutional Black Church, in the U.S, in particular (Pérez, 2014: 82).
Yet, Africa, still flashes through.
There have been calls to reevaluate the grand narratives of Eurocentric religious thought and entertain the viability of de-centering the Black Church (Pérez, 2014: 93). I mean, was it not Cécile Fatiman, a mambo, and Dutty Boukman, a houngan, presiding over a Vodoun ceremony that gave direction and energy to Africans to free themselves in Haiti? What about our maroon ancestors?
In Working Roots and Conjuring Traditions: Relocating Black ‘Cults and Sects’ in African-American Religious History, Pérez argues that it is imperative to de-center the Black church in order to approach the heterogeneity and richness of lived religion…” (73).
In relation to the Black radical tradition and Islam, specifically what’s considered its unorthodox formations, little attention is given.
Accordingly, narrow conceptualizations of Islam, or any spiritual practices of Africana peoples for that matter, marginalizes the impact of unorthodox communities. We miss the fact that Clarence 13X, Father Allah, a dissident follower of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, use the “Black God trope that 13X learned from El Shabazz to articulate their humanist worldview” (Collins, A Disciple of Malcolm X: Clarence 13X Smith’s Embodied Black God Rhetoric, 2020).
In the final analysis, a historical consciousness that does not inform a radical imagination that invents paths to an African future is counterproductive to liberation.
Today, we will explore, contextually, Islam and the Black radical tradition.
AWNP’s, Dr. Tasneem Siddiqui is in conversation with Dr. Bilal Ware.
Dr. Rudolph (Bilal) Ware is a historian of Africa and Islam. He is currently an associate professor at the UC-Santa Barbara, and the founding director of the Initiative for the Study of Race, Religion, and Revolution (ISRRAR).
His first book, The Walking Qur’an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa, explores the history of a thousand years of Quran schooling in the region. His research and teaching examines Muslim anti-slavery movements in Africa and the Atlantic World. His most recent book, Jihad of the Pen: Sufi Thought in West Africa, with co-authors Zakary Wright and Amir Syed, explores Sufi thought in West Africa.
Dr. Ware is currently working on: Visionaries: Second Sight and Social Change in Islamic West Africa; and The First Atlantic Revolution: Islam, Abolition, & Republic in West Africa c. 1776.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
[Note: This program was produced and aired in 2016]
Image: Acclaimed Kenyan street artist & muralist, Wise 2 [https://www.singulart.com/en/artist/wise-two-5599]
Today, we will listen to Pt. 2 of a two-part series titled: Hip Hop as Critical (Pan African) Consciousness. In this series, we engage a range of artists, activist, & thinkers in deeply exploring the essence of and finding the continuities in African and Diasporic sociopolitical thought and behavior—focusing specifically on hip hop as a form of cultural expression and creative resistance.
The series engages in a substantive discourse on the viability of hip hop being a platform for developing a critical consciousness. A platform based in Pan African activity that has implications for the entire African world as well as other oppressed people. Today’s conversation, in particular, is intent on sparking a shift in our approaches to cultural production, resistance, and art as emancipation practice—it seeks to interrogate what we know?—And how we have come to know what we know?—knowledge production not simply for the sake of knowing…but for the purpose of guiding our doing—framing our activity.
We are working to move conversations beyond "mainstream" discourse about hip hop and situate it in a proper context…addressing real-time problems faced by Africans and African descendant across the globe…
It does this…by first, examining the origins and continuities in African and Diasporic dimensions of hip hop…and secondly, look @ its ability to transmit complex messages that have collective sensibilities in inform the formation of a critical consciousness…
With this, several fundamental questions arise, which asks, but are but are not limited to:
- Why is culture such an important place for contestation?
- How can hip hop be used as a force for creative resistance?
- Can hip hop serve as a platform for developing a critical consciousness? If, so, in what must it be rooted?
- What is the role of the artist?...Or More importantly what is the role and responsibility of the listeners?
Today, in Part 2 of this series…we will listen to a recent wide-ranging conversation with scholar, activist, and artist Will Boone. Dr. Boone is an Associate Professor and chair of English at Winston Salem State University where he teaches courses on African and Diasporic Studies.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, Palestine, South Africa, and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Enjoy the program!
Image: Ella Baker at the November 1974 Puerto Rican Independence Solidarity Rally
Attempts to distort, rewrite, dilute, misdirect, and misguide the impact of our radical scholars, radical thinkers, activist, artist, and advocates are carefully planned practices by those who hold perceived positions of authority. The exclusion of important Africana thinkers and activist is not a matter of simple exclusion, but a matter of intentional attempts to disrupt the continuity of radicalization.
Ella Baker words from a speech titled, “The Black Woman in the Civil Rights Struggle” delivered at the Institute of the Black World in 1969, are still sharply true today. Ms. Baker reasoned that: “In order for us as poor and oppressed people to become a part of a society that is meaningful, the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed. This means that we are going to have to learn to think in radical terms.”
Barbara Ransby, one of the world’s preeminent thinkers and activist, writes in Ella Taught Me: Shattering the Myth of the Leaderless Movement that “those who romanticize the concept of leaderless movements often misleadingly deploy Ella Baker’s words, “Strong people don’t need [a] strong leader.” Baker delivered this message in various iterations over her 50-year career working in the trenches of struggle, but what she meant was specific and contextual."
Professor Ransby, who also wrote the important, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision, suggests that “Ella Baker spent her entire adult life trying to “change this system as rooted in exploitation, oppression, and the idea that Whiteness equals supremacy.” Somewhere along the way she recognized that her goal was not a single “end” but rather an ongoing “means,” that is, a process. Radical change for Ella Baker was about a persistent and protracted process of discourse, debate, consensus, reflection, and struggle.” Employing an Africana critical human rights consciousness if you will.
In addition to Professor Ransby work, it is vital and essential that I highlight and call attention to the work of Joanne Grant who provided us with: Black Protest: History, Documents, and Analysis 1619 to Present, 1968; Ella Baker: Freedom Bound, 1998; Confrontation on Campus: The Columbia Pattern for the New Protest, 1969; but she produced an important documentary film titled: Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker.
Joanne Grant, a radical journalist and activist of African descent who served as an assistant to W.E.B Du Bois; she was a member of the Communist Party, which made her a target of the House Un-American Activities Committee; was an author; documentary filmmaker is yet another important link in the genealogy of Black radical praxis that have continuities with not only Diaspora exemplars such as but not limited to, Ella Baker, Septima Clark, Fannie Lou Hammer, Madie Hall Xuma but continental Africa as well, Winnie Mandela, Miriam Makeba, Mariama Ba to name a few.
Today, in response to screening of Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker AWNP co-sponsored this past August, we will listen to a conversation I had with Zach Norris where we explore the continuities of the praxis of Ella Baker.
Zach Norris is the Executive Director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, author of We Keep Us Safe: Building Secure, Just, and Inclusive Communities, and co-founder of Restore Oakland. Zach is also a co-founder of Justice for Families, a national alliance of family-driven organizations working to end our nation’s youth incarceration epidemic.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Enjoy the program!
Note: This program was produced and aired in 2017.
Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first prime minister and president after declaring their independence on March 6, 1957…founding member of the Organization of African Unity, wrote in the preface of the 1969 second edition of his work titled Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonization that: “Since the publication of the 1st edition of Consciencism in 1964, the African revolution has decisively entered a new phase, the phase of armed struggle. In every part of our continent, African revolutionaries are either preparing for armed struggle, or actively engaged in military operations against the forces of reaction and counter-revolution. The issues are now clearer than they have ever been. The succession of military...” [https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/consciencism-philosophy-and-ideology-de-colonization-kwame-nkrumah].
According to historian John Henrik Clarke in his 1974 article titled Kwame Nkrumah: His Years in America, "the influence of the ten years that he spent in the United States would have a lingering effect on the rest of his life." Key to the maturation of his sociopolitical thought, it is during these 10 years, Kwame Nkrumah, along with Nnamdi Azikiwe the first president of Nigeria attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.
Dr. Clarke goes on to suggest that “there is no way to understand the late Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, or any other man, without also understanding the country in which he was born and to what extent that country and the circumstances of his birth did influence the total of his life...”
Today, Africa World Now Project Radio will bring you a recent exploration into the Social and Political Philosophy of Kwame Nkrumah with Dr. Kofi Kissi Dompere.
Dr. Dompere is professor of economics at Howard University. He is author of many scientific and scholarly works in economics, philosophy, and decision theory. Some of this work includes his 2006, Polyrhythmicity; his 2017, The Theory of Philosophical Consciencism: Practice Foundations of Nkrumaism in Social Systemicity; 2006, African Union: Pan African Analytical Foundations; 2017, The Theory of Categorial Conversion: Rational Foundations of Nkrumaism in Socio-natural Systemicity and Complexity; 1995, Epistemics of Development Economics: Toward a Methodological Critique and Unity.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, Palestine, South Africa, and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Enjoy the program…!
Image: Painting by Najma Ahmed, founder of Nujuum Arts. Based in Mogadishu and Hargaisa. Somalia/ somaliland. More information available here: https://web.marcelforart.com/nujuum_hashi/about
The geopolitical conditions within which Somalia was born cannot be divorced from the conditions that institutionalized themselves in 1884/85 at what has come to be called the Scramble for Africa at the conference convened in Berlin, the Congo Conference.
During the Conference where European white supremacist decided it was their right to divide the lands to which they had no affinity other than economic motives, the geographical region of Somalia was divided into three parts: British & Italian Somalia [gaining independence 1960—immediately untied, forming greater Somalia], and French Somalia [gaining independence in 1977, becoming Djibouti].
Other historical influences that produced current Somalia, are located in the conditions that surround the periods when the Ethiopian Empire took over [Ogaden] and Kenya took over [Northern Frontier District] regions.
These historical conditions bolstered by exacerbating and fomenting divisions among the various groups of people who live in the region are important to understand as they directly impact the environments within which the people live today.
To erroneously label Somalia as a fail state, instead of a collapsed state, distorts the how and why the region is in a state of intentional conflict accelerated at the behest of Western foreign capitalist interest that have historical roots in the many attempts to control the region; that is the wars between European cultural groups and the sociopolitical, cultural ‘Others’ they created as their ‘enemies’.
To be clear, upon closer analysis the real threat of the region is the fact that the people of Somalia are really showing that the nation state is not the only system upon which peoples can organize themselves. What do I mean, the people in the region have been functioning against the imposition of foreign structures that have cause internal conflict for over 30+ years. If left to organize themselves on the trajectory they were ancestrally on before the intentional and aggressive efforts of Western nations to destabilize the region for its own economic and geopolitical ends, Somalia as we know it would be what it once was erroneously labelled, the Switzerland of Africa.
The reason I say erroneously labeled [but still useful to highlight the point]; the model of peaceful sociopolitical organization should not be limited to a European nation. This label, also, dismisses the deep logics and sociopolitical histories of African peoples who organized themselves into civilizations before the creation of the nation state. These histories and logics are in the ancestral membrane of the people. And the peoples of Somalia, despite the distorted narrative and images are exemplar to this fact [https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/aljazeeraworld/2016/10/somalia-forgotten-story-161027115655140.html].
Today, AWNP’s, Mwiza Munthali is in conversation with, Mr. Abukar Arman.
Abukar Arman is a former diplomat, once serving as Somalia's Special Envoy to the US. As a Somali political analyst, he is widely published on issues related to foreign policy, Islam, the Horn of Africa, and extremism among other topics.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Photo: Col. John Charles Robinson of Chicago
In Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Robin DG Kelley writes that “most black people believed there was an order higher than the Constitution. Throughout the Africana experience in the Americas, Psalm 68, verse 31 of the Bible promised redemption for the black world. It reads: “Princes shall come out of Egypt. Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hands unto God.”
Kelley goes on to suggest that this passage was as important to Pan-Africanist and emigrationist sentiment as the book of Exodus, even becoming the theological and ideological basis for what became known in the nineteenth century as Ethiopianism. One of the earliest published examples of this doctrine was Robert Alexander Young’s Ethiopian Manifesto: Issued in Defense of the Blackman’s Rights in the Scale of Universal Freedom (1829), which predicted the coming of a new Hannibal who would lead a violent uprising to liberate the race.
Just like Haiti, Ethiopia's reputation as a beacon of hope and strength for the Africana world was solidified in 1896, after the defeat of Italy at the Battle of Adwa.
The histories of Afro America and Ethiopia interacting are both deep and complex. But what is clear, Ethiopia held its own space in the sociopolitical thought of the Africana world.
In his New World A-Coming, Roi Ottley wrote that "Negroes first became aware of the black nation [of Ethiopia] back in 1919, when Ethiopian dignitaries arrived in the United States on a diplomatic mission. During their stay in New York, this group received a delegation of Black folk from Harlem. During a ceremonial reception for this diplomatic mission, held at the Metropolitan Baptist Church in Harlem, the Mayor of Addis Ababa, delivered a speech expressing Ethiopian and Afro-American unity.
Throughout the 1900s, African responded to various official invitations and appeals recruiting technically skilled Black Americans to settle in the country. Universal sympathy expressed by Afro-Americans for the Ethiopian-Italian war was shaped into concrete reality through the activities of several war relief committees.
Actual participation in the war was expressed through the military activities of two Afro American airmen. "Colonel" John Charles Robinson, of Chicago and Trinidadian-born "Colonel" Hubert Fauntleroy Julian, who arrived in Ethiopia in late 1934 (as volunteer pilots for the only two Ethiopian planes that were airworthy during the war).
After the war, Robinson remained in Ethiopia to establish commercial air service into East Africa and the Sudan. With the purchase of an old World War II surplus DC-3 aircraft, Robinson became service crew and pilot for the forerunner of the present Ethiopian Air Lines [Shack, 1974].
I wanted to contextual this deep historical context of U.S. African descendant connections and continuities with Ethiopia in effort to prime your historical memory of the importance of Ethiopia in the context of Africana internationalism and its place in the radical black imagination as a platform to understanding the current conditions in nation.
More importantly why Africa, its nations, and the conditions within which communities face there are directly related to the conditions within which Africana people’s faces across the world.
Today, AWNP’s Mwiza Munthali speaks with Ayantu Ayana, doctoral student and a member of the Oromo Advocacy Alliance, where she contextualizes the current conditions in Ethiopia.
Aynatu Ayana addresses the underlying historical-rooted issues that manifest today in the country.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Enjoy the program!
Wangũi wa Kamonji in her article, Women in Kenya rebuild resilience amidst an eco-cultural crisis, published in February of this year, a few weeks before the current global pandemic takes its cripplingly hold, writes that: “in the global North, it has become more common to declare that indigenous peoples hold the solutions to the climate crisis. Such rhetoric risks being only lip-service if solutions do not recognize and resource indigenous-led work to repair damage to indigenous cultures, commitment to an indigenous resurgence and the full integration of wisdom of these indigenous values in projects that seek solutions. After decades of shame, [violent] suppression and devaluation, much indigenous knowledge held by groups like the Tharaka [in Kenya] has been forgotten, hidden or impaired. Tharaka women [have] often commented that it seemed like “everything was going to disappear.” Facing this eco-cultural crisis, remembering, and restoring indigenous women’s knowledge and practices, grounded in a paradigm of respect and collaboration with the Earth, emerges as the most salient pathway to recovery and restoration.
Professor Gloria Emeagwali adds sharp clarity to this notion when she argues that, I must quote in its totality: “Throughout Africa, in spite of ongoing colonization and the continuing effects of globalization, there are people, particularly in rural communities, who still associate their existence to, and with, the land, and with their immediate socio-physical environments and surroundings. Land has been a source of Indigenous identity for Africans, in that through associations with the land, local cultures, spiritualities, politics, economics, and the relations of society to Nature are defined. There are knowledges associated with the land that continue to guide everyday existence. People continue to negotiate identities, cultures, and spiritualities with particular understandings of the place of the human in their environments. These phenomena constitute important dimensions of the knowledgebase, and such knowledge also informs everyday existence. African indigeneity must be read as both a process and a form of identity. It is an identity that defines who a people are at a particular point in time. But it is also a recognition that such identities are in a continual process of existence.
The lesson here is that a peoples’ indigeneity and indigenousness is not simply taken away from them simply because they encounter others on their homeland [or beyond]. The Eurocentric constructions of the Indigenous as primitive, culture-based, and static is a ploy to privilege European identity, and should be distinguished from what the people claim and assert of their own indigeneity and indigenousness. The latter is about the affirmation of self, community, history, culture, tradition, heritage, and ancestry.
Eurocentric constructions are about establishing cultures of hierarchies as a way to accord privilege and power. This is how racism worked and continues to work.
Today, AWNP’s Tasneem Siddiqui [@DrT_Siddiqui] is in conversation with activist and thinker, Wangũi wa Kamonji [@_fromtheroots]. They explore the contours and practice of indigenous knowledge and ancient technologies as that inform a decolonization that is simultaneously in resistance & restoration.
Through research, dance, storytelling and facilitating diverse public spaces for critical consciousness and transformation, Wangũi wa Kamonji is retrieving and restoring indigenous Afrikan lifeways and practices. [Also see: @afrikahai_]
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
[Image: Claudia Jones Paul Robeson Amy A Garvey with friends in London England, Source: Source Pan African News Wire]
W.E.B. Du Bois (1933) in, Pan-Africa and new racial philosophy, presents his early articulations of Pan Africanism as “the industrial and spiritual emancipation of the Negro people” wherever they are in the world.
George Padmore (1955) in, Pan Africanism or Communism, asserts that “the idea of Pan Africanism first arose as a manifestation of fraternal solidarity among Africans and peoples of African descent" (95).
I have explored in, Pan-Africanism in the United States: Identity and Belonging, why Pan-African discourse is not a dominant expression in African diasporic resistance in the U.S. today. This is not to say a Pan-African discourse is not present at all, but when situated in the historical and intellectual genealogy of African decedent experiences in the U.S., it is marginal at best.
Even with this contextualization, the marginalization of Africana women in the formation and evolution of Pan African thought and practice is important to center.
This disarticulation has distorted the historical narrative of radical and Pan African thought of the fact that in “early coverage of the 1900 Pan-African Congress reveals delegates, “all eminent in their sphere” who represented the United States, Canada, Ethiopia, Haiti, Liberia, Sierra Leone, the then Gold Coast, most of the islands of the then British West Indies included Miss Anna Jones (Kansas), and Mrs. Annie Cooper (i.e. Anna Julia Cooper) (Washington, D.C.) among others (see Adi & Sherwood 2003, for listings).
Mabel Dove Danquah attended the 2nd Pan African Congress. Her husband Joseph Boakye Danquah, himself a major pan-Africanist was one of the African students that Amy Ashwood Garvey nurtured in the West African Students Union in London (Davies, 2014: 80).
Adelaide Casely Hayford, who married the pan-Africanist J.E. Casely Hayford in 1903 and as a pan-Africanist herself, briefly held the position of lady president of the UNIA branch in Freetown, Sierra Leone. She spent two years in the U.S. studying girls schools, became an associate of U.S. women like Nannie Burroughs, and would later develop her own school for girls. In 1927 she attended the fourth Pan-African Congress in New York (Davies, 2014: 80).
Today, we explore the current rebellion through a Pan African lens with Africans Rising for Justice, Peace and Dignity.
Africans Rising is a Pan-African movement of people and organizations.
Next, you will hear, in order, of speaking: Coumba Toure, co-coordinator of Africans Rising for Justice, Peace and Dignity; Hakima Abbas, executive co-director of the Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID); M. Adams, community organizer and co-executive director of Freedom Inc; Taalib Saber, Pan Africanist, filmmaker and principal attorney at The Saber Firm, LLC, where he practices Education and Special Education Law, Civil Rights, and Personal Injury Law; Dimah Mahmoud, co founder of the Nubia Initiative, a humanist, activist, and passionate change-maker; Gacheke Gachihi, Coordinator, Mathare Social Justice Center and member, Social Justice Centres Working Group in Nairobi, Kenya; and Yoel Haile, Criminal Justice Program Manager with the ACLU of Northern California.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Enjoy the program!
[Note: Produced and aired in 2017]
For more than four centuries, the communities formed by such escaped enslaved peoples dotted the fringes of plantations in the Americas, from Brazil to southeastern United States, from Peru to the American Southwest. Known variously as quilombos, mocambos, or mambeses, these new societies ranged from tiny bands that survived less than a year to powerful states encompassing thousands of members that survived for generations and even centuries. Their descendants still form semi-independent enclaves in several parts of the hemisphere -for example, in Suriname, French Guiana, Jamaica, Colombia and Belize.
For generations, historians believed that even the most remarkable of maroon settlements in the North America did not rival the achievements of maroon communities in South and Central America as well as the Caribbean.
Nevertheless, according to a number of scholars such as Cedric Robinson, Gerald Mullin as well as Herbert Aptheker evidence of the existence of at least fifty such communities in various places and at various times, from 1672 to 1864, has been found.
Taken further back, Herbert Aptheker’s work shows us that the 1st maroon communities pre-dated Jamestown settlements by 82 years. They were slave insurrectionists from abortive Spanish colonizing efforts in North and South Carolina.
With this……We will listen to part of a discussion between famed independent filmmaker, activist, scholar Haile Gerima and Dr. Akinyele Umjoa where they discussed maroons and Dr. Umjoa’s book, We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement…
Haile Gerima is an independent filmmaker and professor of film at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Born and raised in Ethiopia, Gerima immigrated to the United States in 1967. After the award-winning Ashes & Embers (1982) and the documentaries Wilmington 10—U.S.A 10,000 (1978) and After Winter: Sterling Brown (1985), Gerima filmed his epic, Sankofa (1993).
Gerima continues to distribute and promote his own films, including his most recent, Teza, which won the Jury and Best Screenplay awards at the Venice Film Festival in 2008. He also lectures and conducts workshops in alternative screenwriting and directing both within the U.S. and internationally.
Dr. Akinyele Umjoa is a scholar-activist, who currently serves as the Chair of the Department of African-American Studies at Georgia State University (GSU). Dr. Umoja’s writing has been featured in scholarly publications such as The Journal of Black Studies, Black Scholar, Radical History Review and Socialism and Democracy. And a number of edited volumes. He is also author of We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement.
We then turn our attention to the theory and practice of the Black church.
I sat down with Dr. Torin Alexander, where we explored the deep epistemological and ontological underpinnings of the black church. Paying attention to the differentiation of the Black church as an institutional-physical space and incubator of liberatory practice.
Dr. Alexander is a scholar of African American religion and religious experience. His interdisciplinary research and teaching are influenced by phenomenology, critical theories on race and gender, and post-colonial/post-structuralist studies.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Enjoy the program….
We are currently living in an age where poverty and disease are big business. In a world where race and class produce and reproduce ways of interacting. This process has found ways to attach itself to our very construction of individual and group realities, therefore entrenching conscious and unconscious acts of racism as being natural and/or universal occurrences.
We live in a world where racial diversity is misunderstood as ideological diversity…a constructed reality where the ascription of power is imposed on old ideas of identity and re-incorporated in new forms of marginalization. This holds true, despite any claim of post-this-or-post-that…that is made by dominant discourses.
W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1903 in Souls of Black Folk that:
“THE PROBLEM of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line, —the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea”
Today, in the 21st Century, we are still confronted with this color line, which is exacerbated by a symbiotic relationship with the drive to secure material wealth at rates that often rival the height of the age of imperialism, where the total control of Africa as well as other resource rich lands were dominant behavioral expressions in geopolitics. Prophetically, in his later writings, as W.E.B Du Bois is known to do, expands or situates his conceptualization of the color line into being intimately linked with class formations.
In the Preface of the 1953 Edition of the Souls of Black Du Bois argues that:
“I still think today as yesterday that the color line is a great problem of this century. But today I see more clearly than yesterday that back of the problem of race and color, lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it: and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance, and disease of the majority of their fellowmen; that to maintain this privilege men have waged war until today war tends to become universal and continuous, and the excuse for this war continues largely to be color and race.”
Often ignored by the sympathetic democratic rhetoric of liberals, are the racialized consequences of massive poverty and cultural displacement integral to the globalizing project of democratization (a euphemism for the unbridled proliferation of capitalism).
Within this environment, the meanings of race are constantly re-configuring itself as various forms of exclusion built upon the consequences of enslavement, colonialism, and imperialism are perpetuated and refined.
Today: We will dive deeper into understanding race. What we will hear next is Charles W. Mills describe how race was materialized with the advent of modernity. He argues that capitalism is racialized, and white supremacy was interwoven within it from its origins.
Charles W. Mills is a Caribbean philosopher from Jamaica. He is known for his work in social and political philosophy, particularly in oppositional political theory as centered on class, gender, and race.
He is currently Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. He is the author of numerous books on race and political theory, including The Racial Contract (1997), Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (1998), and the forthcoming Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (2017).
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, Palestine, South Africa, and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Enjoy the program
[Note: Produced and aired in 2017]
In the Wretched of the Earth, Fanon writes: “Decolonization never goes unnoticed […] it infuses a new rhythm, specific to a new generation of men, with a new language and a new humanity...” (Fanon 1961:2)
However, the process of decolonization has yet to reach full expression. The praxis of decolonization, the promise of a radical humanism, a new relation of being in the world, remains severely arrested.
If decolonization was an intentional and direct response to colonialism, decolonization failed in uprooting the colonial repressive systems…on mass scale.
For Fanon, “the colonial world is a compartmentialized world […] a world divided in two. The dividing line, the border…” An idea Du Bois names as the color line, the poverty line…a siphoning of the world’s resources into the hands of a few, safeguarded and securitized by barracks, the police station, drones, the banks, multinational corporations, private interests and capital.
In the past twenty years, throughout the Africana world as well as the global south, burgeoning social movements constituting what Sylvia Wynter describes as “the vast majority of peoples who inhabit the favela/shanty town’ of the globe and their jobless archipelagos…at the national level, Baldwin’s ‘captive population’ in the urban inner cities, (and on the Native Reservations of the United States),” have reinvigorated and expanded the arena and language of grassroots politics and political action (Wynter, No Humans Involved: 60).
We see this, in particular with the youth movements across Africa and more clearly with the “Black First, Land First” which invokes the Fanon postulation that: “For a colonized people the most essential value, because it’s the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity” (Fanon 1961: 44).
Today, we will deeply engage with the language and praxis of decolonization through one of the most important land and dignity movements in South Africa… Abahlali baseMjondolo, also known as Durban Shack Dwellers’ Movement with Dr. Yousuf Al-Bulushi, an assistant of Professor of Peace Studies at Goucher College.
After this, we look at the the community of Buenaventura (along with communities in the Chocó region of Colombia) where a general strike was launched (May 16th)) demanding that the Colombian government meet the basic human rights to water, education, health, culture, land and freedom from racism and violence. The strike caused businesses to closed, road blocks were set up at several points along the main road and peaceful protestors chanted, sang, danced and banged cooking pots to call attention to the desperate situation.
According to a recent report from the Black Alliance for Peace, released on June 12, after many hours of dialogues and negotiations an agreement was reached in the early hours of Tuesday 6th June, bringing an end to a 22-day strike in Buenaventura, Colombia. The strike, in the mainly Afro-descendant and Indigenous city on Colombia’s Pacific Coast was an inspirational reminder of how collective, local level and “people-centered” human rights processes can challenge economic powers and neoliberal politics (Baraka, 2013)[1].
We will hear a report on what happened and prospects of this agreement from Afro Colombian human rights activist Charo Mina Rojas of Black Communities Process in Colombia-International Working Group (PCN); and Afro Colombian Solidarity Network. Enjoy the rest of program.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Enjoy the program.
[Note: This program was produced and aired in 2017]
The question of land as a fundamental aspect of Africana liberation movements is an often-neglected point of inquiry when exploring the long genealogy of Africana thought and behavior—radical or otherwise. Nevertheless, it is indeed, ever-present. A reading of the large cache of demands, treaties, and platforms of various communities of Africana people and organizations provide the historical reality of this fact.
With this, a place that one can start, and move forward or backward is with, of course, Brother Malcolm. As his revolutionary praxis evolved, he once exclaimed that:
“Of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research. And when you see that you've got problems, all you have to do is examine the historic method used all over the world by others who have problems similar to yours. Once you see how they got theirs straight, then you know how you can get yours straight. There's been a revolution, a black revolution, going on in Africa. In Kenya, the Mau Mau were revolutionary; they were the ones who brought the word "Uhuru" to the fore. The Mau Mau, they were revolutionary, they believed in scorched earth, they knocked everything aside that got in their way, and their revolution was also based on land, a desire for land. In Algeria, the northern part of Africa, a revolution took place. The Algerians were revolutionists, they wanted land. France offered to let them be integrated into France. They told France, to hell with France, they wanted some land, not some France. And they engaged in a bloody battle.
So, I cite these various revolutions, brothers and sisters, to show you that you don't have a peaceful revolution. You don't have a turn-the-other-cheek revolution. There's no such thing as a nonviolent revolution. The only kind of revolution that is nonviolent is the Negro revolution. The only revolution in which the goal is loving your enemy is the Negro revolution. It is the only revolution in which the goal is a desegregated lunch counter, a desegregated theater, a desegregated park, and a desegregated public toilet; you can sit down next to the white folks -- on the toilet. That's no revolution. Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis for all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality...”
Brother Malcolm’s ideas are firmly situated in the long tradition of early radical activist and thinkers such as Detroit attorney Milton Henry, the 19th century movements of Benjamin Pap Singleton. And, of course, the Communist Party’s Black Belt Nation Thesis, lest we forget the efforts of the Republic of New Afrika.
Together, these, and the many other efforts across the African world all center the question of land as being the fundamental component in black liberation movements. We see this reality in communities in South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, Colombia, Brazil…etc
Land is understood not in the limited capitalist sense of ownership but the transmission of communal practices of human stewardship as being primary care-takers of the planet.
Today, we will explore the question of land and African world liberation with Dr. Tasneem Siddiqui and Dr. Willie Jamaal Wright.
Dr. Siddiqui is Assistant Professor of History at Winston Salem State University and Dr. Wright is Assistant Professor of geography at Florida State University.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Enjoy the program!
We are witnessing a period that is trending towards unprecedented, but it is not without genealogy or tradition.
Those who seek to counter this rebellion promote narratives with increased use of violence that tries to narrow the righteous rage to suggest that folk are responding to one instance of violence. They think that folk are rebelling against a video. They think folks must protest peacefully. The ‘they’ are those in positions of perceived power where thought and action are built upon racial capitalist logics that maintain and reinforce systems of dehumanization.
Folk are not responding to an instance of violence. People are instinctively responding to the structural and historical realties of violence…
It is essential in this moment where European modernity is fracturing, for every critical thinking African and person of African descendant, globally, to grab hold of the fracture and pull with all your might.
Even more important, it is essential to gain clarity of objective and practice a sharpness of means. George Jackson wrote: “We find ourselves today forced into a reexamination of the whole nature of black revolutionary consciousness and its relative standing within a class society…”
Political education then becomes the call of the day. In this regard Fred Hampton provides a clear analysis of the role of political education in this reexamination [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ffmg6i0lv_k].
Education—political education must be evident. And allow me to quickly point out that to be educated is to—read. The revolutionary importance of reading is key.
Therefore, our rebellious, ungovernable discourse must be rooted in a critical Human Rights consciousness, specifically a critical Africana human rights consciousness
It is here, the platform that guides the question, what next? can be built. From this CAHRC, we must engage in five activities: 1) seek to institutionalize this moment; 2) develop ideological refinement for clarity towards objective; 3) all efforts must be linked with internationalism—PanAfrican being organizational goals; 4) consolidate written & nonwritten projects of black critique into a sustained counter discourse, that provides response and self-critique; and 5) root all of this in a critical Africana human rights consciousness, which is, in fact, a critique and expansion of human rights theory and practice, currently organized.
As we begin to move further into next phases, we must move, in the words of Kwame Ture, our unconscious to conscious organized response.
Above all, we must also keep in mind the tactics offered by Amilcar Cabral: 1) those engaged in struggle, should unflinchingly practice class suicide; & 2) in spite of all fought for and gained: “Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies…Claim no easy victories.”
It is in this historical genealogy we walk. It is in this ancestral tradition we live. It is here, George Jackson provides more clarity: “We must prove our predictions about the future with action.” And I will add within all expediency of black critique, as the future of our humanity rests on getting this right.
Next, you will hear a recent conversation I had with Dr. Daryl B Harris.
Daryl B. Harris is an associate professor and former chair of political science at Howard University. He is author of The Logic of Black Rebellions; Postmodernist Diversions in African American Thought; as various other chapters and articles.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Enjoy the program!
Note: This conversation with Brother Ah was the first program produced for AWNP Radio. It aired as the inaugural program in 2016. Brother has joined the ancestors today (May 31 2020). We will need to hear him speak with us on a higher frequency. He was, is and will continue to be.
I recently had the pleasure to sit down with one of our scribes…Bro. Ah…to Reflect upon Africa’s Deep Influence on Diasporic Cultural Production.
Robert Northern (aka Brother Ah) is the musical director of the World Music Ensemble and The Sounds of Awareness Ensemble. He specializes in Wind Instruments, African Drums, and Percussions.
Brother Ah constantly seeks to celebrate the emergence of a world culture, while retaining the distinct expressions of each cultural style in it, paying particular attention to African inflections.
Brother Ah extensive experience spans the musical field. He was the musical director of “Sounds of Awareness”. A musical collective that utilizes music, dance, poetry and the sounds of nature to inspire and raise individual levels of consciousness. The group also produces music for meditation, relaxation and healing.
He also founded The World Community School of Music in 1992 and offers instrumental and vocal music classes to students of all ages from.
As a lecturer and educator, he has taught at public and private schools in New York and Washington, DC, as well as Brown University in Rhode Island (9 years), Dartmouth College in New Hampshire (3 years), Talladega College (Alabama).
Brother Ah is a performer, educator, lecturer, composer and arranger both in Western and non-Western traditions. He has composed and directed numerous extended works including “Ode to Creation”, The Forces of Nature” and “Tribute to the Ancestors”.
Brother Ah, as a French horniest, has played and recorded with musical greats including, but not limited to, Thelonius Monk, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, McCoy Tyner, Freddie Hubbard, Sun Ra, Dizzy Gillespie, Eric Dolphy, Max Roach, John Lewis, to name a few.
His classical performances include the New York Metropolitan Opera (stage band), Radio City Music Hall Orchestra; symphony orchestras in Vienna, Austria, West Germany and Broadway Theatre orchestras.
He studied at the Manhattan School of Music in New York City, the Vienna State Academy in Vienna, Austria, and he is a graduate of Howard University in Washington, DC.
This is Africa World Now Project…I am James Pope.
[Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!]
Enjoy the program…
Image: Monument to the Maroon, Alberto Lescay, in El Cobre, Santiago de Cuba, taken June 2019; https://albertolescay.com/
It must be said, we have entered the most aggressive phase of European modernity’s disintegration. One that has been built upon decades of exploitation—human and natural. This may seem to be a very strong statement. Some may even suggest that it is an overstatement. It is neither. It is not based on speculation or opinion. The map of human history, the warnings of anti-racist, anti-racial capitalist, environmentalists, antiwar thinkers, advocates, activists have predicted this moment. Octavia Butler, Martin Delany, Ngugi, write and wrote about this. Fanon, Cabral, Biko, Armah, Gyekye, Du Bois, the Boggs, the Jacksons, Baraka theorized this moment. Coltrane, Coleman attempted to play us toward another direction. Simone, Lincoln, Holiday, provided a way to understand and see beyond this moment.
It is our collective responsibility to ensure that we utilize this space, this moment of fracturing to create something new. We have been given the tools; our ancestors gave us the map. Let us read it together. To reformulate a black studies within the epistemic and philosophical architecture that is inadequate to properly engage its trajectory and call it new, is a contradiction of the highest order.
Today, we will explore the contradictory musings of this new black studies...with Dr. Corey Walker.
Corey D. B. Walker is the Wake Forest Professor of the Humanities at Wake Forest University. He is the author of A Noble Fight: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America (University of Illinois Press), editor of Community Wealth Building and the Reconstruction of American Democracy: Can We Make American Democracy Work? (Edward Elgar Publishing), editor of the special issue of the journal Political Theology on “Theology and Democratic Futures,” and associate editor of the award-winning SAGE Encyclopedia of Identity. He has also published over sixty articles, essays, book chapters and reviews appearing in a wide range of scholarly journals and co-directed and co-produced the documentary film fifeville with acclaimed artist and filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson. He has held faculty and academic leadership positions at Brown University, University of Virginia, Virginia Union University, and Winston-Salem State University and visiting faculty appointments at Friedrich-Schiller Universität Jena, Union Presbyterian Seminary, and University of Richmond.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Image: ODO NNYEW FIE KWAN, "Love never loses its way home"
Kahlil Gibran, writing in the 1921, The Prophet presents us with a serious meditation on love:
Gibran writes: “Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself. Love possesses not nor would it be possessed; For love is sufficient unto love” (The Prophet, 1921).
Our great ancestor, Toni Morrison writing Beloved in 1977, provides an even more clear meditation on love…
Morrison writes: “Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all” (Beloved, 1977).
Love, as a praxis, a concept and practice, requires serious deliberation, specifically, in the context of relationships, interactions, and black family stability. As love is often the platform, or base, upon which family units are built.
It is also the platform upon which knowledge systems rooted in generative human progress and spirituality are built.
When broaching a conversation such as this, it spurs great, and varying debate on the fundamental meanings of love, relationships, and family. Understandably so because they impact every aspect of our being.
Yet, a cursory study suggests that every philosophy of life, religion and/or spiritual system understand that love is defined as unconditional, as it is rooted in things seen and unseen. It is the root of all life—biological, spiritual, the life of the mind…and is essential to its proliferation and evolution.
The most important experiences we will have in our journey through this material reality are directly related to the relationships and interactions we create, nurture, and evolve.
Thus, the primary task in our efforts to create, nurture and evolve, is rooted in balancing our individual and collective philosophies of life. [a task that is really the fulcrum upon which relationship and/or interactions survive the various stressors within which they form].
This brings us to today’s conversation. I would like to be clear; it is not an attempt to provide definitive answers. It is not a claim of right or wrong, promoting one perspective over another.
It is an attempt to disrupt normative assumptions about one of the most important aspects of our human existence: love, relationships, interactions, and marital stability, in our case the Black family.
Our program is not an attempt to intellectualize and disregard the emotional, psychological, spiritual, physical components of love, relationships, interactions, and stability.
It attempts to provide a platform that can provide help in understanding and balancing these, at times, destabilizing factors, molding them into lasting connections…in this world and beyond…
It is an attempt to help us find forever!
In this regard, we bring you a recent conversation I had with Dr. Antonius Skipper.
Antonius Skipper, PhD [LSU] is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at Winston-Salem State University.
Dr. Skipper maintains an active research agenda that explores the social, medical, and familial experiences of African Americans. He qualitatively explores factors that contribute to the stability and resilience in African American families. He is widely published on issues such as, religion as a source of coping and resilience for older African Americans, religiosity and health, marital stability in strong African American couples, and generative fathering for Black men.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Enjoy the program!
[Originally produced in 2017]
William Patterson, a leader of the Communist Party USA, was an eminent civil rights attorney who spearheaded defense of the Scottsboro Nine, Black youth in Alabama framed on phony rape charges in 1932.
Patterson was a radical visionary who understood that African world struggle for freedom has in essence a struggle for human rights. Not human rights as practiced and theorized from a racialized, elitist Westernized perspective, but from a holistic, communal position.
In this regard, Patterson, much like Sylvia Wynter, seeks to restore to our conception of human life the framework of a direction, a telos.
In the mid 1930's Patterson went to Cuba to set up the Cuban International Labor Defense and to organize support for those fighting the dictatorship of Batista.
In 1951, We Charge Genocide: the Crime of Government, a petition on behalf of African descended persons in the United States charging the U.S. government with the crime of genocide was published by the Civil Rights Congress and was presented to the United Nations General Assembly in Paris by Patterson and to the United Nations Secretariat in New York by Paul Robeson.
For this act, Patterson was charged with contempt of Congress because he refused to divulge the names of contributors to the Civil Rights Congress and its bail fund as well as the names of the organizations to which he belonged. Patterson served ninety days in the Federal House of Detention in New York and in the Federal Penitentiary at Danbury, Connecticut on contempt charges in 1954-55.
In May of 1969, he joined the defense team of attorneys for Huey P. Newton of the Black Panther Party. He served as a trustee of the Angela Davis Legal Defense Fund and of the National Legal Defense fund.
Taking a moment to impress upon you the deep visionary perspective and impact of the We Charge Genocide petition, on preparing and submitting, Patterson stated: “To me, it seemed clear that the Charter and Conventions of the UN had to be made the property of Black America…It could be made the instrumentality through which the ‘Negro Question’ could be lifted to its highest dimension.”
Today, we will listen to Gerald Horne reflect on the life and work of William Patterson, through a discuss of his book, which was published by University of Illinois Press and released Oct 2013, titled Black Revolutionary: William Patterson and the Globalization of the African American Freedom Struggle.
Gerald Horne is the John and Rebecca Moores Professor of History at the University of Houston.
After Dr. Horne, we turn our attention to the situation and conditions of African Migrants in Libya. Joining us for this discussion is Mwiza Munthali, executive producer, human rights activist, and international journalist who recently caught up with Nunu Kidane.
Ms. Nunu Kidane is the Director of Priority Africa Network and editor of AfricaMoves: A Pan African Migration Platform which hosts regular consultations on migration policy around Africa and the diaspora. Ms. Kidane is founder and current steering committee member of the Pan African Network in Defense of Migrants’ Rights (PANiDMR) and the Black Immigration Network (BIN). In 2012, Nunu Kidane received award from the White House as "Champion of Change" for work with African diaspora communities.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
I would like to be clear at the outset: the question of the survival of black colleges and universities is actually a very problematic inquiry…
It highlights the internalization of racialized ideological propensities, as this question is debated primarily by folk within the black community. The colonized ideological impulses that drive the philosophy of education as it relates to Africana peoples filter into and arrest the imagination of communities who attach to survivalist projects that suggest the only way out is to be cogs in a machine designed to overwork, underpay, and discard its human remains…
The ancient practices rooted in Africana peoples congregating in common space [whether forced or voluntarily] has produced much of the world most innovative thought and practices, that range across all disciplines. In short, #HBCUsWork...
This is despite working within constrains that if one simply scratches the surface of explanations, are due to manufactured budget and other non-monetary constraints. This is all wrapped within another layer of insidious structures run by, quite frankly, a comprador class of managerial black elite [and want to be elite] who have been trained in the best traditions of plantation philosophical practices that arrest the radical imagination if its students and faculty who are invested in nurturing a critical consciousness...
If allowed the unfettered freedom to develop its most potent substance, the intellectual capital of some of the world’s most brilliant minds, that are fed by the river of genealogies that run through the ancestral and historical memories of its students—fragments of memories of Library of Alexandria, the temple complexes throughout Kemet and Nubia…
The questions posed by Du Bois that challenges black institutions delivered in various speeches from 1906, The Hampton Idea to his 1960, Whither Now and Why should serve as the frame through which we look, through which we will look today…
Black institutions must deal with questions around radical imagination, intellectual capital moving away from the fallacy of attainting access to the plantation capital that PWIs are built upon, HBCUs will never be players in this game...
HBCUs must substantively align with African institutions, rooting a praxis in constant decolonization and advancement of knowledge systems. We must move the intellectual boundaries of HBCU knowledge production beyond limited and arrested expectations…
The danger and delusion of black [brown and poor] folk as Du Bois warned is the substance upon which institutions have inculcated in the structures that educate generations of students is summed up in one question parents ask, but reality perpetuate the colonizing ideological impulses that drive the philosophy of education as it relates to Africana peoples around the world: what are you going to do what that degree in Africana Studies? Art? History? Literature? Or they demand that you go to school and get a job…
We no longer live in that space. The global racial capitalist system does not have enough room to accommodate all peoples clamoring for jobs…
The question still stands, to which we are ancestrally and historically bond to answer: Whither Now and Why?
Today, Dr. Josh Myers will explore these themes and more in a talk he gave at Winston Salem University centered around the recent publication of his: We Are Worth Fighting For
A History of the Howard University Student Protest of 1989. He engaged this history in relationship to the form and function of HBCUs.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
[Note: This program was produced & recorded in 2017]
Needless to say, most of you are extremely aware that we are indeed living in a moment that implores each and every one of us to have a clear, resolute, and radical perspective of one’s own position in the current sociopolitical environment as well as develop strategies that are broadly informed to address present and coming forms of marginalization.
To be clear…the current systemic forms of violence—that is legal, physical, economic, cultural, political, and social—are not new phenomena to Africans and people of African descent. I say this because historically, the naked imposition of power as exhibited through the mechanisms of racial capitalism—chattel slavery; colonialism, neocolonialism; settler colonialism; Jim Crow; Apartheid—has often manifested itself in the material and nonmaterial life of the African world.
The difference today…by most accounts is the reconstitution of these older forms of marginalization in a new time and space. The idea of progress is wedded to the movement of time—history. The standard equation reads that the further away we move from something the smaller or the further away we move from that point.
So, this accepted understanding brings us to a deep problem…time is often materially bound to structures that are constructed to support various forms of social, political, cultural, and economic relations that are relative to the worldview of those who are in positions of perceived power or authority.
Being so, it becomes the work of the radical intellectual—the radical black intellectual in our case—to dig at the root of these structures…pushing the foundations of these structures, systems, and institutions to expand, include, or break!
I sat down with M1 of Dead Prez to explore his work, political activity, and the importance of the relationship between cultural production and strategy…in our current moment…
When then turn our attention to the International Decade for People of African Descent.
The UN General Assembly has proclaimed 2015-2024 as the International Decade for People of African Descent citing the need to strengthen national, regional and international cooperation in relation to the full enjoyment of economic, social, cultural, civil and political rights by people of African descent, and their full and equal participation in all aspects of society.
Today, we will contribute to this mandate by paying tribute to the people of African descent in the U.S. history month by listening to various speeches by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
One of the most often overlooked aspects of Dr. Martin Luther King in his evolution within the Black freedom movement is his ever evolving internationalism—and growth toward embracing a more radical fight against racism—imperialism—and colonialism…Although we have been inundated with sound bites and narrow frames of reference when exploring Dr. King…Dr. King’s activism in many respects was just as evolutionary as El Hajj Malik Shabazz—the ends on the same pole...Dr.King was living in revolutionary times that was grounded and guided by the foundation set by the work of towering international left activist such as Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, William Patterson, James and Esther Jackson, National Negro Congress, an early more radical NAACP …In fact, it is often lost that Dr. King in his last book—was keenly aware of the importance of the international struggle.
With the help of a compilation produced by Dj Sese titled: Liberating Dr. King: The L is Coming, we will be exposed to Dr. King from a decidedly radical perspective (Big shout-out to @imixwhatilike).
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, Palestine, South Africa, and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Enjoy the program…
The resilience, creativity, and genius of African peoples wherever they are found in the world will always be apparent. It is without doubt this pandemic is unraveling and laying bare its core principles that devalue life while at the same time the myths that have supported the systems and structures that create an illusion of a social contract rooted in ideals such as equality and justice are in fact being exposed in the most brightest and boldest way possible. What we are witnessing is the implosion of what Charles Mills calls the racial contract. A contract that is rooted in white supremacy, expressed in economic, political, social, medical interactions.
These expressions are global as they are engrained in the cultural milieu of an European antiquity where Europe discovered itself through unbridled expeditions of exploitation over centuries.
And let’s be honest, this narrative that suggests that: we are all in this together is, but another contradiction rooted in yet another temporality of Western economic, political, social, cultural systems imploding under the weight of its fictitious existence. We are not in this together. The science, material realities, data show, in the Diaspora, people of African descent are dying at disproportionate rates.
A few weeks ago, French scientist suggested that vaccines be tested in African communities.1 It has been reported that in 2014, during the West African Ebola outbreak, more than 250,000 blood samples were collected from patients by laboratories in France, the UK, and US without informed consent as patients underwent testing and treatment for Ebola.1 But this practice is not new, and we do not have to go deep into the past…in 1996, in Kano State, Nigeria, where there was a meningitis outbreak, Pfizer conducted clinical trials to test a drug it was developing without the consent of patients. Similar trails were conducted in Zimbabwe in 1994, funded by the US-based CDC and NIH which resulted in adverse effects for patients.2
We can go on and on throughout the African world: Tuskegee Experiment, Henrietta Lacks, the entire practice of gynecology during chattel slavery in the U.S.
History shows, data shows, practices show that we are in this…but not together.
But through all of this, Africa, Africans and people of African descent have relied upon principles that are rooted deep in ancestral and historical genealogies that are articulated in traditions, cultural expressions, & rituals that will prove, as they have throughout global history to provide paths out of crisis, natural or otherwise.
Today, we speak with Kenyan street artist, project curator and trainer, Kerosh who is based in Nairobi.
We explore the implications of COVID19 in Kenya.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Enjoy the program!
For more:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diVWr_eLdnM
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https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/ebolas-lost-blood-row-samples-flown-africa-big-pharma-set-cash/
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https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/medical-colonialism-africa-200406103819617.html
https://www.kenyanvibe.com/kenyan-graffiti-artist-wisetwo-paints-largest-murals-in-east-africa/
https://www.facebook.com/anidanarts/posts/introducing-kerosh-kiruri-the-second-artist-who-will-be-coming-to-work-with-the-/1104133713080496/
https://www.tuko.co.ke/102997-make-cool-150k-month-graffiti.html
Image: https://www.wendiartit.com/2017/03/meet-kerosh-part-i.html
There is a danger in using and/or buying in to the ‘unprecedented’ narrative as being projected by dominant [medical, political, economic] discourse. In relation to the Africana world, it distorts, hides, and marginalizes the impact and community rooted efforts Africana people throughout history have presented the world.
This current pandemic is no different. Therefore, identifying historical and ancestrally rooted collective responses [being clear of delineate reaction to conditions, although there were instances of reactions] is essential.
Local health. National health. Global health, as being exposed in this current pandemic to be an appendage to racial capitalist logic, is woefully inadequate. This is without any debate. In order to properly contextualize and organize a collective global response to this pandemic, analysts who are using the term—response—who be better served as transmitters of information to adjust their lens to understand that what is happening is a reaction that is innate to the reverberations of sociopolitical and economic structures that are rooted in exploitation, marginalization, and the continued devaluation of human life.
Nevertheless, the African world, properly organized, will as in the past provide a way forward for the West—the rest.
Today, in the context of World Health Day, which was recognized yesterday, April 7, we speak with Coumba Toure, Coordinator of Africans Rising for Justice, Peace and Dignity, speaking to us from Dakar, Senegal. Coumba Toure was born and raised between Mali and Senegal. She is a writer and storyteller and publishes children stories and organizes art events focused on nurturing the mind of children through Falia. She also designs popular education programs with a focus on impacting and is a board member of TrustAfrica.
We then turn our attention to the Eastern Cape province, South Africa, where we spoke with writer, activist and poet Siki Dlanga from Eastern Cape, South Africa. She is author of Black Lives Matter alive or dead, which was featured on PBS News Hour in conjunction with her work on protecting an African burial ground with Macedonia Baptist Church in Bethesda, Maryland and performed throughout the states as well as author of a poetry anthology titled: Word of Worth.
But, before we dive in, AWNP’s collective member, Funa Ngonda, provides a bit of context for us.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Image: This Papyrus is the world's oldest surviving surgical document written in hieratic script in ancient Egypt around 1600 BCE. Plate 6 and 7 of the papyrus, pictured here, discuss facial trauma [https://www.ancient.eu/image/4542/].
Note: This program originally aired in 2016, we were just starting!
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Amilcar Cabral…one of the African world’s foremost intellectual—theoreticians is also one of the most marginalized in the study of the African world. If we were to try to encapsulate Amilcar Cabral influence into a single phrase it would have to be his insistence on the study of reality [the material conditions within which culture moves history]. He insisted that "one does not confuse the reality you live in with the ideas you have in your head"…he would frequently elaborate on this by asserting your "ideas may be good, even excellent, but they will be useless ideas unless they spring from and interweave with the reality you live in." What is necessary is to see into and beyond appearances: to free yourself from the sticky grasp of “received opinions”, whether academic or otherwise. Only through a principled study of reality, of the strictly here and now, can a theory of revolutionary change be integrated with its practice to the point where the two become inseparable.
For Cabral, it is always necessary to “tell no lies, and claim no easy victories”!
Africa World Now Project will bring you a community-based discussion [organized as part of a continuing series to remove the real and imagined barriers between the academy & community] on the impact and implications of Amilcar Cabral in the 21st century. We bring this organic forum which was after a screening of a documentary film titled Cabralista.
This film was developed with the expressed purpose to be made publicly accessible to all that what to know.
"Cabralista" is an ambitious documentary trilogy, chronologically divided in Past, Present and Future:
Part I—Past, is a visual biography of Amilcar Cabral, based on historical facts and testimonies of his lifetime collected throughout the years and narrated by Val Lopes, the director and author of the trilogy.
Part II—Present - Collective Memory, which explores the present, how Cabral is remembered, defining a non-formal zeitgeist around his ideology, showing an African Youth with strong Cabralist views.
Part III—Future - Utopia, is a futuristic view, of a "better Africa", in a world where the early African freedom fighters have not been eliminated and our development has not been disturbed and distorted, but left in our own hands to grow freely.
In today’s program…we will listen to the discussion after Part I of the Trilogy was screened.
What you will hear is James Early, former Director of Cultural Studies and Communication at the Center for Folklife Programs and Cultural Studies at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. And Member of the Board of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), myself and the audience engage in a non-traditional, organic discussion that explored the legacy and impact of the praxis of Amilcar Cabral.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Enjoy the program!
[Note: Program originally aired in August 2016]
In a speech delivered in 1971 in Cape Town, South Africa, Steve Bantu Biko proclaimed that the: “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”
This time-less expression is currently fueling grassroots organizing and resistance efforts in South Africa. We see the echoes of this axiom in movements across South Africa from the Rhodes Must Fall/Fees Must Fall uprisings to the organizational expressions of resistance through organizations such as Black First, Land First or Abahlali baseMjondolo [Shack Dwellers Movement] and Landless People’s Movement; and outside of SA, with the Homeless Workers’ Movement [Brazil].
Before we begin our conversation with Andile Mngxitama, it is important to hear and think with Steve Biko. One of the Africana world’s foremost activist---thinkers, Steve Biko is mostly remembered through the work and ideas of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM).
Although Steve Biko was not alone in forging the Black Consciousness Movement; he was nevertheless its most prominent leader, who with others guided the movement of student discontent into a political force unprecedented in the history of South Africa. As a consequence of his potent political mind and activity, he is inextricably linked the development and evolution of the Black Consciousness Movement, which spread across the African world, finding it’s lasting expression in Afro Brazilian communities. To understand more about the life and contributions of Steve Biko, there is no other place to start than to read him, you can start by reading and thinking through I Write What I Like…but for now, we can listen to him #ThinkingBlackOutLoud.
After thinking with Bantu Biko, we explore movement building in a ‘post’ Apartheid SA, with Andile Mngxitama, a leading black consciousness thinker and organizer. He co-edited Biko Lives! Contesting the Legacies of Steve Biko, has published four essays in the New Frank Talk journals. He is frequent contributor to various multimedia outlets that explore Africa in general, South Africa specifically.
Enjoy the program!
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Additional resources:
Africa is A Country [video]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksgrJyOrd7A
Quartz Africa: https://qz.com/africa/1111666/feesmustfall-black-south-african-students-had-a-better-chance-at-graduating-during-apartheid/
Al Jazeera English [video]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOGkWCfcq-o
Andile Mngxitama [Twitter]: https://twitter.com/mnxitama?lang=en
South African History Online [https://www.sahistory.org.za/]: https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/stephen-bantu-biko
South African History Online [https://www.sahistory.org.za/]: https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/quotes-steve-biko
South African History Online [https://www.sahistory.org.za/]: https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/biko-lives-contesting-legacies-steve-biko-edited-andile-mngxitama-amanda-alexander-and
All Africa [multimedia new source]: http://allafrica.com/stories/201507311433.html
More on Andile Mngxitama: http://mg.co.za/author/andile-mngxitama-comment-author
South African History Online [https://www.sahistory.org.za/]: http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/apartheid-legislation-1850s-1970s
Black Opinion [media http://blackopinion.co.za/
Black First Land First: https://blf.org.za/
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/a-conversation-with-guilherme-boulos-leader-of-brazils-homeless-workers-movement/
South African History Online [https://www.sahistory.org.za/]: https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/landless-peoples-movement
Abahlali baseMjondolo: http://abahlali.org/
Image: https://nmaahc.si.edu/object/nmaahc_2015.97.27.6
[Note: This program originally aired in 2016]
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The June 16 1976 Uprising that began in Soweto and spread countrywide profoundly changed the sociopolitical landscape in South Africa. Of the various events that led to the uprising—the primary impetus was located in the Apartheid government’s policy that resulted in the introduction of the Bantu Education Act in 1953.
The rise of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) and the formation of South African Students Organisation (SASO) raised the political consciousness of many students while others joined the wave of anti-Apartheid sentiment within the student community. When the language of Afrikaans alongside English was made the required medium of instruction in schools in 1974, black students began mobilizing themselves. On 16 June 1976 between 3000 and 10,000 students mobilized by the South African Students Movement's Action Committee supported by the BCM marched peacefully to demonstrate and protest against the government’s directive. The march was meant to culminate at a rally in Orlando Stadium.
Although their protests were peaceful, police opened fire on the students, killing many and injuring even more. Images of police flogging, firing at and arresting students were forever impressed upon our minds and stowed away in the archives of painful history as a country. Only three decades later, we bore witness to the rise of a similar student movement––the birth of #FeesMustFall.
We then look at Ethiopia with AWNP's, Mwiza Munthali.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous African and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, South Africa, and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Image: Everything Must Fall: The High Cost of Free Education, a film by Rehad Desai [Miners Shot Down, 2014; The Bushman's Secrets, 2006; How to Steal a Country, 2019]. This film was featured in Africa World Now Project's New African Film Festival, held, yearly every March, Silver Spring, Maryland, USA, Washington DC metropolitan area.
Note: This version is an update to the version aired on Feb. 26 2020. Dr. Greg Carr engaged in this discussion at the Carruthers Center for Inner City Studies, Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago on January 31, 2020.
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When thinking of history, one tends to categorize or disassociate the contextual conditions that create & propel phenomena/phenomenon that move across time and space. Events and thought are relegated to a disassociated moment, mapped on categories of time that have been redefined to fit a particular worldview---Western European historiography and historicity and its notion of modernity. The concept is strip of its promise of futurity.
I have stated before and will state again, the perspective of history that holds together the web of the past, present and future is the one presented by John Henrik Clarke.
Dr. Clarke writes: “History is not everything, but it is a starting point. History is a clock that people use to tell their political and cultural time of day. It is a compass they use to find themselves on the map of human geography. It tells them where they are, but more importantly, what they must be.”
It is precisely because of this, I argue that those who are interested in black history should---must---also be concerned with an Africana future. Of the many places we can start to understand the nexus of time and space, and given what this month has come to mean for many, it is appropriate and necessary to think about the: Life and Legacy of Carter G Woodson.
Today, we will explore the very ideas I just presented, with Dr. Greg Carr through a lecture he conducted earlier this year that deeply explored, in depth, the life, impact, legacy & intellectual genealogy of Carter G Woodson.
Greg Carr is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University as well as Adjunct Faculty at the Howard School of Law. He holds a Ph.D. in African American Studies from Temple University and a JD from the Ohio State University College of Law. His work has appeared in, The African American Studies Reader, Socialism and Democracy, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America and Malcolm X: A Historical Reader to name a few.
Dr. Carr is the first Vice President of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations and a former member of the board of the National Council for Black Studies. Having been named Professor of the Year three times by the Howard University Student Association, the College of Arts and Sciences Student Council and the College of Arts and Sciences Honors Association, he has led or co-led student research and study programs to South Africa and Egypt.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Additional Credit: Noël Camille Gardner; See video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEiXx8pwVFw
Today, Africa World Now Project’s Executive Producer, Human Rights Activist, and International Media Journalist, Mwiza Munthali talks with Mozambican investigative journalist Estacio Valoi (@estaciosvaloi), with the Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ) about COVID-19 and conditions on the ground a year since cyclone Idai devastated communities in Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Mozambique. Mwiza connects with Estacio who is currently in Maputo, Mozambique.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Protect our Journalist!
https://gijn.org/about/staff-member/estacio-valoi/
https://pulitzercenter.org/people/estacio-valoi
https://www.zammagazine.com/engage/the-network/568-estacio-valoi
Image: https://archief.socialhistory.org/en/collections/posters-mozambique
[Note: This program originally aired September 2016]
The evolution of Black radicalism has occurred while it has not been conscious of itself as a tradition. Its praxis, is both lived and intellectualized.
One of the most important explorations of the Black Radical Tradition was undertaken by Cedric Robinson with his work Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition…
According to Robin D. G. Kelley on the importance of this work:
“It is suggested that perhaps more than any other book, Black Marxism shifts the center of radical thought and revolution from Europe to the so-called "periphery-to the colonial territories, marginalized colored people of the metropolitan centers of capital, and those Frantz Fanon identified as the "wretched of the earth." And it makes a persuasive case that the radical thought and practice which emerged in these sites of colonial and racial capitalist exploitation were produced by cultural logics and epistemologies of the oppressed as well as the specific racial and cultural forms of domination.
Yet for all of Robinson's decentering, he begins his story in Europe. While this might seem odd for a book primarily concerned with African people, it becomes clear very quickly why he must begin there, if only to remove the analytical cataracts from our eyes. This book is, after all, a critique of Western Marxism and its failure to understand the conditions and movements of Black people in Africa and the Diaspora. Robinson not only exposes the limits of historical materialism as a way of understanding Black experience but also reveals that the roots of Western racism took hold in European civilization well before the dawn of capitalism. Robinson proposed the idea that the racialization of the proletariat and the invention of whiteness began within Europe itself, long before Europe's modern encounter with African and New World labor. Such insights give the "Dark Ages" new meaning. Despite the almost axiomatic tendency in European historiography to speak of early modern working classes in national terms-English, French, and so forth-Robinson argues that the "lower orders" usually were comprised of immigrant workers from territories outside the nations in which they worked. These immigrant workers were placed at the bottom of a racial hierarchy. The Slavs and the Irish, for example, were among Europe's first "niggers," and what appears before us in nineteenth-century U.S. history as their struggle to achieve whiteness is merely the tip of an iceberg several centuries old.' Robinson not only finds racialism firmly rooted in premodern European civilization but locates the origins of capitalism there as well.
Building on the work of the Black radical sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox, Robinson directly challenges the Marxist idea that capitalism was a revolutionary negation of feudalism. Instead, Robinson explains, capitalism emerged within the feudal order and grew in fits and starts, flowering in the cultural soil of the West… Capitalism and racism, in other words, did not break from the old order but rather evolved from it to produce a modern world system of "racial capitalism" dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide.”
How do we understand the implications of this tradition in the context of this period of violence and resistance…how do we understand the dialectic of this exploration yet state- and sociocultural violence has been a consistent part of the daily lived experience of the African world…
Today…we will explore the Black Radical Tradition through the eyes of those who are attempting to live its praxis.
This program was produced in solidarity with communities across the Africana world such as the Fees Must Fall/Rhodes Must Fall…Black First/Land Movements in South Africa…Telema Movement in Democratic Republic of the Congo…and other points who developing their praxis in opposition to the conditions within which they lived…
Enjoy the program…
Data shows that, one (1) in five (5) of Rio de Janerio’s inhabitants reside in one of its more than 1,000 favelas. It is in these spaces where inequality and human potential is molded, identity is created, resistance is formulated.
After the abolition of slavery in 1888, favelas began to rapidly appear. Majority moved to urban areas to take part in and create informal economies, primarily due to official policies between former plantation owners and government officials who prioritized immigration of European migrants.
It is within this abbreviated history that we locate Marielle Franco, a black queer woman, mother, sociologist, socialist, human rights defender, councilwoman from the favela of Maré who was assassinated March 14, 2018. Marielle was born & raised in one of Rio’s favelas and was murdered representing her and other communities like it.
Of the many continuities that we can identify with the assassination of Marielle Franco & the efforts she fought to expose, extrapolating them to conditions and experiences around the African world, we must not forget that Marielle Franco was a part of a long tradition of freedom fighters...
In the statement, On the Imperative of Transnational Solidarity: A U.S. Black Feminist Statement on the Assassination of Marielle Franco, Professors Kia L. Caldwell, Wendi Muse, Tianna S. Paschel, Erica L. Williams, Christen A. Smith, and our very own Keisha-Khan Y. Perry, writes that: “it is important to recognize that Black Brazilians have also been speaking out and organizing against anti-black police lethality and brutality for generations. Black resistance can be traced back as far as the wars between slavery-era quilombos (maroon communities) and Portuguese military forces”.
Today, in the tradition of holding up those who contribute to freedom, in recognition of the afterlives of Marielle Franco, we explore Afro and Indigenous Womxn’s Radical Resistance in Brazil with Joênia Wapixana of the REDE party and Congresswoman for the state of Roraima in the Amazon region, and first indigenous woman ever elected to the Brazilian Congress; and Sara Alves Branco, a black Brazilian human rights lawyer advocating for the promotion of racial and gender equality, as well as legal adviser and project assistant at the black Brazilian organization Center of Studies of Labor Relations and Inequalities (CEERT).
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Sources: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/democraciaabierta/life-and-battles-marielle-franco/; https://www.leftvoice.org/tag/marielle-franco;https://www.kzoo.edu/praxis/the-life-marielle-franco/; https://nacla.org/news/2020/03/10/mariellepresente-reading-list-marielle-franco; https://newint.org/features/2020/01/24/museum-working-class; https://www.theblackscholar.org/on-the-imperative-of-transnational-solidarity-a-u-s-black-feminist-statement-on-the-assassination-of-marielle-franco/; https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2010/may/17/five-days-favela-complexo-mare; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3BRTlHFpBU; https://www.leftvoice.org/tag/marielle-franco; https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10714839.2017.1298243; https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/may/04/killings-brazilian-police-human-rights-crisis-un-review; https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/JoeniaWapixana.aspx; https://library.brown.edu/create/fivecenturiesofchange/chapters/chapter-4/abolition/; https://psol50.org.br/
Place as understood in Africana deep thought and practice, is both material and nonmaterial. The seed of humanity’s ability to evolve is rooted in the practices that are intent to create a balance between this fact. Imbalance, conscious and unconsciously created have deep implications on the lived realities of every community around the globe. Being so, the remedy to imbalance can also be located in mapping Africana praxis, of resistance---of being.
The roots of current sociopolitical and cultural disorders can be traced to the processes of European projects that (re)defined the human and the justifications for the creation and maintenance of private property. There is little to debate on this fact. Racial capitalism is not a simple economic system, it is ideological and cultural; it creates, orders, and structures life systems and the polices the knowledge that are out of these systems.
Today, AWNP’s Tasneem Siddiqui (تسنيم صديقى Twitter: @DrT_Siddiqui) is in conversation with Ashanté Reese (Twitter: @AMReese07). We will have the privilege to sit and listen to the minds of deeply intelligent, action-oriented educators, think through black geographies, the right to food, memories of resistance and the role of land in the scope and range of Africana freedom.
Ashanté Reese (Web: http://www.mamboanthro.com/) is assistant professor in the department of Geography and Environmental Sciences at University of Maryland-Baltimore County. Ashanté earned her bachelor’s in history with a minor in African American studies from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. After graduating she taught middle school at Coretta Scott King Leadership Academy. She later went on to earn a master’s in public Anthropology at American University and a PhD in Anthropology, specializing in race, gender, and social justice. Her work is situated around Black geographies, specifically, the ways Black people produce and navigate spaces and places in the context of anti-Blackness. While she is interested in and committed to documenting the ways anti-Blackness constrains Black life, her ultimately is intent to seek answers to the question: what and who survives?
Including being a valued member of the AfricaNow! and AWNP multimedia educational collectives, Tasneem Siddiqui is an assistant professor in the department of history, politics, and social justice where she teaches courses that explore the ways of being, practices of resistance, and knowledge production throughout the African world.
HBCUsWork
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Enjoy the program!
In When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda, Mahmood Mamdani essentially argues that the dominant narrative of the Rwanda genocide needs to be confronted. Rather than relying upon underlying notions that attributes generic psychological irrationality or cultural stereotypes as being explanatory causes of the genocide, it must not be lost that the acute events the spurred the mass loss of human life must be contextualized in regional and historical conditions (When Victims Become Killers: 8; Book Review: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/08969205020280030805).
For Mamdani: “We may agree that genocidal violence cannot be understood as rational: yet, we need to understand it as thinkable.” (When Victims Become Killers: 8; Book Review: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/08969205020280030805)
To understand this position, we can extract a more critical understanding, at least in part, from the term ‘genocide’ itself. If described as being solely a moral totality, the socio-historical context becomes obscured. As the morality in question is carried and nourished in the cultural seed of a people. Genocide, by its very definition, refers to systematic efforts [with mental and physical elements] to destroy entire of groups of people within the juridical boundaries of a nation-state (https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml). Additionally, genocide refers to acute events that, while located within brutal and irrevocable chronology (exemplified in phrases that include: ‘Final Solution’, ‘Eradication’, ‘Extermination’, ‘Cleansing’), dominant discourse tends to dehistorize—or over historize it, depending on the group it is applied to of course. For Mamdani, understanding the Rwanda genocide as “thinkable” means accounting for regional dynamics and historical realities. As a result, by examining the formation of political identity rooted in narrowly constructed political and economic referential points created by the legal infrastructures of the state, we can begin to see how genocidal conflicts are manufactured for particular purposes.
It is here, a framework is developed that can be used to reveal how modalities of colonial rule create distinctive legacies; the subaltern identities that are constructed by colonial state-formation exemplify and moves forward the dilemmas of post-colonial citizenship.
In essence, the impact of the dialectical historical processes, between the colonial and anti-colonial, create contradictions captured in a myth of the post-colonial moment…a moment that is yet to realize that it is possible.
Today’s program was produced in anticipation of the forum that will be held on Feb 6, from 12-1:30 at the Institute for Policy Studies) which will feature todays guest, Judi Rever author of “In Praise of Blood: Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front” and Claude Gatebuke, a survivor of the Rwandan genocide, co-founder & Executive Director of the African Great Lakes Action Network (AGLAN).
Judi Rever is a freelance print & broadcast journalist who started her career with Radio France Internationale before working for the wire service Agence France-Presse (France Press Agency),
Claude Gatebuke is co-founder & executive director of the African Great Lakes Action Network (AGLAN) as well as a Rwandan genocide and civil war survivor.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
For more: UN Mapping Report-- https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Countries/CD/DRC_MAPPING_REPORT_FINAL_EN.pdf
In, Amilcar Cabral and the Theory of the National Liberation Struggle, Professor Nzongola-Ntalaja writes that: “Amilcar Cabral’s contribution to understanding the success and failures of liberation movements, resides in his demonstration that national liberation struggles have two phases: the national phase and the social phase, with the latter being more crucial to its ultimate conclusion (1972: 102-110).
This analysis is of course theorized within the reality that nation states themselves have deep inherent structural implications that will come into conflict with communities of people that are excluded in its fundamental assumptions of how and for whom society should be organized.
It also is based on the reality that nation states, as advanced through European projects, were themselves developed as a direct product of imperialism and its attendant forms of colonialism (direct, indirect, neo, settler, internal).
According to Amiri Baraka in Towards Ideological Clarity, “the 18th century [a time when European nation states, driven by the old wars between tribal Europe rapidly began to solidify their existence in national entities] was, also, the time when European capitalism amassed the initial wealth it needed to bring about the unprecedented technological advances responsible for what was later called the: industrial revolution. This primitive accumulation cannot be separated from the European Slave Trade...".
Writing in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney further argues that: “throughout the 17th and 18th centuries and for most of the 19th century, the exploitation of Africa and African labor continued to be a source for the accumulation of capital to be re-invested in Western Europe. The African contribution to European capitalist growth extended over such vital sectors as shipping, insurance, [the formation of international corporations-such as but not limited to, the African Royal Company, East Indian Company, etc], capitalist agriculture, technology and the manufacture of machinery...".
The legacy of this is encapsulated in an African world left to wrestle with the contradictions inherent in sociopolitical and economic structures where the exploitation of human and natural resources is the foundational ethos and the human response is a reclamation of its humanity as developed from a critical consciousness—in the case of the African world, a critical Africana consciousness.
Today, AWNP is in conversation with veteran activist and political theorist, Omali Yeshitela, Chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party.
In 1966, Chairman Omali Yeshitela after ripping down a racist mural from the walls of City Hall in St Petersburg, Florida, developing a political and intellectual trajectory informed by anti-colonial movements around the world and the struggle for liberation by people of African descent in the U.S., Yeshitela has dedicated his life to refining a praxis that seeks to institutionalize freedom for the African world.
In 1972, the African People’s Socialist Party was formed along with the worldwide Uhuru Movement and the African Socialist International, with branches active in the U.S., Europe, the Caribbean and on the continent of Africa.
Last year, Chair Omali, as Malcolm X did 55 years ago, traveled to London to participate in the formal debates at the Oxford Union. He was asked to argue in favor of the house embracing an ever-closer African union.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
For more: https://apspuhuru.org/
To unpack the complexities of Africana resistance, particularly its most “radical” elements—whether expressed through collective or/and individual activities and thought, it is vital to identify and map the traditions that inform and challenge their praxis. To be clear, the processes of identification and mapping is to highlight points of continuity and discontinuity, in order to understand distortions to expressed objectives, particularly if those expressed objectives are justice, equality and freedom.
Being so, let’s apply this perspective to Kwame Ture aka Stokely Carmichael.
The 1967 Dialectics of Liberation Congress held in London, proved to be an important catalyst in the praxis of Kwame Ture.
The Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation (for the Demystification of Violence) took place in London’s Roundhouse between the 15th and 30th July 1967, it was an attempt to ‘demystify human violence in all its forms, and the social systems from which it emanates, and to explore new forms of action.’
Ture (Carmichael at the time) contribution to the Dialectics of Liberation conference and elsewhere, were premised by his expressed purpose to expose the forms of oppression endemic to the institutionalized norms and practices of white, Western, or “advanced” nations. Unpacking the endemic violence inherent in racial capitalism and its fortification in Western institutions, Carmichael exposed the limits of white liberalism, which he characterizes as “sympathetic [to the cause of black struggle] in an empty sense,” missing the big picture of the institutional forms to which its adherents contribute, despite their “good intentions” (Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan Africanism: 78-79).
The importance of revisiting and deeply exploring this lecture from Kwame Ture in this period of being quote ‘woke’ unquote and the rampant and narrow postulation and self-congratulatory circles that posit that scholarship is in fact activism (i.e. write a book about history, not understanding or even unpacking the relevance of their ideas to the ‘now moment’ and in many cases not even reading the very people these scholars- activist are writing about today) is absolutely essential.
The extreme danger in such individualistic, neoliberal sensibilities are: 1) they coopt and distort the range and foresight of the ideas presented, relegating them and subsequently binding them to a period. And the way time is understood in a Western context is antagonistic and debilitating to the way ‘time’ is understood in relation to space (physical mental and spiritual) as well as the power of the ‘word’ in an Africana context (we will deal with this in another program); 2) this framing ensures that future generations betray the instructions of those who come before are urge us to create another future through substantive engagement with the past. Knowing an event happened on a certain date does not necessitate an understanding. Nor does it consolidate into a movement. In short, it does something that one of our important thinkers, Tom Porter, always reminds us of: it is the Negation of the Negation.
Moving unconscious to conscious is an intentional, protracted, collective process that requires 1) (collective) study; 2) (collective) deep thinking; 3) (collective) engagement/application; for collective 4) refinement/evolution/correction. More important it provides accountability and serves as a mechanism of self and collective critique. Study, thought, and action must always equate to collective progress.
These factors are exemplified through the praxis of Kwame Ture.
On October 12, 1983, Maurice Bishop, prime minster of Grenada and one of the founding leaders of the New Jewel Movement, was placed under house arrest at the orders of Deputy Prime Minister Bernard Coard (Maurice Bishop Speaks, xii-xiii).
On October 19, Maurice Bishop and five other central leaders of Grenada’s revolutionary government and the New Jewel Movement were murdered, at the orders of Deputy Minister Bernard Coard.
On October 25, thousands of U.S. Marines and Army Rangers landed in Grenada to establish a military occupation of the island and brutally reversed the far-reaching advancements that were implemented as a result of the March 13, 1979, revolution.
In less than two weeks, the Grenadian worker and farmer government established after the removal of Granada’s dictator, Eric Gairy, saw the U.S. military at the command of President Ronald Raegan, invade the island.
Notwithstanding this history of oppression, there is a clear history of resistance.
The new jewel movement was formed in 1973, as a result of the merger of two organizations that were established the previous year—the Movement for Assemblies of the People (MAP), and the Joint Endeavor for Welfare, Education and Liberation (Jewel). The new organization showed its capacity to mobilize mass support through rallies swelling up to 10,000 people.
In a 1977 interview, Bishop articulated the ideological foundations of the movement stating that: “the idea of Black Power that developed in the United States and the freedom struggle of the African people in such places as Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau and unquestionably through the Cuban experience we got the chance to see scientific socialism up close” (Maurice Bishop Speaks, xii-xiii).
What must not be lost is that Maurice Bishop and Unison Whiteman are exemplars of what I called a critical Africana human rights consciousness, a praxis that evident in Africana sociopolitical and cultural practices. The praxis of their critical human rights consciousness is rooted in an African ethos and expressed through the processes of: refining and gaining international perspectives; building ways to institutionalization the movement; refining and clarifying ideological guidance; understanding the conditions of struggle as being centered on questions around human rights; developing and disseminating a counter discourse, through various multimedia platforms.
Radio Free Grenada was a nod to Radio Free Dixie, established by Mabel and Robert F Williams when they were exiled in Cuba. C. L. R. James is known to be a strong radical intellectual influence on the movement and its members.
What we will hear next, is one of the last engagements Maurice Bishop had on U.S. soil; a June 5, 1983 talk Bishop gave in New York. This is one day after he was honored speaker at the invitation of TransAfrica, held on June 4, 1983, an organization of which I, as well as AWNP’s own Mwiza Munthali, who was Director of Public Affairs worked with. The June 4 1983 TransAfrica event was filmed by Haile Gerima.
It is the intention of AWNP to bring you the voices of those from whom you would not normally get a chance to hear, as they articulate their ideas with their own words; due to the direct efforts of historical marginalization for political purpose. Some of you may have heard this before, while some of you have never even heard of Maurcie Bishop. Either way, AWNP is a platform for building, expanding, and applying ideas. As once explored by Kwame Ture, moving the unconscious to conscious.
Forward Ever, Backward Never
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
The ghosts of Hegel, Hume, Locke, and other so-called enlightenment thinkers, are not ghosts at all. The limiting racialized reasoning; the logics of racial capitalism they espoused are in fact material and nonmaterial at the same time. We are living in the 21st century, with 14th century logics and reasoning. The complexities of the language formulated during this period have ensured that this will forever be the case. That is until projects (mass in character) that intentionally and comprehensively disrupt the very power relations that are attendant to the languages that are a product of the racial capitalist logistics that guide everyday racialized reasoning are met with in full force by an African Future.
At the heart of Africana world liberation, is a desire to practice humanity. A desire that is rooted in collective sensibilities that are guided by a constant search for an understanding of the relationship between nature and the universe.
Paul Zeleza has argued that “African identities, like African languages, are inventions, mutually constitutive existential and epistemic constructions.”
This postulation was rooted in questions around the “challenges of defining “Africa.” Arguing along with other scholars that whoever defines and constructs “Africa,” in considerable measure, guides how we identify and analyze African identities and languages.
In The Invention of Africa : Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge, V. Y. Mudimbe interrogates the construction of Africa through Eurocentric categories and conceptual systems, which produced enduring dichotomies between Europe and Africa, investing the latter's societies, cultures, and bodies with the representational marginalities or even pathologies of alterity (Mudimbe, 1988; Zeleza, 2006).
Elsewhere, Mudimbe, argued that one of the most important aspects of Africa’s representation lies not in its invention per se, a phenomenon that is by no means confined to the continent (think of “Asia” and the “Americas” and “Europe” itself and indeed the origins of the names of numerous nations and ethnic groups), but in the fact that Africa is always imagined, represented and performed as a reality or a fiction in relation to master references—Europe, Whiteness, Christianity, Literacy, Development, Technology, even Islam, as codified through Arabic invasions—mirrors that reflect, indeed refract Africa in peculiar ways, reducing the continent to particular images, to a state of lack until their arrival (Mudimbe, 1988; Zeleza, 2006). Without.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o must not be understood as a singular path on a multipath map. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o work must be situated in what Dr. Greg Carr argues that all Africana phenomenon/a must be situated, in a long-view process of memory, translation and recovery. To do so, we can then begin to see how Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s work begins to intersect, inform and be informed by those other Africana thinkers that are committed to identifying, mapping and conceptualizing frame works for understanding human experience, as we move across time/space. Ayi Kwei Armah, Soyinka, Ama Ata Aidoo, Achebe, Tess Onwueme, Ifeoma Okoye, Aminata Sow Fall, Mariama Bâ, Alice Walker, May Ayim, Audre Lorde, to name a few. As listed, the principle of gender is not categorized, as this very abbreviated list does not distinguish Africana female writers from male projecting counterparts…these writers are writers organizing their rhythms of knowledge production through a lens…either way they lead to a common point, as they are writing for freedom.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Image: Nairobi, March 2019
Writing in Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, CLR James argues that: “the cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression. For the one aims at perpetuating resented injustice, the other is merely a momentary passion soon appeased.
The range and scope of CLR James’ work cannot possibly be captured in our limited time with you this evening. However, it is the intent for us to spend our time effectively with you in a way that encourages you to explore the work of CLR James as we hear reflections by those who had the opportunity to work closely with him.
The epigraph just cited, is one that brings into sharp focus, two of Western Europe’s deadly gifts of modernity, its attempted to redefine the praxis of being human (as the great thinker Sylvia Wynter has provide a map for us to understand); and the justification(s) for the creation of private property. This thousand-year process, according to Cedric Robinson, culminating into a racial capitalist system that feeds off the ideas that has structured our current world as a result of slavery, colonialism/neocolonialism, the salience of race as a cultural ideological class construct, the demonization of gender, and iterations of imperialism has left a deep wound on our collective human consciousness, etc…
Next, you will hear, in order of speaker, reflections on the Legacy of CLR James from those who worked closely with him:
James Early, Former Director of Cultural Studies and Communication at the Center for Folklife Programs and Cultural Studies at the Smithsonian Institution;
Kojo Nnamdi, Host of the Kojo Nnamdi show on NPR/WAMU FM
Sylvia Hill, Former Professor of Administration of Justice, Department of Urban Affairs, Social Sciences and Social Work at University of the District of Colombia; and
Aldon Nielsen, who is currently The George and Barbara Kelly Professor of American Literature at Penn State University and author of C.L.R. James: A Critical Introduction.
This program was moderated, in part by, E. Ethelbert Miller. Ethelbert Miller is a literary activist and board chairperson of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). He is also a board member of The Writer’s Center and editor of Poet Lore magazine. He was previously the Director of the African American Resource Center at Howard University and former chair of the Humanities Council of Washington, D.C. He is currently a Resident Fellow at UDC.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Music referenced: KAMAUU: Bamboo & LăVĭNDŭR (LaVeNDeR) [Moving Still]; Kojey Radical: Water; Robert Glasper Experiment: Find You (KAYTRANADA Mix) ft. Iman Omari
This past August, several former commanders of Colombia’s largely demobilized Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) released a video in which they announced a “new phase of armed struggle.” What this video signaled more than anything, was a clear reminder the peace accord is directly related to the conditions on the ground—the conditions of violence and poverty as they are proliferated and exacerbated by Colombia’s elite and attendant corruption at various levels of government (https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/09/08/how-to-keep-the-colombian-peace-deal-alive-farc-duque-uribe-colombia/).
In the words of one of the local residents—Luis, a seventy-three-year-old—living in one of the areas targeted for development, FARC, operating there since 1981, has long been viewed as “a useful group . . . they have been the presence of law in the face of state absence” (https://jacobinmag.com/2019/08/colombia-farc-hidroituango-demining-coca-campesinos). In areas, such as this, that have never seen police or government officials, the FARC organized communal work groups to fix local paths, imposed a minimum wage, resolved domestic disputes, and punished criminals. However, the dynamics of FARC presence in the area changed in the late 1990s to 2003, when right-wing paramilitary groups entered the region in force (https://jacobinmag.com/location/colombia).
Today, AWNP’s, Mwiza Munthali recently spoke with our friend and colleague, Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli.
Gimena Sanchez-Garzoli is currently a Senior Associate for the Andes at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), where she is the leading Colombia human rights advocate.
We then turn our attention to Brazil, exploring the current sociopolitical and ecological crises and the implications of Afro Brazilians with Juliana Borges.
In recent months, fires in the Amazon Rainforest have put a spotlight on the planetary harmful deforestation occurring there. Just before the September 23 United Nations Climate Action Summit, Human Rights Watch released the report Rainforest Mafias: How Violence and Impunity Fuel Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon. According to the report, “Every day, people in Brazil put themselves at risk to defend the Amazon rain-forest from illegal logging. … For Brazil to meet its Paris Agreement commitment, it will need to rein in the criminal groups that are driving much of the deforestation…”.
Next, we will hear a talk delivered by Juliana Borges (https://uniondocs.org/people/juliana-borges/).
Ms. Juliana Borges is an Afro-Brazilian researcher, writer, anthropologist, and activist working on issues related to racism, gender, drug policy, incarceration, and violence. She is part of the National Council of Brazilian Platform for Drug Policy Reform, a consultant at the Brazilian Bar Association/Sao Paulo Section on confrontation, monitoring, and memory of torture and violence. In addition, she recently published a book on Racism and the War of Drugs in Brazil, titled, “Encarceramento em Massa (Feminismos Plurais),” a book from the “Plural Feminisms” collection. She is a consultant for the Perseu Abramo Foundation in the area of violence studies, and a consultant for the project “They exist—women in prison,” which works in Rio de Janeiro women’s prisons (https://sur.conectas.org/en/black-women-under-fire/).
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
In a November 1797 Letter to the French Directory, Toussaint L’Ouverture writes a warning to the French and its allies in Haiti of any attempts to (re)institute slavery in Saint Domingue:
“Do [the forces of reaction] think that men who have been able to enjoy the blessing of liberty will calmly see it snatched away? ... If they had a thousand lives, they would sacrifice them all rather than be forced into slavery again. But no, the same hand which has broken our chains will not enslave us…”
Though most reports point to this current iteration of Haitian resistance are being sparked by the Haitian government’s announcement that it was going to cease subsidizing gas and diesel, it must not be lost that the current uprising in Haiti is a reverberation of what was started in the late 1700s and early 1800s, but intentionally interrupted over the next few centuries.
As a result, this announcement can be better understood as an accelerator that added to the conditions of poverty, which was proliferated by massive corruption involving members of the previous and current government, including the president, Moïse.
To date, “journalists, human rights groups, and a state auditing body have all issued hundreds of pages of reports documenting how up to $2 billion from the Venezuelan fuel assistance program PetroCaribe has been diverted into politicians’ pockets.
According the article, Why Haitians are Protesting En Masse via Jacobin Magazine, as well as other sources, “every day on the air, elected officials sling accusations of kickbacks and graft at one another.
In addition to this, last January at the Organization of American States, Haiti voted with the United States against its longtime former benefactor, Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro. According to Haitian human rights advocate Marie Yolène Gilles, this vote was a quid pro quo.
Yet, not surprisingly, the US-dominated OAS has yet to meet officially about the Haitian crisis —although there was a secretive and unofficial US-led trip—even though conditions on the ground are pretty close to the circumstances decried in the January resolution on Venezuela.
Environmental [neo]Colonialism
The conditions in Haiti are a direct product of the continued conditions of colonialism, neoliberal economic policies and an unjust approach to tackling climate change.
The environmental degradation, which is exacerbated with each drought and hurricane season, can be traced back to French colonial rule over Haiti when land and forests were abused, rendering large swathes of the country barren and infertile (https://portside.org/2019-10-01/what-really-behind-crisis-haiti).
The US approach to the Haitian economy has been predominantly extractive. The country has an estimated $20bn of mineral deposits consistently exploited by US and Canadian corporations.
Today, we take another look at the conditions on the ground in Haiti, through a recent conversation between AWNP’s Mwiza Munthali and Nicole Phillips .
Nicole Philips is an attorney, specializing in human rights and rule of law and professor at the University of the Aristide Foundation law school in Port-au-Prince, Haiti as well as a professor at UC Hastings College of Law at the University of San Francisco.
Our show was produced in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, the Avalon Village in Detroit; Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, Cooperation Jackson in Jackson Mississippi; Palestine, South Africa, and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
To understand the music of John Coltrane you must understand the long genealogy of the genre of African Diasporic cultural expression—called Black (or American) Classical Music or jazz as it is often labeled particularly, as it moves back and forth on the time/space continuum. From the Now moment. To the Future moment as yet seen. To the complexities of the past. Back to Now. Never in a linear path.
You must listen to Sun Ra. Diz. Bird. Sonny. Brother Ah. Abdullah Ibrahim, Celia Cruz, Tito. Hugh Masekela. Abby. Max. Ella. Nina. Holiday. De La. Tribe. Guru. Heavy. The birds. The Wind. The rain.
You must be able to map the material and non-material experiences…often improvised in response to the conditions within which Africana peoples found themselves.
You must understand the deep ancestral, historical, and spiritual memory of a people to simultaneously be aware of these conditions while also seeing a world beyond those conditions.
John Coltrane—the person, the musician—is a vital link in the long chain of humanity—a representation of an African vibration of humanity.
Amiri Baraka in his article John Coltrane: Why His Legacy Continues? writes: “Why does his legacy continue to influence our lives, our music, and the arts?...Trane emerges as the process of historical clarification itself, of a particular social/aesthetic development…When we see him standing next to Bird and Diz, an excited young inlooker inside the torrent of the rising Bop statement, right next to the chief creators of that fervent expression of new black life, we are seeing actual point and line, note and phrase of the continuum. As if we could also see Louis and Bechet hovering over them, with Pres hovering just to the side waiting his entrance, and then beyond in a deeper yet to be revealed hover, Pharoah and Albert and David and Wynton or Olu in the mist, there about to be, when called by the notes of what has struck yet before all mentioned. Trane carried the deepness in us thru Bird and Diz, and them, back to us. He reclaimed Bop fire, the Africa, Polyrhythmic, Improvisational, Blue, Spirituality of us…the Free Jazz! Was parallel to Free Angela! Free Huey! The Ballot or the Bullet! Free Black People!” (192: Digging: The Afro American Soul of American Classical Music)
---Amiri Baraka adds more clarity---I love Music (For John Coltrane)--
For Amiri Baraka, and others, “Trane still sounds inside us as the freedom we seek, the total expression of our lives as the expression of the Human headed soul, teaching that the flaming paradise of his music is in us to create the world we live in” (194: Digging: The Afro American Soul of American Classical Music)
But above all of this…more than any of this…to understand Trane you must understand his wife, Alice Coltrane. You must listen to her organized vibrational melodies that seek in their own space to free people, who did not know they needed to be freed, and as of yet still not know they need to be freed.
Today, we will listen to a radio documentary produce by the Pacifica Archives, titled Trane Lives. We hear Alice on Trane…and Trane, less than a year before he moved beyond.
For complete program: https://www.pacificaradioarchives.org/recording/pz065901-02
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
Image: Alice and John Coltrane: no copyright infringement is intended
Questions and discourses around intervention in African nations are quite frankly opaque and attempt to sell contradictory and conflicting reasoning. For instance, the very notions of foreign—intervention—and its relationship between the logic of racial capitalism and its attendant operational institutions and systems, such as—colonialism/neocolonialism, imperialism, unequal trade, forced and coerced migration, issues of citizenship, imposition of colonial borders, who has the right to have rights, human dignity, scramble and (re)scramble for control of material and nonmaterial resources, and international development…are marginalized, hidden, or often ignored.
To be clear, the notion of intervention itself—its philosophical and epistemic groundings in Western logics is inherently problematic. One need not move far on the world historical map to see the material implications of Western (or outside) intervention and its deleterious impact across the African world.
For many critically thinking folk, the differentiation between intervention and invasion are slim or non-existent. And if we are to understand the roots of contemporary intervention—we must surely deal with the earlier histories and philosophies of raw, unbridled invasions to extract natural resources and to control human physical and intellectual productive forces, and its evolution into post-modern versions of a liberal, gentler imperialism.
Nevertheless, the current reality is that Africa consistently face multiple levels of intervention, all normally rooted in a weak and narrow idea of humanitarianism, or a racial capitalist-driven development, not to mention, the justification of intervention under false notions of governance rooted in a Western historiography, of which these same governments do not practice in totality themselves.
Today, we deal with the current reality of Foreign Intervention in Africa, specifically After the Cold War and its relationship between Sovereignty, Responsibility, and the War on Terror with Dr. Elizabeth Schmidt.
Dr. Elizabeth Schmidt is currently a professor emeritus of history at Loyola University Maryland.
She received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin and has written extensively about US involvement in apartheid South Africa; women under colonialism in Zimbabwe; the nationalist movement in Guinea; as well as foreign intervention in Africa before and from the Cold War to the war on terror.
Some of her works include:
•Foreign Intervention in Africa after the Cold War: Sovereignty, Responsibility, and the War on Terror;
•Mobilizing the Masses: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Nationalist Movement in Guinea, 1939-1958;
•Peasants, Traders, and Wives: Shona Women in the History of Zimbabwe, 1870-1939;
•Foreign Intervention in Africa From the Cold War to the War on Terror; and
•Decoding Corporate Camouflage: U.S. Business Support for Apartheid to name a few.
Today’s program, as always, is produced in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, the Avalon Village in Detroit; Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, Cooperation Jackson in Jackson Mississippi; Palestine, South Africa, and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Robin D.G. Kelley argues that Cedric Robinson’s book is “a critique of Western Marxism and its failure to understand the conditions and movements of Black people in Africa and the Diaspora.”
Kelley goes on to suggest that Robinson not only exposes the limits of historical materialism as a way of understanding Black experience but also reveals that the roots of Western racism took hold in European civilization well before the dawn of capitalism.”
In fact, it was Robinson who proposed the idea that the racialization of the proletariat and the invention of whiteness began within Europe itself, long before Europe's modern encounter with African and New World labor. Accordingly, such insights give the "Dark Ages" new meaning.
I have argued, elsewhere, rooting my perspectives in a critical reading of Robinson, Marimba Ani, Oliver Cox, Audrey Smedley, Sylvia Wynter, C.L.R. James and W.E. B. Du Bois, that race must be understood at a deeper level. To better understand the salience of a fictitious, yet deadly concept, it must be examined as a cultural-ideological class construct, further building on the argument of Du Bois, that “the world was thinking wrong about race, because it did not know. The ultimate evil was stupidity.
According to Audrey Smedley in, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview, race is a “cosmological ordering system structured out of the political, economic, and social experiences of peoples who emerged as expansionist, conquering, and dominating nations on a worldwide quest for wealth and power.”
Being so, we can see that race is expressed in material and non-material ways. It is, in fact, a culturally ingrained, ideologically-driven mechanism that has permeated sociopolitical structures and economic imperatives which guide institutional practices for the expressed purpose to serve deeply rooted insecurities that are wrapped in the myths of white superiority.
Today, we bring you, a public critical reading of Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition with Acklyn Lynch, Haile Gerima and AWNP collective’s member, Josh Myers. This critical reading is part of a series that is curated at Sankofa Video and Books in Washington, DC.
Dr. Acklyn Lynch is a revered scholar/activist of African and African Diaspora history, culture and politics. He has taught at University of Maryland Baltimore County, Howard University, and University of Massachusetts Amhurst. He is author of Nightmare Overhanging Darkly: Essays on Black Culture and Resistance.
Haile Gerima is an independent filmmaker and professor of film at Howard University.
After the award-winning Ashes & Embers (1982) and the documentaries Wilmington 10—U.S.A 10,000 (1978) and After Winter: Sterling Brown (1985), Gerima filmed his epic, Sankofa in (1993). His films have won numerous awards and are internationally acclaimed for the range and scope of their storytelling, cinematography, and innovations.
Gerima continues to produce and distribute his films, including his most recent award-winning film, Teza (2008). He also lectures and conducts workshops in alternative screenwriting and directing both within the U.S. and internationally.
Josh Myers currently teaches Africana Studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. He has published a number of scholarly journal articles exploring Africana history, politics and culture. He is author of the forthcoming, We Are Worth Fighting For: A History of the Howard University Student Protest of 1989. He serves on the editorial board of The Compass and is editor of A Gathering Together: Literary Journal.
Over the past few weeks there has been a low-humming buzz on dominant media platforms around the release of New York Times Magazine 1619 Project. The lead author, investigative journalist, Nikole Hannah-Jones writes that:
“The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.”
History is a very nonlinear, messing process. Therefore, to pinpoint moments as being the beginning can often lead to more questions. In fact, for most of us, history as a concept is narrowly understood. While there is historical specificity to various events and experiences, we must be careful to not miss the convergence, often, of a series of simultaneous events that contribute to what one may identify as the moment, the origin.
If we agree, then Dr. John Henrik Clarke’s definition of history becomes very important to highlight:
“History is not everything, but it is a starting point. History is a clock that people use to tell their political and cultural time of day. It is a compass they use to find themselves on the map of human geography. It tells them where they are, but more importantly, what they must be.”
It becomes very instructive for a critical reader, particularly when reading projects that are developed for public consumption—to always move directly to the sources. The references. The works cited pages. The footnotes. The end notes. Or, if lucky, to the list of supplementary or more information reading lists.
To not understand that all writing is political. And that all efforts to tell stories are rooted in epistemic and philosophical frameworks that guide the way we go about doing the work we do, particularly in attempts to quote—tell the whole story—unquote is to miss exactly who is talking and who they are actually talking to, despite who the author or authors of a discourse are.
As critical, intentional thinkers who attempt to engage, map, and push forward knowledge of and about the Africana world and its contributions to and relationships with the world; we do not involve ourselves into putting much energy into petty non-substantive critiques of the work or works of others.
But we do pay attention. We are cognizant of the various discourses that are promoted. We are interested in ontological and epistemic decolonization processes...
Amiri Baraka once wrote:
“The actual beginnings of our expression are post Western (just as they certainly are pre-western). It is only necessary that we arm ourselves with complete self-knowledge the whole technology (which is after all just expression of whoever) will change to reflect the essence of a freed people.”
Today, AWNP’s Josh Myers explores 1619 in context. Moving the conversation and offering those who’s curiosities have been primed to see the what this 1619 thing is all about.
Josh Myers teaches Africana Studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. He serves on the editorial board of The Compass and is editor of A Gathering Together: Literary Journal
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Enjoy the program!
Image & Artist: Emilio O'Farrill
Descriptors such as jungle music, negro music, jazz...African American Classical Music. Black Classical Music. Spirit Music...and African Rhythms...have been attached to the vibrational human expressions, that once organized into various rhythms, notes, and harmonies become what we have come to call—music. The deep structures that organize these vibrations have purpose. They have origin. They have life. They represent life. They aide us through life. They are bridges between and expressions of worlds seen and worlds unseen. They are all around us. Exploring the form and functions of African rhythms and all that they contribute to our world are part and parcel of understanding the interconnections between the material and nonmaterial, and how they inform each other.
This past April 2019, at the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilization’s (ASCAC) meeting held at Medgar Evers College in New York, a discussion titled African Rhythms: A Workshop on Cultural Continuity and the Future of Jazz, was developed to explore what was laid out above.
Who you will hear next in order of speaker, the wide-ranging discussion from this meeting:
George Turner is a longtime activist from Brooklyn, NY and currently serves on the Board of ASCAC.
Hank Williams is a jazz writer and radio host and professor at Lehman College.
Dr. Anyabwile Love is an assistant professor of Black Studies at the Community College of Philadelphia and a scholar of John Coltrane.
Dr. Josh Myers (AWNP Collective, is assistant professor of Africans Studies at Howard University.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
How do we see?...before you become perplexed at such a simple question...the answer is more complex than we usually give time to consider…
If you thought and said, with our eyes! Then you are fractionally correct. And I mean fractionally…because the sciences have proven beyond doubt, opinion or belief that, we quote see unquote with our mind(s). The various conflation of influences that coagulate to shape our perspectives and perceptions that over a course of time and space we have, either, been forced to or voluntarily merge into our life trajectories, is in fact what we see. Therefore, what we feel. And, consequently, what we do (or don’t do) is directly guided by this fact.
The universal consciousness of the what physicists have come to discover— a living universe, a collective consciousness to which we are all linked…known to ancient Africans—refined through centuries of civilization of the Nubians and Kemet (Egyptians), known to them as the primordial waters of nun, known and expressed to us daily as, emotion…identified through science as light…is vital to all life—including the life of the mind.
Various Africana systems have attempted to systemize this multiplicity of this knowledge filtered through time and space, material and spiritual explorations. For example, Kimbwandende Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau in African Cosmology of the Bantu-Kongo: Principles of Life & Living introduces us to the scared knowledge of what is conceptualized as the Kongo Vee. According to Dr. Fu-key aw Bunseki, the ‘V’ is one of the most important keys to understanding life on the planet earth and the cosmic bodies. The ‘V’ is everything because it is the beginning itself. It is the bridging wire between thinking-matter the human (muntu), and the world of un-thinking matter (the world and source of un-grasped ideas and images. (African Cosmology of the Bantu-Kongo: 130-131).
In his book, Dark Light Consciousness, Dr. Bynum adds to our understanding of the role and importance of African wisdom and its influences. In fact, we can say with assured confidence, fundamental facts-or wisdom-that make-up African knowledge systems are the direct origins of contemporary discoveries in various fields of inquiry such as, but not limited to, quantum physics and the musings of advance ideas captured in string theory.
Dr. Bynum writes that ‘Light itself now appears more and more to us as a vibration of a fifth dimension. Both forces and Beings appear to us in the realm of light and it is our disposition that influences what we see' (Dark Light Consciousness: 3).
In other words, our eyes function to perceive and receive light which allows us to quote see based upon our cultivated (or uncultivated) understanding of the totality of experimental and experiential knowledge invoked by a singular phenomenon or collection of phenomea. More plainly, what we quote see is what our understanding of the mind allows us to quote see.
Today, we expand upon and more deeply explore these ideas with Dr. Edward Bruce Bynum, as they are presented in his book, Dark Light Consciousness: Melanin, Serpent Power, and the Luminous Matrix of Reality.
Dr. Edward Bruce Bynum is former director of the Behavioral Medicine & Anxieties Disorders Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Health Services in Amherst, a clinical psychologist, a practitioner of kundalini yoga, and author of several books of poetry, psychology, and has published numerous clinical articles for scientific journals.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Enjoy the program!
Music:
The Light Remix (Common)-J Dilla
Like it Is-Yusef Lateef
Nafas-Zeb
Picture: Sirius A
In The Price of Racial Reconciliation, Dr. Ronald Walters writes “the power of history is not only its description of events, but also its relation to the identity of those who shape it, and those “who suffer from such shaping. As such, “history” comprises events that groups select as a resource to derive identity and meaning from the past, and to inform present understanding or action. The selectively of such events politicizes history, for the powerful can determine an understanding of historical events consistent with a narrative they wish to advance” (2).
Dr. Walters goes on to suggest that a “step toward dismantling systems of oppression in which one cultural group dominates another, reparations are more than simply “payment” for past injury. They are a national question” (3).
It is here the myths that support a tenuous national identity crumble with the realities of the systems, conditions and institutions that were constructed to maintain a social order that supports an economic system—in this case racial capitalism.
We do not have time to go into the long history of the movement, but highlighting its continuities throughout the world is essential in this period of planetary crisis that are disproportionately impacting the African world.
On one level, the essential question of reparations is rooted in the fact that slavery was unjust because it refused to recognize and compensate the labor of those subjected to slavery. In a capitalist society built upon plantation economies, the idea of unpaid labor is in fact a violation of the fundamental principles of the so-called free-market exchange that regulates the notion of supply and demand the establishes the value of both labor and what this labor produces (From Slavery to Genocide: The Fallacy of Debt in Reparations Discourse:109). On another level, the clear morality and legal violations are brought to fore.
It is not a question of either, or, but a question of both/and.
We will hear Professor Sir Hilary Beckles (older lecture Kingstown, SVG) expand upon reparations.
Professor Sir Hilary Beckles is Vice Chancellor of the University of the West Indies. He is a distinguished university administrator, economic historian, and specialist in higher education and development thinking and practice; and an internationally reputed historian.
Sir Hilary has published and lectured extensively in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. His work includes: Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados and the Caribbean (Rutgers University Press/Zed Book, 1989); Centering Woman: Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slave Societies (James Currey Press/Randle Publishers, 1999; White Servitude and Black Slavery: white indentured servitude in the Caribbean, 1627-1715 (Tennessee University Press, 1989); The First Black Slave Society: Britain’s Barbados, 1627-1876; Britain’s Black Debt: Reparations for Slavery and Native Genocide in the Caribbean, (UWI Press, 2015).
He is Chairman of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Commission on Reparation and Social Justice.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Dr. Ichile in her article titled, Black Magic Woman: Towards a Theory of Africana Women's Resistance suggest that when properly contextualized, the role of enslaved African women in history was multiple, but two primary roles are prevalent, they were both spiritual and political leaders. Contextualized as such, Dr. Ichile then show that three major aspects of women's resistance emerge:
(1) African women acted as queens and queen mothers, activated at key moments to galvanize enslaved people seeking not only freedom, but sovereignty;
(2) In maroon communities, women's maintenance of African cultural traditions, agricultural production and motherhood made long-term settlements possible;
(3) As priestesses and "conjurers," women attacked slaveholders with their spiritual gifts and knowledge, in ways that were sometimes more effective than direct, military confrontation, and were often coordinated to work in tandem with armed conflict.
According to Dr. M Bahati Kuumba in, African Women, Resistance Cultures and Cultural Resistances, “for African and African diasporan women, culture is a societal dimension that has complex and contradictory implications with respect to their interests, freedom and rights. On the one hand, established/'traditional' African and African diasporan cultures are replete with practices and perceptions that hegemonize patriarchal interests and women's oppression (McFadden, 1997). And “to make matters worse, nationalist discourse and praxis in many African descendent communities position women as the custodians of and conduits for its customary practices, often serving as their own worst enemies.” Nevertheless, the lives of Africana women “have a long and varied 'herstory' of challenging social injustice by deploying, opposing and transforming cultural systems (Collins, 1990, 2000; Steady, 1987, 1993;Terborg-Penn, 1986).”
Another important scholar, Dr. Valethia Watkins in Contested Memories: A Critical Analysis of the Black Feminist Revisionist History Project, suggest that “properly framing and naming the intellectual and political tradition of Black women has become contested terrain and reflects the political and ideological diversity and differences among Black women. Black women are often treated as if they are a homogenous group when, in reality, they are diverse in their political consciousness, perspectives, ideas and commitments as any other group. Black women do not speak with a single voice; hence, efforts to articulate “the” Black women’s standpoint or perspective are misleading and hegemonic by definition.
These views, taken together, provide a contested and expands the narrow view of gender, broadly, Women-Africana women, specifically.
Dr. Iyelli Ichile earned her PhD in African Diaspora History from Howard University and a Master’s in African American Studies from Columbia University. She has worked with the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, and developed a research agenda that has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, The DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and several university grants.
Dr. Ichile has held positions at Temple University, Prince Georges Community College, Virginia Commonwealth University, Florida A&M University, and Goddard College. She is currently a Smithsonian Faculty Fellow at Montgomery College-Rockville.
Her work has appeared in Journal of African American History; Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society; Journal of Pan African Studies to name a few.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
In a Washington Post article titled, Recent protests in Sudan are much more than bread riots, Nisrin Elamin and Zachariah Mampilly, writes “On Dec. 19 2018, the town of Atbara in northeastern Sudan erupted in protest against the military dictatorship that has ruled the country for almost three decades. People took to the streets following a tripling of bread prices to demand “freedom, peace, justice and the downfall of the regime.” But international coverage framing the protests as bread riots obscures the larger political context, misrepresents protesters’ demands and supports the regime’s insistence that the crisis can be resolved by simply reintroducing targeted subsidies and stabilizing the Sudanese pound.”
Let’s contextualize this important moment in the African world that is directly related to the long tradition of protest and resistance in the region referred to as Sudan further.
According to Nisrin and Zachariah, “It is no coincidence that the protests began in Atbara, a town known for its powerful railroad workers union. Sudan has a history of successful revolutions against military regimes, most notably in 1964 and in 1985, in which trade unions and student movements played a pivotal role.
But the absence of formal trade unions and independent local governing structures did not prevent people from forming alternative grass-roots structures for mobilizing against political repression. Youth movements and independent farmer and worker formations multiplied over the last decade as people lost faith in established opposition parties and politics. Most notably, from 2012 to 2014, students and the urban poor held a variety of creative protests before being repressed by the regime.
With the oil-export economy emerging in the 1990s, other sectors that produced food and cash crops were left to wither away or were privatized and handed off to foreign investors or regime loyalists.
All in all, the conditions that spurred the current Sudan uprisings, were proliferated and promoted by austerity measures recommended by the IMF in 2017 (known as structural adjustment programs).
Today, Africa World Now Project’s Mwiza Munthali discusses the uprisings in Sudan with Nisrin Elamin.
Nisrin Elamin is a Sudanese writer, activist and PhD candidate in Anthropology, based in the New York City area. She has over 15 years of experience working with community-based organizations as an educator, organizer and advocate. Most recently, she served as a Director of the Sadie Nash Leadership Project’s summer leadership and social justice program for young women and non-binary folks at City College. She also works part-time with the group African Communities Together, which organizes around immigrant, civil and workers’ rights in New York and in Washington DC. Her research examines the ways Saudi and Emirati ‘land grabs’ are reconfiguring social relations between landholding and landless communities in central Sudan. In January of 2017, she was one of the first people to be detained under the Trump administration’s Muslim ban, causing her work to be interrupted. But since then, she has been able to return to Sudan to complete her research.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
For more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/12/28/recent-protests-in-sudan-are-much-more-than-bread-riots/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.fce161deb4fd
https://www.thenation.com/article/sudan-protests-revolution-bashir/
Image: Alaa Salah, 22, stands on a vehicle as she sings to the crowd. Photograph: -/AFP/Getty Images
Writing in Where is the ‘African’ in African Studies, on African Arguments, Robtel Pailey asserts that “the extent to which the ‘African’ in African Studies is concealed or revealed depends entirely on the politics of the knowledge producer, the ethos of the institution they represent, the pedagogy and methods they employ, and their level of commitment to the continent and its people.”
In Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive, Achille Mbembe presents a theoretical lens through which we can use to examine current conditions in present societies who are a product of settler colonialism, (neo)colonialism, chattel slavery, etc. Mbembe introduces us to the notion of a ‘negative moment’ (2015).
Mbembe goes on to argue that “blackness” is fracturing. “Black consciousness” today is more and more thought of in fractions.”
It is here, the clarity of what a negative moment comes to the fore, it is a moment when new antagonisms emerge while old ones remain unresolved. It is a moment when contradictory forces—undeveloped, fractured, fragmented—are at work but what might come out of their interaction is anything but certain. It is also a moment when multiple old and recent unresolved crises seem to be on the path towards a collision.”
It is in this moment that knowledge, understanding, and power converge. It here is that the mere prohibitive structures, institutions, and systems that promote some forms of knowledge, and demonize others is an act of violence.
What we suggest is a real attempt to decolonize not only the university and knowledge, we must decolonize, decolonization. Decolonization is not new, of course. In fact, its dominant conceptualization and current discourse is a product of African postcolonial experiments in the 1960s and 1970s.
Where does this negative moment place us in the context of addressing current planetary crises, rooted in the aggressive proliferation of racial capitalist logic(s)? Where do we start an intentional and serious commitment to decolonize?
Today we will explore the possibilities of an African future through decolonizing African Studies with Dr. Robtel Pailey.
Robtel Pailey is a Liberian academic, activist and author with more than 15 years of combined personal/professional experiences in Africa, Europe and North America. She is also author of Gbagba and Jaadeh, critically acclaimed anti-corruption children’s books.
Robtel completed BA degrees in African Studies and English Literature at Howard University, a MSc in African Studies at the University of Oxford, and a doctorate in Development Studies at SOAS, University of London, as a Mo Ibrahim Foundation PhD Scholar.
Robtel currently serves as Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Oxford's Department of International Development (ODID), where she conducts research on race, citizenship, ‘South-South’ migration and development cooperation in Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Today, Africa World Now Project collectives' Tasneem Siddiqui and Keisha-Khan Perry sit down with Dr. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and explore the contours, continuities, and evolutions in Africana radical sociopolitical thought.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University.
Professor Taylor is author of, Haymarket Books 2016, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, where it examines the history and politics of Black America and the development of Black Lives Matter in response to police violence in the United States.
Professor Taylor’s most recent book, How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, also with Haymarket Books (2017) won the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction.
Dr. Taylor’s research examines race and public policy including American housing policies.
Dr. Taylor's current work: Race For Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownersip (2019), explores U.S. federal government's promotion of single-family homeownership in Black communities after the urban rebellions of the 1960s. Taylor looks at how the federal government's turn to market-based solutions in its low-income housing programs in the 1970s impacted Black neighborhoods, Black women on welfare, and emergent discourses on an urban “underclass”. Professor Taylor is particularly interested in the role of private sector forces, typically hidden in the development and implementation of public policy, in the “urban crisis” of the 1970s.
Professor Taylor’s work has been supported, in part, by a multiyear Northwestern University Presidential Fellowship, the Ford Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation.
Our show was executive produced by Keisha-Khan Perry and Tasneem Siddiqui and as always in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Enjoy the program!
Race For Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownersip available: https://www.amazon.com/Race-Profit-Industry-Undermined-Homeownership/dp/1469653664/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=keeanga-yamahtta+taylor&qid=1555627062&s=gateway&sr=8-3
Sterling A. Brown work amplifies and materialize the nature of the aesthetic connections that find continuity in contemporary black life.
Brown opens, Southern Road with an epigraph of an old negro spiritual:
‘O de ole sheep dey knows de road,
Young lambs gotta find de way.’
It is with this, Sterling A Brown highlights the intentions of his work which is ‘to face two directions at simultaneously'. To look forward into the future while facing the past, the poems in Southern Road consider the relationship between the [past and present] and its relevance to Black people entering the European conceptualization of modernity (Gabbin, Sterling A Brown, Building the Black Aesthetic Tradition, 1985: 3.
For Sterling A. Brown, diving into the depths of human experience and character necessitated a close look at language. In a 1978 interview Brown stated that, “The poets that struck me were those who were poets of the people and poets of direct—not florid…American speech.” The contribution that Brown offered is a clear understanding that what the ‘new’ poets were doing with language was not new (30).
Today Dr. Josh Myers will explore the work of Sterling A. Brown in a presentation titled, A Blue(s) (Note) for Sterling Brown.
In addition to being a valued member of the AWNP collective and its affiliates, Dr. Josh Myers is currently an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University.
He currently serves on the board of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations and the editorial board of The Compass: Journal of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations, he works with the DC area collectives, Positive Black Folks in Action and the Nu Afrikan Cultural Vanguard.
His research interests include Africana intellectual histories and traditions, Africana philosophy, critical university studies, and disciplinarity. His work has been published in The Journal of African American Studies, The Journal of Pan African Studies, The African Journal of Rhetoric, The Human Rights and Globalization Law Review, Liberator Magazine, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Knowledge, and Society, Critical Ethnic Studies, and Pambazuka, among other literary spaces.
His book, “We are Worth Fighting For: The Howard University Protest of 1989” is forthcoming.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Enjoy the program!
On Thursday March 14, Cyclone Idai made landfall on the coast of Mozambique at Beira. Since hitting the South-East African coast, directly impacting Mozambique, Malawi, and Zimbabwe, Cyclone Idai brought massive destruction in the region—including numerous deaths, countless people displaced and rivers overflowing. The impact of the cyclone has brought the multi-leveled implications of climate change to the fore: In Mozambique, flood waters that have destroyed crops, homes, cultivated water-borne disease, in Zimbabwe, mud slides has permanently altered landscapes; in Malawi, more flood damage.
According to William Minter in his article titled In the Wake of Cyclone Idai: The North has a Climate Debt to Pay , in Foreign Policy in Focus, “weeks after Cyclone Idai struck the coast of Mozambique, near Beira, the flood waters have receded to reveal a shattered landscape.
Houses and roads were washed away; crops awaiting harvest were destroyed. Confirmed deaths are high across Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi, with the total still growing. Emphasis has shifted from the rescue of survivors clinging to treetops and rooftops to organizing the delivery of provisions of food, secure housing, and medical care for hundreds of thousands left homeless.
Even as local and international relief efforts ramp up their efforts, there is a need to also focus on broader global implications. The causal connection between climate change and extreme weather events, such as Cyclone Idai, is clear. The need for climate actions in both the global North and South are beyond dispute. These needs include making the response to crises sustainable, increasing resilience to the effects of climate change through adaptation, and rapidly accelerating action to cut greenhouse emissions from fossil fuels.
The question, ironically is centered on whose responsibility should this be? At the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the first global climate agreement affirmed that much of the burden should be shouldered by the nations in the Global north. The Summit agreement stated that: The Parties should protect the climate system for the benefit of present and future generations of humankind, on the basis of equity and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.
Accordingly, the developed country Parties should take the lead in combating climate change and the adverse effects thereof.
Today, providing a more in-depth, on-the-ground assessment of the effects of Cyclone Idai, specifically in Mozambique and Zimbabwe are: [a little editorial note…we will examine Malawi next week]:
Estacio Valoi, an investigative journalist based in Mozambique and is part of Center for Investigative Journalism (CIJ); and
Ruth Castel-Branco, a labor scholar-activist based at the University of the Witwatersrand, and an editor of Alternactiva—a Mozambican progressive media platform.
Briggs Bomba, currently coordinates the Zimbabwe Alliance, a funding collaborative that works to promote a vibrant civil society and a successful democratic transformation in Zimbabwe. Anchored by TrustAfrica, it identifies, engages and supports local initiatives through grant making, capacity building, networking and mobilizing international solidarity.
All three are in conversation with Africa World Now Project’s Executive Producer, human rights activist, and international media journalist, Mwiza Munthali.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
We begin our program today with an update on current activities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Mwiza Munthali, Africa World Now Project executive producer, human rights activist, and international journalist recently caught up with Kambale Musavuli.
Kambale Musavuli, a native of the Democratic Republic of Congo and one of the leading political and cultural Congolese voices, is a human rights advocate, Student Coordinator and National Spokesperson for the Friends of the Congo.
Kimbale has work his appeared in Washington Post.com, Foreign Policy in Focus, The Huffington Post and numerous other academic and news publications. He has appeared on various media outlets on National Public Radio, Democracy Now, ABC News, Al Jazeera English Television, Radio France International.
We then turn our attention to Brazil, specifically the role of black women and the fight for racial justice against the land grab.
In her book, Black Woman Against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil, Dr. Keisha-Khan Perry argues that “spatial exclusion is at the core of gendered racial stratification in Brazilian cities, the thus exclusion produces mass black political organization, as is occurring in neighborhoods in the city of Salvador. The racial logic of modernization and urban renewal informed by European models of development nurtures a nostalgic desire for the colonial past on the part of white Brazilians. Taken together, with various construction projects that separated black residents from white residents and access to other resources in the 1960s, the need to articulate a politics of land permeance and ownership was formed” (xv).
In South Africa, according to an April 2017 article on Black Opinion, the author asserts that: “The liberation of Black People in South Africa can only be truly complete once the majority of the Black Nation has full access to the land and all its offerings. Land provides means for people to fend for themselves and it endows them with a sense of dignity and pride."
The question of human freedom rest at the intersection of land, identity, and collective responsibility.
This question was, once again highlighted here in the U.S. a number of times in the various manifestations of Diasporic struggle for human rights.
Dr. King brings sharp critique and clarity on the contradictions that are exposed when the question of human freedom does not meet at the intersection of land, identity, and collective responsibility. Weeks before he was assassinated he highlights what happened just after the Civil War…
Next, we will listen to a recent conversation that I had with Dr. Keisha-Khan Perry on the question of land, racial justice, and black women in Brazil.
Dr. Keisha-Khan Perry is Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University where she specializes in the critical study of race, gender, and politics in the Americas with a particular focus on black women's activism, urban geography and questions of citizenship, feminist theories, intellectual history and disciplinary formations, and the interrelationship between scholarship, pedagogy, and political engagement. She has conducted extensive research in Mexico, Jamaica, Belize, Brazil, Argentina, and the United States.
Professor Perry recently completed Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil which is an ethnographic study of black women's activism in Brazilian cities. The book examines their participation and leadership in neighborhood associations and how and in what ways their interpretations of racial and gender identities intersect with urban spaces. She is currently writing Anthropology for Liberation: Research, Writing and Teaching for Social Justice while working on two other research projects. She is engaged in a study, which documents and analyzes the historical paradox of citizenship and black land ownership and loss in Brazil, Jamaica, and the United States.
Dr. Todd Steven Burroughs asserts that, fantasy can be a form of social protest, but fantasy can also be a form of mental conquest.
The imagination of the black mind has produced some the most advanced conceptualizations of justice, freedom, citizenship, and peace. The sovereignty of the black imagination has also been constantly under assault. It is the duty of those who create to educate their audience into the habits of thinking. According to David Scott in his interview with George Lamming, the sovereignty of the imagination has neither to do with the sequestering of creativity from, nor its absorption by, the world of affairs—this would be merely bad faith. Rather an authentic sovereignty of the imagination has to do with the active will to refuse submission to the customs that seek at every turn to inspire our self-contempt and our unthinking docility, and to command our understanding of, and our hopes for, what it might mean to live as a free community of valid persons”.
The use of and control of popular cultural platforms are a documented method of social control and political consolidation.
Today, Drs. Todd Steven Burroughs, Jared Ball, and Mark Bolden explore the continuities in popular culture, futurism in black literature, and the sociopolitical implications on the histories and futures of black think.
Dr. Todd Steven Burroughs is an independent researcher and writer based in New-ark, New Jersey. He has taught at Howard and Morgan State University. A professional journalist since 1985, he has written for The Source, Colorlines, Black Issues Book Review and The Crisis magazines, web-based blackamerica.com and The Root.com, and newspapers such as The New York Amsterdam News, The Afro-American (New Jersey edition) and The Star-ledger. He is author of Marvel’s Black Panther: A Comic Book Biography From Stan Lee to Ta-Nahisi Coates, as well as co-author of Civil Rights: Yesterday and Today with Herb Boyd, and A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable’s Malcolm X and Warrior Princess: A People's Biography of Ida B. Wells.
He also curates a popular culture blog: drumsintheglobalvillage.com
Dr. Jared Ball is a father and husband. After that, he is a Research Professor of Communication Studies in the Institute for Urban Research at Morgan State University in Baltimore, MD. and is the curator of imixwhatilike.org, an online hub of multimedia dedicated to the philosophies of emancipatory journalism and revolutionary beat reporting.
He is author of I Mix What I Like: A Mixtape Manifesto and co-author of, A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable’s Malcolm X. His work has been published in The Black Scholar, Radical Teacher, International Journal of Communication, The Journal of Pan-African Studies, Journal of Black Studies, The Global Journal of Hip-Hop Culture, Journal of Pan African Studies.
He is the creator and curator of the multimedia platform: www.imixwhatilike.org
I mix what I like is Dr. Ball’s homage to the great activist-theorist Steve Biko’s I Write What I Like.
Dr. Mark Bolden is an African sovereignty psychologist in private practice.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
For more: Visit imixwhatilike.org
Writing in his 2006 work titled, Yoruba Culture: A Philosophical Account, Dr. Kola Abimbola argues that Yoruba sociopolitical religious practices—( Òrìṣa tradition and culture) were expanded and intensified throughout the Americas due to the Transatlantic human trade which saw the enslaved millions of Africans.
He writes: “Today, the Òrìṣa tradition and culture is practices by about 100 million people in Argentina, Australia, Benin Republic, Brazil, Cuba, France, Germany, Ghana, Haiti, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, Sierra Leon, Spain, Togo, Trinidad and Tobago, the UK, the US, Venezuela, and other places. In all of these places, Yorùbá religious practices play a significant role in, music, dance, the arts, and many facets of day-to-day living.” (24)
Kola Abimbola goes on to suggest that while there is a significant amount of good material available on various aspects of Yorùbá and Òrìṣa culture in different parts of the world, no one has yet fully explained its philosophical underpinnings. What philosophical affinities do Candomblé and Batuque (Ba—Tooque) in Brazil, Santeria in Cuba, Vodun in Benin Republic, Vodou in Haiti, and Òrìṣa worship in Nigeria all share in common? (24)
To date, many scholars have been content with explaining the details of the rituals, the arts, the music, and even the languages that all these different manifestations of Yorùbá culture share. But no good account of what unifies these traditions, that is, their philosophy, exists. Simply put, the philosophical and theological ideas that unify all these traditions under the rubric Yorùbá have not been adequately explained. (24)
For Dr. Abimbola, the widespread inadequacy of the treatment of Yorùbá culture can be traced to three separate but interdependent erroneous assumptions implicit in the writing of some scholars. He captures these inadequacies, conceptually as: tribal fetishism, methodological straitjacketing; and hierarchical dogmatism. (24)
Toady. We will hear a recent conversation I had Dr. Kola Abimbola on Ifa’s Anceint Future…meditations on the deep tradition of African thought and its relationship to the physical and non-physical world…
Dr. Kọ́lá Abímbọ́lá studied the Ifá Literary Corpus as an apprentice under Wándé Abímbọ́lá and Babalọ́lá Adébóyè Ifátóògùn. He received his PhD studies in Philosophy of Science under John Worrall at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a second PhD in the Law of Evidence and Criminal Justice under C. John Miller at the University of Birmingham. He has taught at Seattle University, Haverford College, Temple University, and at the University of Leicester (Lester) School of Law. He is currently an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Howard University in Washington DC. Kọ́lá is the Editor of Journal of Journal of Forensic Research and Criminology. He was President of the International Society for African Philosophy and Studies from 2006 to 2010, and a British Council Commonwealth Academic Scholar from 1989 to 1992.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, Palestine, South Africa, and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Enjoy the program!
Today, we bring to you a recent wide-ranging conversation exploring the HBCUs as a response to and product of coloniality, sovereignty of the black imagination, the philosophical roots of Black Thought/Black Study, and the impetus of evolving black institutions (back) to becoming a maroon space with Corey Walker and Josh Myers.
Dr. Corey Walker is a visiting professor at the University of Richmond. He collaborates with campus and community partners on research, teaching, and public programming on the University’s recently acquired Wyatt Tee Walker collection. He is also Senior Fellow in Religious Freedom at the Religious Freedom Center of the Freedom Forum Institute in Washington, D.C.
An accomplished academic leader, Walker served as vice president and dean of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Theology at Virginia Union University just prior to coming to the University of Richmond. Other leadership roles he has held include serving as founding dean of the College of Arts, Sciences, Business, and Education at Winston-Salem State University, chair of the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University, and inaugural director of the Center for the Study of Local Knowledge at the University of Virginia.
A dedicated teacher and scholar, Walker has served as a member of the faculty at the University of Virginia, Brown University, Winston-Salem State University, and Virginia Union University. He was also visiting professor at the Historisches Institut at Friedrich-Schiller Universität Jena in Germany and non-resident fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University.
Dr. Walker is author of the book "A Noble Fight: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America," editor of the special issue of the journal Political Theology on the theme “Theology and Democratic Futures,” and associate editor of the award-winning SAGE "Encyclopedia of Identity." He has published over 50 articles, reviews, book chapters, and essays appearing in a wide range of scholarly journals. He co-directed and co-produced the documentary film "Fifeville" with acclaimed artist and filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson. Walker's scholarship focuses on the complexities of religion, philosophy, history, memory, culture, and public life.
In addition to being a valued member of the Africa World Now Project & AfricaNow! collective and its affiliates, Dr. Josh Myers is currently an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University.
In addition to serving on the board of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations and the editorial board of The Compass: Journal of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations, he works with the DC area collectives, Positive Black Folks in Action and the Nu Afrikan Cultural Vanguard.
His research interests include Africana intellectual histories and traditions, Africana philosophy, critical university studies, and disciplinarity. His work has been published in The Journal of African American Studies, The Journal of Pan African Studies, The African Journal of Rhetoric, The Human Rights and Globalization Law Review, Liberator Magazine, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Knowledge, and Society, Critical Ethnic Studies, and Pambazuka, among other literary spaces.
His book, “We are Worth Fighting For: The Howard University Protest of 1989” is forthcoming.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
In order to understand the current sociopolitical conditions and deep Africana radical cultural influences moving in Sudan today, the long historical genealogy, the evolutions in physical geography, and the migration and interaction patterns of various communities of African peoples of the region must be explored.
Despite the growth and retractions of the region, one of these descriptors that has lasted the evolution of time and space is Nubia. Throughout history Nubia and its component geographical part had a number of other references. Among one of the earliest is Ta-Setiu or the ancient Egyptian (Kemetic) reference to the area as being the “land of the bowpeople”. Another ancient Egyptian reference is to Ta-Nehesi which reflects the name of an ethic group of Nubia. The Greek invasions applied the term Dodekashoenos to the describe lower Nubia. Arab invasions used Butn al-Hajr (roughly translated as the Belly of Stones) for the section of the Nile from the second Cataract. Kush is another descriptor that was used to give reference to ancient Nubia. As used, Nubia is associated with an ancient word used for gold…the region often referred to as the ‘land of gold’.
Imperial and linguistic efforts to control and redefine the peoples and regions by the Greeks, referred to Nubia as Ethiopia which included at times, parts of Libya. The central reason for this linguistic application was used to reference to the phenotypical identification of the “brunt faces” of the Nubians. Other descriptors, included Meroe. Christian Nubia refers to the three kingdoms of No-ba-tia, Mu-kur-ra, and Al-wa that cover this region, and Nubia was the reference to the region until the end of the 19th century. It was at this time, the name “the Sudan” came into used, from the Arabic expression Bilad as-Sudan, meaning “land of the blacks”. Which was essentially an Arabic translation of the Greek “Ethiopia”. It was further used throughout Muslim literature generally to refer to Africa beyond the Sahara.
The continuity of Africana radical tradition follows the trajectories of resistance, internationally.
The influences and evolution of Africana radical thought and practices can be seen in Malik el-Shabazz praxis. According to the article X Marks the Spot: Mapping Malcolm X’s Encounter with Sudan, though Malik el-Shabazz (Malcolm X) travels in the middle East and Africa put him in touch with the most revolutionary movements of his time, it was his ongoing contacts with students, scholars, and religious leaders from Sudan that had a truly transformative effect on his beliefs about race and religion.
Today, we add to this genealogy and discourse a conversation with Alsarah of the Nubatones.
Alsarah is a singer, songwriter, bandleader and a somewhat reluctant ethnomusicologist.
Born in Khartoum, Sudan, she relocated to Yemen with her family before abruptly moving to the USA, finally feeling most at home in Brooklyn, NY where she has been residing since 2004. She is a self-proclaimed practitioner of East-African Retro-Pop music. Working on various projects, she has toured both nationally and internationally.
Alsarah & the Nubatones were born out of many dinner conversations between alsarah and rami el aasser about nubian ‘songs of return’, modern migration patterns and the cultural exchanges between sudan and egypt. To learn more visit www.alsarah.com and explore the catalogue of music….
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Enjoy the program!
The relationship between spirituality, science, language, the political, the transference and production of culture presents a rich terrain to understanding the relationship between liberation, humanity & justice.
At this point in human history, no matter how hard those who seek to dominate, distort historical record to marginalize the deep-rooted African genesis of human existence, the facts, the realities come through. They are ingrained within the fabric of the African unconscious.
Writing in African Unconsciousness: Roots of Ancient Mysticism and Modern Psychology, Dr. Edward Bruce Bynum suggest that: (Page 155)
Today, we expand and explore the ideas Dr. Edward Bruce Bynum presents in his work.
Dr. Edward Bruce Bynum is a clinical psychologist, a practitioner of kundalini yoga, and author of several books of poetry, psychology, and has published numerous clinical articles for scientific journals. Dr. Bynum was the former director of the Behavioral Medicine & Anxieties Disorders clinic at the University of Massachusetts Health Services in Amherst and the winner of the national Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Prize for Chronicles of the Pig & Other Delusions, Dr. Bynum is also a recipient of the Abraham H. Maslow award of the Division of Humanistic Psychology from the American Psychological Association for "outstanding and lasting contributions to the exploration of the farthest reaches of human spirit".
His corpus of work, thus far, includes: Dark Light Consciousness: Melanin, Serpent, Power, and the Luminous Matrix of Reality; The Roots of Transcendence; The African Unconscious: Roots of Ancient Mysticism and Modern Psychology; The Dreamlife of Families: The Psychospiritual Connection; Families and the Interpretation of Dreams; Transcending Psychoneurotic Disturbances: New Approaches in Psychospirituality and Personality Development; The Family Unconscious: An Invisible Bond; The Luminous Heretic; Gospel of the Dark Orisha; The First Bird: Songs of the Dark Body in Flight; The Magdalene Poems; The Dreaming Skull; Godzillananda: His Life and Visions, a Prophecy Compiled and Translated from the Ancient Meroitic Texts by an Unknown Scholar of the 14th Century; Chronicles of the Pig & Other Delusions; and the edited volume, Why Darkness Matters: The Power of Melanin in the Brain.
He is the producer of a ten-part audio lecture series on science, psychology, spirituality and African psycho-historical and philosophical systems. He is a frequent speaker at national and international conferences and has appeared on radio, television and in documentaries. His research interests include depth psychology as it pertains to neuroscience, neuromelanin, consciousness research, as well as the analysis of dreams, family dynamics, the philosophy of science, ancient history, anthropology-archaeology, and yoga. Dr. Bynum’s books can be purchased directly from the publisher at Cosimo Books, www.cosimobooks.com or from Amazon.com. To find out more about his work, please visit his website: www.obeliskfoundation.com
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Enjoy the program!
The relationship between the rise of capitalism, the exploitation of labor and natural resources, the control of productive forces are important components of interests when attempting to understand the imposition of the negatively constructed sociopolitical and cultural institutions of the West.
The contractions that move capitalist societies have been subjects of those who study and try to organize folk who are caught within the fissures and cavities of the eventual conflicts that arise from capitalism.
According to the article, Repression and Resistance on the Terrain of Social Reproduction: Historical Trajectories, Contemporary Openings, while the idea of social reproduction is most often associated with Marxist feminist literature from the 1970s, considerable work was done around that concept in a wide range of rather disparate bodies of work throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
While this work is important, it must not…it can not be lost that the work of African and African descendant women from Maria Stewart, Sojourner Truth to Claudia Jones and the proper expansion of capitalism to be properly contextualized as racial capitalism preceded these notions. And once contextualized we can see the limits of the aforementioned critiques.
Drawing genealogies of social reproduction from the perspective of black women’s experience, pre and post-slavery to the racist politics of the welfare regimes, Africana women demonstrated that the domestic confines of the housewife was the problem of white working- and middle-class women.
Many of these ideas were first articulated in Claudia Jones’ important 1949 essay, “To End the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman. It is here, Jones introduced the idea of the triple oppression of working-class black women. She showed that, having had to work alongside their men, black women were never confined to the “domestic” sphere alone. From here, writing in the 1970s and the early 1980s, black women, such as, but not limited to, Angela Davis and Hazel Carby continued the line of thought articulated by Jones. in partial response to Wages for Housework, Angela Davis wrote that “Throughout this country’s history, black women toiled together with men under the whip of plantation overseers, suffering a grueling sexual equality at work.” Dr. Davis continues...After slavery, black women were employed in vast numbers in a range of industries, from tobacco and sugar, to lumber and steel. It is here that Professor Davis shows how black women’s labor was mobilized in the reproductive realm as well as in the manufacturing and service industries long before discourses of the “double burden” emerged in white feminist thought.
Today, Silvia Federici will revisit ideas that she presented in Caliban and the Witch through her new work(s) titled: Witches, Witch-hunting & Women; Reenchanting the World: Feminism & the Politics of the Commons.
Silvia Federici is an Italian-American activist and the author of many works, including Caliban and the Witch and Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. She was co-founder of the International Feminist Collective, an organizer with the Wages for Housework Campaign, and was involved with the Midnight Notes Collective. Silvia Federici has taught at several universities in the US and also in Nigeria. She is now Professor Emerita at Hofstra University (Long Island, NY).
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
According to the article, Reform or Transformation? The Pivotal Role of Food Justice in the U.S. Food Movement, the global food price crisis of 2008 ushered in record levels of hunger for the world’s poor at a time of record global harvests as well as record profits for the world’s major agrifoods corporations (Lean 2008).
According to the United Nations World Food Program, more than 90 percent of the world’s hungry are simply too poor to buy enough food (2011). Some of the planet’s most hungry people live in the Global North, though hunger is measured as “food insecurity”. Food insecurity in the United States is characterized by a nationwide epidemic of diet-related diseases that result in an estimated $240 billion a year in health costs that fall disproportionately on low-income communities of color (Schlosser 2001; Baker et al. 2006).
Researchers have shown that what is called the food-justice movement emerged from several sources, including movements for environmental justice (Bullard 1994), working-class communities of color dealing with diet-related diseases (Herrera, Khanna, and Davis 2009), critiques of racism in the food system (Self 2003; Allen 2008) as well as critiques of racism in the food movement itself (Slocum 2007; Guthman 2008). Moreover, the very notion of ‘food justice’ developed within the “context of institutional racism, racial formation, and racialized geographies” (Alkon and Norgaard 2009).
The deep-rooted influences, practice, and knowledge that filters throughout discourses on and around food, land, and resistance, are undoubtedly rooted in the humanity of Africana peoples. In fact, nowhere is this captured better than how rice made its way to Americas, first to Brazil and then to the Carolinas. Here is a story recounted by a Brazilian woman: “An enslaved African woman, unable to prevent her children’s sale into slavery, placed some rice seeds in their hair so they would be able to eat when the ship reached its destination. As their hair was very thick, she thought the grains would go undetected. However, as they disembarked the slave ship, the planter who eventually bought them discovered the grains. In running his hands through one child’s hair, he found the seeds and demanded to know what they were. The child replied, ‘this is food from Africa.’ This is the way rice came to Brazil, through the Africans, who smuggled the seeds in their hair” (Judith Carney, With Grains in Her Hair: Rice in Colonial Brazil, Slavery and Abolition, 25(1), 2004: 1–27).
Today we will hear the second keynote address from this past Oct BUGs conference, held in Durham North Carolina by Leah Penniman.
Leah Penniman, is Co-Director and Program Manager at Soul Fire Farm. Leah has over 20 years of experience as a soil steward and food sovereignty activist, having worked at the Food Project, Farm School, Many Hands Organic Farm, Youth Grow and with farmers internationally in Ghana, Haiti, and Mexico. She co-founded Soul Fire Farm in 2011 with the mission to reclaim our inherent right to belong to the earth and have agency in the food system as Black and Brown people. Her areas of leadership at Soul Fire include farmer training, international solidarity, food justice organizing, writing, speaking, “making it rain,” and anything that involves heavy lifting, sweat, and soil. She is author of Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm's Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land, 2018.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Enjoy the program!
"It could have easily been called 'Afro-American Fight Song'. My solo in it is a deeply concentrated one. I can't play right unless I'm thinking about prejudice and hate and persecutions, and how unfair it is. There's a sadness and cries in it, but also determination." --Charles Mingus, Haitian Fight Song, The Clown, 1957; Maurice Jackson, Friends of the Negro! Fly with Me...
The Haitian Revolution has often been described as the largest and most successful slave rebellion in the Western Hemisphere. However, this dominant narrative must be critiqued, specifically the notion of-slave rebellion. This frame of conceptualization masks the clear fact that to frame it as a slave rebellion, misses the deep and clear idea that it was a people who was thrust in a global system of various forms of enslavement which attempted to dehumanize whole communities of people, who freed themselves. The fact is, the reason the Haitian Revolution was successful is because of the African human agency of peoples who understood strategy, military and environmental, who possessed a clear cosmological and ontological understanding of human freedom...
C. L. R. James argues that critically examining the Haitian Revolution as an exemplar of true revolution...The implications of the Haitian Revolution, specifically on the Africana world are further described by Kwame Ture when he argues that...
In 1825, Haiti was forced to pay France $22 billion at literal gunpoint following France's establishment of a naval blockade of the newly freed island nation. Moreover, as Haiti struggled to get out from under this crippling debt, the United States was repeatedly involved in destabilizing the country, economically and politically.
Haiti was still under a mountain of debt when hit by the devastating 2010 earthquake. Following the disaster, Haiti was primarily forgiven of its obligations but curiously had to borrow roughly $2.6 billion despite worldwide charity efforts to support rebuilding projects.
Currently and over the course of months, particularly since April, Haitian citizens have taken to the streets, expressing their historically rooted, contemporarily manifested frustrations with elite and governmental mismanagement of funds and overt corruption.
These include, a mass protest held on October 17. On November 18th, Haitians mobilized a nation-wide general strike and demonstrations—another important historical date, as it was on this day in 1803 when Haitians defeated France at the Battle of Vertieres which led to the country’s independence in January 1804.
With the recent uprisings, which a number of people have been killed and wounded by the police, Haitians are demanding a complete transparent investigation of the PetroCaribe scandal and the resignation of President Moïse, a clear path to address the economic problems and an immediate roll back of austerity measures.
PetroCaribe is the Venezuelan subsidized energy program provided to Haiti to assist in rebuilding efforts following the January 2010 earthquake that devastated the country.
Today, we explore the historical circumstances and international context surrounding the recent uprisings with Ms. Nicole Phillips, Esq., who is currently a professor at the University of the Aristide Foundation law school in Port-au-Prince, as well as an adjunct professor at UC Hastings College of Law in San Francisco. Ms. Phillips was formerly Staff Attorney, at the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH).
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Enjoy the program!
Picture Credit: https://www.antenna.works/ayiti-cherie/
In the last speech you heard, was of Thomas Sankara. In it he asserts that: “Our country produces enough food to feed us all. In fact, we can produce more than enough. But because of the lack of organization. We still need to beg for food aid. This type of assistance is counterproductive. And has kept us thinking we are only beggars who need aid….I am asked where is imperialism. I say, look at your plate. You see the corn, rice... Imperialism is right here”
According to Thomas Mitchell, in From Reconstruction to Deconstruction: Undermining Black Landownership, Political Independence and Community Through Partition Sales of Tenancies in Common, the story of the federal government’s failure to deliver “forty acres and a mule” to freed slaves after the Civil War has long been a part of African American folklore. This history has been highlighted in an opinion by a federal judge in a landmark settlement of the class action lawsuit filed by black farmers against the United States Department of Agriculture. The case is known as Pickford II. The original Pigford v. Glickman lawsuit, named after North Carolina farmer Timothy Pigford was filed against the USDA in 1997.
The history of those African descendants who purchased land in states throughout the South during Reconstruction, however, remains largely unknown and uncelebrated. Research suggests that, in total, this group acquired approximately 15 million acres of land in the South in the 50 years following the Civil War.
Further, unlike the large numbers of poor white men who were able to acquire land from the public domain under federal homestead laws in the late 1800s, African Americans who acquired land did so mostly by private market purchases, often under intentional and direct violence, limited access to credit, and overt discrimination.
Furthermore, in relation to food security and insecurity issues, Margaret Marietta Ramírez in her article, The Elusive Inclusive: Black Food Geographies and Racialized Food Spaces, argues that “in recent years there has been a growing conversation amongst food scholars, activists and policymakers questioning the ability of community food projects to serve low-income communities of color (Alkon and Agyeman 2011; Allen 2010; Guthman 2008; Slocum 2006). Within these conversations, the issue of participation is often raised, framed as something that can be remedied by conducting “outreach” or building a more “inclusive” project that better engages local residents. However, it can be argued that these efforts for “inclusion” in community food projects will continue to struggle to build participation in communities of color if they do not shift the power structures that exist within the organization itself.
Today, we will hear Dr. Monica White, who gave one of the keynote speeches at this year’s BUGS Conference which was held in Durham North Carolina, Oct. 19-21, 2018.
Dr. Monica M. White earned her Ph.D. from Western Michigan University in Sociology. She is currently an assistant professor of Environmental Justice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a joint appointment in the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology. Her book, Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement, 1880-2010, was just released.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Links:
https://www.blackurbangrowers.org/2018-bugs-conference
Monica White: https://dces.wisc.edu/people/faculty/monica-white/
Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement, https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469643694/freedom-farmers/
Today's program covered: The 60th Anniversary of the 1958 All-African People’s Conference | Held: December 5-8, 2018 | Institute of Africa Studies | University of Ghana
The histories of Pan African activity are often incomplete, not because we do not know them. But often because academically, African and Diasporic academicians do not engage with each other. Interesting notion, when this class of folk claim to be experts in the very subject matter they do not practice. Moving forward we must examine pan Africanism in more detail and intentionally. I have argued in, Pan-Africanism in the United States: Identity and Belonging, “in relation to the Africana world, the forms of resistance that challenge the dominant narratives which are produced and reproduced from the sociohistorical and cultural processes which attempt(ed) to strip identity formations from African peoples provide a nuanced frame of reference to understand the relationship between identity, belonging, resistance, and power. The various perspectives that are produced have deep implications that are useful to understanding the evolution in the forms and practice of oppression over time and space. To be clear, we must pay attention to the processes that produce a Pan African critical consciousness that challenges or impedes the development of an African collective consciousness, which then becomes the most press point of concern today. The questions that form will attempt to peel away the relationship between ideas of identity formation and what does it mean to be African, presently and moving forward? Is the descriptor Africa or African meaningful to launch a program for liberation? How can and do we truly begin to return to the source? We may find that the very idea and practice of Pan Africanism, while having a long and vital history in constructing a united front against centuries long attacks against the Africana world, must address what has Pan Africanism as an ideological guide to institutional formation actually produced.
Today, AWNP’s executive producer, human rights activist, and international media journalist, Mwiza Munthali caught up with Dr. Gnaka Lagoke, an Assistant Professor of history (world, African, and African-American) and of Pan-Africana Studies at Lincoln University (PA) to talk about the 60th anniversary of the All African People’s Conference in Accra, Ghana.
Dr. Gnaka Lagoke is also a specialist and a political analyst in African and world politics, focusing on International and African development, comparative politics, international justice, Pan-Africanism and Ubuntu Philosophy. He founded the Washington DC-based “The Revival of Pan-Africanism Forum” and the Thomas Sankara Annual Conference in 2007. As a political analysist, he has appeared on Voice America, Russia Today, HispanTV, Australian Broadcast Corporation, Democracy Now, Al Jazeera, CCTV, TVC News.
Dr. Lagoke is also a member of the Organizing Committee of the 60th Anniversary of the All African People's Conference.
Today’s program is produced in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, the Avalon Village in Detroit; Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, Cooperation Jackson in Jackson Mississippi; Palestine, South Africa, and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Music Highlighted: Tall Black Guy--Water No Enemy
Jaden Smith -Icon (Instrumental)
Little Brother-The Way To Do It (Instrumental)
Speech(es): At the beginning--Kwame Nkrumah opens the 1958 All African Peoples Conference; Speech at the end: Forces Against Africa
Image:http://africanactivist.msu.edu/image.php?objectid=32-131-1DE
“History teaches us clearly that the battle against colonialism does not run straight away along the lines of nationalism. For a very long time the native devotes his energies to ending certain definite abuses: forced labour, corporal punishment, inequality of salaries, limitation of political rights, etc. This fight for democracy against the oppression of mankind will slowly leave the confusion of neo-liberal universalism to emerge, sometimes laboriously, as a claim to nationhood. It so happens that the unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and, let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps.
National consciousness, instead of being the all-embracing crystallization of the innermost hopes of the whole people, instead of being the immediate and most obvious result of the mobilization of the people, will be in any case only an empty shell, a crude and fragile travesty of what it might have been.” [Frantz Fanon’s, The Pitfalls of National Consciousness in The Wretched of Earth.]
The pitfalls of national consciousness is one of the many important theoretical contributions from Frantz Fanon. Fanon argues that nationalism often fails at achieving liberation across class boundaries because its aspirations are primarily those of the colonized bourgeoisie, a privileged middle class who perhaps seeks to defeat the prevailing colonial rule only to usurp its place of dominance and surveillance over the working-class, the lumpenproletariat.
With the current discourse around limited notions of nationalism and the so-called rise of an global ultra-nationalist right…Today’s program is an intentional disruption in this milieu.
It is designed to offer streams of thought that invoke critique and inform paths of study toward solutions.
Today’s conversation attempts to offer perspective by focusing specifically on the sociopolitical and cultural conditions in Brazil, Venezuela and Cuba.
What you will hear next is a recent conversation with James Early.
James Early is former Director of Cultural Studies and Communication at the Center for Folklife Programs and Cultural Studies at the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC. Mr. Early has served in various positions at the Smithsonian Institution, including Assistant Provost for Educational and Cultural Programs, Assistant Secretary for Education and Public Service, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Service, and Executive Assistant to the Assistant Secretary for Public Service.
Prior to his work with the Smithsonian, Mr. Early was a humanist administrator at the National Endowment for the Humanities, Washington, D.C., a producer, writer, and host of "Ten Minutes Left," a weekly radio segment of cultural, educational and political interviews and commentary at WHURFM radio at Howard University, and a research associate for programs and documentation.
He currently serves on the Board of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and is a consultant on various issues related to human rights, labor, land, state craft.
Today’s program was produced in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, the Avalon Village in Detroit; Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, Cooperation Jackson in Jackson Mississippi; Palestine, South Africa, and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Enjoy the program!
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The histories of cooperative practice and ownership of Africana communities have a long history, particularly when we account for an Africana human agency in the face of hyper-exploitation and hyper-extractive logics and practice of racial capitalism. These systems and logic encompass the privatization and monopoly over agriculture, manufacturing, finance, housing, healthcare, land, water, and other natural resources, etc. Articulated through plantation/neo-plantation-based economic systems and power relations, aligned with industry and codified in the state and/or state-sanctioned violence animated by false notions of racial supremacy. The affect has produced an active intergenerational disaccumulation of wealth for Africana people, evolving forms of political disenfranchisement and a sustained attack on “programs designed to lessen ethnic and class exploitation,” “the spread of mass impoverishment, the erosion of human rights protections, and the increased deadliness of daily life” (Woods 1998, 5). The question must be posed, at its core, did the state, as birthed as a settler colonial project ever have a twinkling of a notion of the existence of other human beings? History and analysis would suggest in some ways yes, in many more ways, not even close.
Foregrounded by Africana ontology and epistemologies that produced (and continues to produce) a distinct and radical paradigm of land use, social organization, and economic development, which cultivates political power in the form of strategies for realizing global social justice.
Today, Africa World Now Project’s senior researcher, content contributor, and production designer Dr. Tasneem Siddiqui and associate producer Dr. Keisha-Khan Perry speak with Dr. Jessica Gordon Nembhard about the History of African and Diasporic Cooperative Thought and Practice.
Author of Collective Courage: A History African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice. Dr. Jessica Gordon Nembhard is a professor of Community Justice and Social Economic Development in the Department of Africana Studies at John Jay College, of the City University of New York (CUNY) in New York City.
Dr. Gordon Nembhard is a political economist specializing in community economics, Black Political Economy and popular economic literacy. Her research and publications explore problematics and alternative solutions in cooperative economic development and worker ownership, community economic development, wealth inequality and community-based asset building, and community-based approaches to justice.
Dr. Nembhard is an affiliate scholar at the Centre for the Study of Co-operatives at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, where she is co-investigator for the “Measuring the Impact of Credit Unions,” Community and University Research Partnerships (CURA) project; and an affiliate scholar with the Economics Department’s Center on Race and Wealth at Howard University.
Today’s program was executive produced by Dr. Tasneem Siddiqui and as always in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, the Avalon Village in Detroit; Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, Cooperation Jackson in Jackson Mississippi; Palestine, South Africa, and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Historically, U.S. interest in Africa, specifically, its foreign policy towards Africa has been two-pronged. Both of which, it can be argued, mapped back to the origins and proceedings of the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, where U.S. official and unofficial representatives maneuvered amongst imperial powers to destabilize African societies in order to supply global racial capitalism with its material and human power.
The historical two-pronged approach of U.S. foreign policy toward Africa lies, first, in protecting its material economic interests; and secondly, its desire to carefully maneuver this interest to avoid becoming involved in direct conflict with or between European imperial powers.
To the present, Africa was always been seen as means to an economic end. Direct control of African territory has traditionally been the preoccupation of European imperial nations.
However, it is clear that the historical origins of U.S. foreign policy have evolved. Specifically culminating into Africom.
Foster (2006) lay the foundation for the ‘new Scramble for Africa’ when he writes:
“In West Africa, the U.S. military’s European Command has now established forward-operating locations in Senegal, Mali, Ghana, and Gabon—as well as Namibia, bordering Angola on the south—involving the upgrading of airfields, the pre-positioning of critical supplies and fuel, and access agreements for swift deployment of U.S. troops.15 In 2003 it launched a counterterrorism program in West Africa, and in March 2004 U.S. Special Forces were directly involved in a military operation with Sahel countries activating more than 1,000 U.S. Special Forces.”
Sandra T. Barnes, 2005 article titled Global Flows: Terror, Oil & Strategic Philanthropy , argued that “military spending in the four years following 9/11 has doubled the amount expended in the preceding four years. The total spent or allocated for arms, training and regional peacekeeping operations that focus primarily on training and arming sub-Saharan militaries in the four-year period from 2002 until the end of 2005 will amount to $597 million, whereas for 1998-2001 it was $296 million. At this rate, it will take a comparatively few years to equal the $1.5 billion that some believe was spent during the three decades of the Cold War on arms for African allies.”
AWNP’s collective member, executive producer, human rights activist, and international media journalist, Mwiza Munthali, recently caught up with long-time human rights expert and activist, Ajamu Baraka.
Ajamu Baraka a highly recognized human rights expert and human rights defender whose experience spans four decades of domestic and international education and activism, Ajamu Baraka is a veteran grassroots organizer whose roots are found in organizing in the anti-apartheid and Central American solidarity struggles.
Ajamu Baraka was the Founding Executive Director of the US Human Rights Network (USHRN) from July 2004 until June 2011.
He is currently National Organizer for Black Alliance for Peace and an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and a writer for Counterpunch.
For more information: https://blackallianceforpeace.com/usoutofafrica/
We then talk with Mr. Efi Tembon, Director, Center for Community Transformation, where we explore human rights, the history of marginalized people and recent elections in Cameroon.
Today’s program was produced in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, the Avalon Village in Detroit; Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, Cooperation Jackson in Jackson Mississippi; Palestine, South Africa, and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Today Africa World Now Project spotlights the current political and human rights situation in Uganda. In recent weeks the sociopolitical and human rights situation in Uganda has received unprecedented attention worldwide particularly with the arrest of Member of Parliament Robert Kyagulanyi (also known as Bobi Wine).
The popular musician turned politician, Bobi Wine arrest and subsequent treatment in Ugandan police custody underscored what human rights and civil society organizations have been reporting on for years. Ugandans have been encountering a deeply repressive state headed by Museveni. According to a report Al Jazzera: (Play Clip) Uganda
At a press briefing held in Washington, DC last month, Bobi Wine and his lawyer Robert Amsterdam Wine's discuss the conditions in Uganda, Bobi's condition after his August 14th arrest and the treason charges which followed are discussed. What you will hear next is the extract of the media briefing, where Bobi Wine and his lawyer explore what is next.
We then explore the sociopolitical and human rights condition in Uganda in more depth. Africa World Now Project’s executive producer and human rights activist, international media journalist caught up with Professor Allimadi recently caught up with Professor Milton Allimadi.
Milton Allimadi, is currently the publisher of Blackstar News, and an Adjunct Professor of African History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, the Avalon Village in Detroit; Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, Cooperation Jackson in Jackson Mississippi; Palestine, South Africa, and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
According to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz in an article titled, Settler Colonialism and the Second Amendment in Monthly Review, which is adapted from her recently published book, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, Professor Dunbar-Ortiz points out that: “in a book first published in 1876 but written decades earlier, historian Joseph Doddridge (1769–1826), a minister and early settler in the Ohio country, wrote: "that the early settlers on the frontiers of this country were like Arabs of the desert of Africa, in at least two respects; every man was a soldier, and from early in the spring till late in the fall, was almost continually in arms..."
According to Dunbar-Ortiz, the Second Amendment thus reflects this dependence on individual armed men, not just in terms of a right to bear arms, but also as a requirement to bear arms, which was crucial to the integrity of the state and the conception of security achieved through a relationship between state and citizen. In 1783, the British withdrew from the fight to maintain sovereignty over their thirteen colonies, not due to military defeat, but rather in order to redirect their resources to occupy and colonize South Asia. Britain’s transfer of its claim to Indian Country west of the colonies spelled a nightmarish disaster for all Indigenous peoples east of the Mississippi, and ultimately all of North America that would be claimed and occupied by the United States. Britain’s withdrawal in 1783 opened a new chapter of unrestrained racist violence and colonization of the continent.
The Anglo-American settlers’ violent break from Britain in the late eighteenth century paralleled their search-and-destroy annihilation of Delaware, Cherokee, Muskogee, Seneca, Mohawk, Shawnee, and Miami, during which they slaughtered families without distinction of age or gender, and expanded the boundaries of the thirteen colonies into unceded Native territories.
The Declaration of Independence of 1776 symbolizes the beginning of the “Indian Wars” and “westward movement” that continued across the continent for another century of unrelenting U.S. wars of conquest.
Today, AWNP's Dr. Tasneem Siddiqui explores the disarming history of the second amendment and its relationship to Africa and African descendant peoples with Dr. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.
Having grown up in rural Oklahoma, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, the daughter of a tenant farmer and part-Indian mother, has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than four decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. After receiving her PhD in history at the University of California at Los Angeles, she taught in the newly established Native American Studies Program at California State University, Hayward, and helped found the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies. Her 1977 book The Great Sioux Nation was the fundamental document at the first international conference on Indigenous peoples of the Americas, held at the United Nations’ headquarters in Geneva. Dunbar-Ortiz is the author or editor of seven other books, including An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States; Blood on the Border: Memoir of the Contra War; Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico; and Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment. She lives in San Francisco.
Today’s program was executive produced by Dr. Tasneem Siddiqui and as always in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, the Avalon Village in Detroit; Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, Cooperation Jackson in Jackson Mississippi; Palestine, South Africa, and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Reconstruction, the period so named after the U.S. Civil War, is a period that in its totality is a clear articulation of the lasting implications of settler colonialism.
Take the conceptualization of ‘reconstruction’ itself. This concept implies an implicit notion of equality, collectivism, cooperation, rebuilding, togetherness, democracy, so on and so forth.
W. E. B. Du Bois writing in a chapter titled, “The Propaganda of History” in his seminal work Black Reconstruction argues that:
“the facts of American history have in the last half century been falsified because the nation was ashamed. The South was ashamed because it fought to perpetuate human slavery. The North was ashamed because it had to call in the black men to save the Union, abolish slavery and establish democracy...."
Further solidifying the sharp analysis of Du Bois on the creation and power of nation creating myths, Cedric Robinson, in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, argues that when examined properly it can be understood that the formation of nation-states and political reigns precipitate the development of founding myths—such as myths of origins. Citing Du Bois, Robinson writes, the “bourgeoisie use of print and press, their appeals to and seduction of the classes they intended to dominate facilitated the fabrication of these national myths. These myths sole purpose was to be recognized in the official instruments of class hegemony: national creeds, social ideologies, philosophical tenets, constitutions, etc. They functioned to legitimate the social orders that they create. As they begin to inform the social consciousness of everyone forced and freely a part of the social order, these myths were substituted for history.” They provide the appearance of being a historical narrative when in fact they are actually nothing more than class-serving rationales for exploitation. The formation of the American state is no different. In fact, when properly contextualized, the American Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the considerations in the Federalist Papers were all expressions of the interests and creed of the American bourgeoisie.
Today, Dr. Greg Carr explores this period called, (re)construction.
Dr. Carr is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University and on the Faculty at the Howard School of Law. He holds a Ph.D. in African American Studies from Temple University and a JD from the Ohio State University College of Law.
The School District of Philadelphia’s First Resident Scholar on Race and Culture (1999-2000), Dr. Carr led a team of academics and educators in the design of the curriculum framework for Philadelphia’s mandatory high school African American History course. These materials are the first to approach African American History using an Africana Studies methodology. He is a co-founder of the Philadelphia Freedom Schools Movement, a community-based academic initiative that has involved over 13,000 elementary, high school and college students. Dr. Carr has presented his curriculum work for the Board of Public Education in Salvador, Bahia, and has lectured across the U.S. as well as the world. His publications have appeared in, The African American Studies Reader, Socialism and Democracy, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, The National Urban League’s 2012 State of Black America and Malcolm X: A Historical Reader.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, the Avalon Village in Detroit; Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, Cooperation Jackson in Jackson Mississippi; Palestine, South Africa, and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
In Two Thousand Seasons, Ayi Kwei Armah (A qway Arr ma) writes:
“we are not a people of yesterday. Do they ask how many single seasons we have flowed from our beginnings till now? We shall point them to the proper beginning of their counting. On a clear night when the light of the moon has blighted the ancient woman and her seven children, on such a night tell them to go alone into the world. There, have them count first the one, then the seven, and after the seven all the other stars visible to their eyes alone.
After the beginning they will be ready for the sand. Let them seek the sealine. They will not have to ponder where too start. Have them count eh sand. Let them count it grain from singe grain. And after they have reached the end of that counting we shall not ask them the number the raindrops in the ocean. But with the wisdom of the aftermath have them ask us again how many seasons have flowed by since our people were unborn.
The air everywhere around is poisoned with truncated tales of our origins. That is also part of the wreckage of our people. What has been cast abroad is not a thousandth of our history, even if its quality were truth. The people called our people are not a hundredth of our people. But the haze of this fouled world exists to wipe out knowledge of our way, the way. These mists are here to keep us lost, the destroyers’ easy prey.”
It is the mist of the destroyers that Randy Weston battled. With the spirit of the ancestors, the stories he created were maps to piece the fragments together. The fragments of a fractured history—a torn being. And the rhythm upon which he built these stories are the reminders to seek oneness—a wholeness.
Rhythm according to Amiri Baraka, is “the natural motion of matter.”
The rhythm Randy Weston sought created was the material (re)creation of the map of harmony from which the world—the African world was dislodged. The universe, which is materialized through creative human expression. Baraka adds, “the composite rhythm of everything is everywhere. The whole life (Time, Place, and Condition) shapes rhythm, the where you be at (bloods say). And it is a physical/mental construct. Finally, it is deeper because it goes deeper. Will grow deeper, i.e., the perception of the finest(?) particular (of a) rhythm accesses properties in the perceiver (or confirms them). Rhythm’s infinite “circles” of transformation, in modes and forms and direction we do not even know exist.”
“Africans used rhythm to speak and sing, to dance—to communicate over long distances with each other and to the forces of the universe.” Its censorship. Its control. Its banning was not without political, social, and cultural imposition.
As a result, Africans in the diaspora cultivated new methods and technologies of spiritual practice. It was evitable as, “African religion sough to discover the human relationship to what exists always by tuning in to it, and becoming, at whatever level, at one, cognizant, conscious, “with knowing”, be possessed, by it, as the direct expression of the whole, and as a direct experience. This is the holiness (Whole/ness, at/one), the revelation.”
Today, we pay tribute to Rand Weston. The artist. Theorist. Freedom seeker. The spiritual warrior. The historian. The manifestation of the healing and creative spirits of nature and universe.
What you will hear next and what we present to you…are the words, artistry, ideas of Randy Weston.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, the Avalon Village in Detroit; Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, Cooperation Jackson in Jackson Mississippi; Palestine, South Africa, and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
According to Joseph Jordan in his article, Afro-Colombia: A Case for Pan African Analysis, the early history of Africans in Colombia begins with the Spanish conquest and settlement of various areas in the early 1500s. The importation of Africans as an enslaved people, provided labor for this Spanish conquest and remained a vital component of Colombia’s history until it was abolished in 1851. The formation of an Afro-Colombian identity built upon a tradition of resistance can linked to a continuous history of rebellions and the existence of independent maroon communities called palenque.
According to Wade in The Cultural Politics of Blackness in Colombia, as in many other Latin American countries, in post-independence Colombia prior to the late twentieth century, the category negro had no institutional space in state practices governed by liberal ideologies of citizenship, which gave little room to ethnic difference among citizens. Indigenous people were, however, recognized as a specific category. Academics also did not pay attention to black as a category: anthropology focused on indigenous peoples; sociology attended to peasants and social classes; history, while it looked at “slaves”, did not encompass ‘Blacks’ (Friedemann 1984). Yet the category negro existed in everyday practice to refer to categories of people.
The geographer Agustín Codazzi referred in the 1850s to la raza negra that lived in the Pacific coastal region of the country, populated mainly by descendants of African slaves. The novelist Tomás Carrasquilla (1858-1940) included references to negros in his works (Wade 1993). In the mid-twentieth century, there was extensive press commentary about the music and dance
associated with los negros, which were becoming popular (Wade 2000). The term was not well defined, however. On the one hand, it could be very encompassing, as a term used by the elites to refer to the lower classes in general; on the other hand, it could be quite restrictive, as an insult directed against a particular person.
Euphemisms such as moreno (brown) were common and in areas identified by observers as very black, such as the Pacific coastal region, locals referred to themselves as libres (free people) rather than negros (Losonczy 1997).
Afro-Colombian communities and collective territories are mostly concentrated in the resource rich and geopolitically strategic regions of the country that continue to be the scenes of fierce disputes between armed groups. Along the Pacific coast the fight for the control and exploitation of collective lands by armed actors has meant that such communities have found themselves caught up in the cross fire or continuously on the front line of the conflict.
Recently the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) hosted a discussion exploring the interdependence and complexities in the recent elections, the peace accord and AfroColombian communities.
Anthony Dest, a PHD candidate at the university of Texas at Austin, who served as an election monitor during Colombia’s June 17th presidential run-off election dissected what the elections mean for Afrodescendants and Indigenous Communities on the Pacifica Coast.
This session was moderated by Gimena Sanchez, who is Senior Associate for the Andes at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), where she is the leading Colombia human rights advocate.
Samir Amin wrote in 2016 that:
“Partial awareness emerges from particular struggles, for example, from the struggles of peasants or women for the defense of human commons or the struggle for respect of popular sovereignty. The progress of the convergence of these particular types of awareness would make it possible to advance towards the formulation of new ways to surpass capitalism. But note…increased awareness will not happen through successive adaptations to the requirements of capitalist accumulation, but through awareness of the necessity of breaking with those requirements. The most enlightened segments of the movement should not isolate themselves by brandishing their disdain for others. Rather, they should involve themselves in all struggles in order to help the others to advance their understanding.”
According to John Bellamy Foster in his Monthly Review article titled, Samir Amin at 80: An Introduction and Tribute, Amin’s work, as wide-ranging as it is, can be succinctly described in terms of the dual designation of the The Law of Value and Historical Materialism. For Amin, this basic division of Marxist theory is not to be denied. However, what makes Amin’s work vital and innovative is his insistence that the economic laws of capitalism, summed up by the law of value, are subordinate to the laws of historical materialism.
Economic science, while indispensable, cannot explain at the highest level of abstraction, as in mathematical equations, the full reality of capitalism and imperialism, since it cannot account either for the historical origins of the system itself, or for the nature of the class struggle. Nor indeed can it present in a strictly determinant fashion the contemporary historical manifestation of the law of value, expressed as the theory of “globalized value,” which requires recognition of such factors as monopoly power and unequal exchange. At best we can see value relations as historically “transformed” in ways that are less determinant than in the abstract models based on a freely competitive economy, but which are still subject to meaningful political-economic analysis.
The rise of monopoly capital and imperialism from the late nineteenth century on consolidated a system of “apartheid on a world scale” dividing the affluent countries of the North from those of the South.
Today, Africa World Now Project will present a 2013 lecture that Samir Amin gave at School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London as part of the series "Samir Amin: Six Decades of Development Debate"
Samir Amin was born in Cairo in 1931 and was educated at the Lycee Francais there. He gained a Ph.D. in Political Economy in Paris (1957), as well as degrees from the Institut de Statistiques and from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques. He then returned home where he was attached to the planning bodies of Nasser's regime. He left Egypt in 1960 to work with the Ministry of Planning of the newly independent Mali (1960-1963), and following this, he commenced an academic career. He has held the position of full professor in France since 1966 and was for ten years (1970-1980) the director of the U.N. African Institute for Economic Development and Planning (in Dakar). Since 1980 he was directing the African Office of the Third World Forum, an international non-governmental association for research and debate.
He is author of many books, which include, but are not limited to, Accumulation on a World Scale: A Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment; Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism; Maldevelopment: Anatomy of a Global Failure; The People's Spring: The Future of the Arab Revolution
Over the past twenty-five years, Mozambique has charted a path of dizzying economic growth nearly as steep as China’s, making it among the fastest-growing economies on the planet. But most Mozambicans have little to show for the long boom; to travel in Mozambique is to see much of the promise of development as a mirage. And in the fall of 2016, a debt crisis unraveled layers of corruption that reverberated across Europe, heralding what many in the financial world feared might be the beginning of a “global financial shockwave” (The Guardian).
Go Tell the Crocodiles explores the efforts of ordinary people to provide for themselves where foreign aid, the formal economy, and the government have fallen short. Author Rowan Moore Gerety tells the story of contemporary Mozambique through the heartbreaking and fascinating lives of real people, from a street kid who flouts Mozambique’s child labor laws to make his living selling muffins, to a riverside community that has lost dozens of people to crocodile attacks. Moore Gerety introduces us to a nation still coming to grips with a long civil war and the legacy of colonialism even as it wrestles with the toll of infectious disease and a wave of refugees, weaving stories together into a stunning account of the challenges facing countries across Africa.
Visit: https://thenewpress.com/books/go-tell-crocodiles
Hip hop, as a cultural product of Africa and African descendant peoples is a rich field of inquiry. Hip hop as a viable platform that highlights calls for social change is the life-giving breath of hip hop.
Nevertheless, a viable work that dives deep into the sociopolitical and
philosophical foundations of hip hop as a human expression of African futures is still yet to be written.
Most work on hip hop is still grasping with it at its surface level. Still justifying its existence. Resisting the clutches of the ever-evolving attempts of racial capitalism to control it, hip hop as the historical and ancestral culmination of art, philosophy, politics, collectivism, questions of humanity is simultaneously evolving. Africa, as Dr. Msia Clark writes in her book, Hip Hop in Africa: Prophets of the City and Dustyfoot Philosophers (https://hiphopafrican.com/2017/12/17/hip-hop-in-africa-prophets-of-the-city-and-dustyfoot-philosophers/), is where the origins of hip hop can be found.
According to Dr. Clark, when Africans were forcibly taken from their homelands, enslaved, they carried with them their human traditions, their cultural traditions that linked them with heaven and earth. One of these traditions were the rhythmic meditations on life, love, politics, the future—we call music. These traditions were forged in the conditions within which those Africans found themselves, the Americas, South, Central, North—to become jazz, the blues, gospel…and of course hip hop.
Therefore, to understand the roots of hip hop in Africa—its origins—adds a depth and breadth to studying hip hop that is vital to understand its salience and ability to invent the future.
What we will hear next is a recent conversation with Dr. Msia Clark on her recently published book…Hip Hop in Africa: Prophets of the City and Dustyfoot Philosophers
Dr. Msia Kibona Clark is an Associate Professor in the Department of African Studies at Howard University. She is originally from Tanzania and received her doctorate in African Studies from Howard University in 2006. Her research has focused on African migration and identity, as well as hip hop and popular culture in Africa. Dr. Clark has published several scholarly publications on African migration, African immigrant identities, relations between African migrants and African Americans, and hip-hop culture’s intersections with social change, gender, and politics in Africa. She has published two books (Hip Hop and Social Change in Africa: Ni Wakati and Hip-Hop in Africa: Prophets of the City and Dustyfoot Philosophers) and over ten scholarly articles and book chapters, and currently produces the Hip Hop African blog and monthly podcast hosted at hiphopafrican.com. Dr. Clark is also an accomplished photographer. She has participated in exhibits in Tanzania and the U.S. Her work was also featured in the book project Mfon: Women Photographers in the African Diaspora.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
Amie Césaire writes that: “at the very time when it most often mouths the word, the West has never been further from being able to live a true humanism—a humanism made to the measure of the world.”
Sylvia Wynter adds clarity in that “[O]ur now immensely large-scale systemic injustices, as extended across the planet, are all themselves as law-likely and co-relatedly indispensable to the institutionalization of our now purely secular and therefore Western and Westernized liberal/neoliberal Man’s homo economicus’s biocosmogonically chartering origin narrative!”
Elsewhere, Wynter writes that “Human beings are magical. Bios and Logos. Words made flesh, muscle and bone animated by hope and desire, belief materialized in deeds, deeds which crystallize our actualities […] And the maps of spring always have to be redrawn again, in undared forms.”
Wynter’s vocation, according to Katherine McKittrick, works towards “the possibility of undoing and unsettling—not replacing or occupying—Western conceptions of what it means to be human.”
According to David Scott, “The story of humanism is often told as a kind of European coming of age story. But this coming of age story has another aspect or dimension that is often relegated to a footnote, namely the connection between humanism and dehumanization.”
This fact, in all of its complexities and simplicity, is the foundation upon which, as I argue in my work, human rights theory and practice was constructed. However, the tradition of resistance to this othering process and all of its knowledge production capabilities and capacities, an alternative conception of the world was formed. Conceptions that I call an Africana critical human rights consciousness.
The processes of creating whiteness, and its antithesis blackness being stripped of its agency, its human—being was essential. Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks highlights this dialectical process as the ‘zone of non-being’.
Since its inception, capitalism has displaced and disappeared peoples not only through commodification and mystification, but also through marginalizing non-Western understandings of the world. For Wynter, social categories such as class, race and gender are all part of “the performative enactment of the Western world system’s [allocation of] degrees of domination/subordination.”
What we will hear next is Dr. Paget Henry engage the life and work of Sylvia Wynter. Dr. Paget Henry is Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Brown University. He is the author of Caliban's Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy (Routledge, 2000), Peripheral Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Antigua (Transaction Books, 1985), and co-editor of C.L.R. James's Caribbean (Duke UP, 1992) and New Caribbean: Decolonization, Democracy, and Development (Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1983).
Henry is editor of The C.L.R. James Journal and co-editor of the Routledge series Africana Thought.
Sylvia Wynter is professor emeritus at Stanford University. She is normally described by some as a Caribbean novelist and playwright. Her thought is centered on advancing our understanding of the contradictions in the Man/human dialectic universalized by a Western project to assert its philosophical, ontological, epistemological, cosmological understanding as being THE standard to which all others should be measured—modeled. By will or force.
Professor Wynter was born of Jamaican parents in the Oriente Province of Holguin, Cuba. Educated at King's College, University of London, gaining her MA in 1953 for a thesis on Spanish drama. In 1977 she became Professor of African and Afro-American Studies at Stanford University. Wynter is among the most noted contemporary women playwrights of the Caribbean, rooting much of her work in the folk idioms of the region.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities...
Today, we will take a look the legacy and contributions of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz as he expands the notions and ideas of African world history, justice, freedom, & citizenship…
The collective and historical consciousness of the world in general—and the Africana world, specifically are still trying to grasp and in many instances are still grappling with the profound impact of the trajectory setting praxis of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz.
In fact, interestingly most of us are still trying to deal with basic questions related to Malcolm X…the breadth and depth of his praxis prompts us to still ask: Who is Malcolm X?…
Still, one question rises above all others: Have we been able to truly hear to understand the deep thought of El Shabazz?
Malcolm is given to us as an enigma—an object—he was and is still feared—not only by those current power elite—who by the way directly remember the time of Malcolm as many of them were in positions of authority then and still are now (Malcolm was assassinated 55years ago) …
But he is feared by many black folk who are comfortable with their positions in this segmented society—he is fragmented—disassociated from the larger Africana struggle for a more just and humane world.
This disassociation becomes important to note as the civil rights manifestation of the freedom struggle is given as representing the completion of entire movement itself—consequently he seen as a rupture in black political, social, cultural, economic thought and behavior---he is juxtaposed to Dr. King...
As we know, there have been many works that analyze Brother Malcolm, particularly by people of African descent in the U.S. One of the most potent reflections on this corpus on Malcolm was given in (1992) by Amiri Baraka when he argued that most of the work on Malcolm has been “distorted and co-opted by a generation of backward Black petty bourgeoisie who have never lived with Black people, never lived in the ghetto. Children of Black people who are a part of the anti-us apartheid movement of the 50s and 60s allowed to move to the suburbs and be the token. The masses of Black people did not move forward, only a small sector identified as “role models” for the rest. For them Black culture is abstract—a style, understood only in theory.”
What this all suggest is that in order to truly understand Malcolm X we must do a few things: 1) El Hajj Malik El Shabazz must be situated and mapped in a longer context of Africana world resistance…his praxis is not an anomaly in the sociopolitical and cultural praxis of the African world---it is part and parcel of a larger Black Radical Tradition…a strain of radical thought and action centered on the connectedness of all oppressed African peoples; 2) once mapped this praxis must be placed in its proper place---it must understood as a human rights discourse. Or more appropriately an Africana critical human rights consciousness; and 3) in being understood as so… this framework can then be applied as deep critique—a theory critical of the complexities and nuances found in a society that is a product of racial capitalism.
What we will hear next is El Hajj Malik El Shabazz in his own words...
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Brazil; Colombia; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson Mississippi; Avalon Village in Detroit; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Enjoy the program…!
Image: Jacob Lawrence, Migration Series, panel 45, 1941.
Marx wrote in the Poverty of Philosophy, in Chapter II Part 1 The Method, Fourth Observation that: “Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry..."
Moving this argument beyond Marx, Africana scholars/activists, thinkers, cultural workers such as, but not limited to, C. L. R. James; W. E. B. Du Bois, Cedric Robinson, Eric Williams, Amiri Baraka deepens the overture by Marx.
According to J. Phillip Thompson in his article titled, Capitalism, Democracy, and Du Bois’s Two Proletariats, it is suggested that W. E. B. Du Bois arguments in Marxism and the Negro Problem and Black Reconstruction supports the notion that capitalism created two proletariats.
Writing in Marxism and the Negro Problem, Du Bois argues that: [the] black proletariat is not part of the white proletariat. . . while Negro labor in America suffers because of the fundamental inequities of the whole capitalist system, the lowest and most fatal degree of its suffering comes not from the capitalists but from fellow white laborers..."
Moreover, capitalism (beginning with slavery) offered the white worker, a second/distinct proletariat role; more specifically a policing role in relation to the first proletariat. Du Bois writes in Black Reconstruction that: “The system of slavery demanded a special police force and such a force was made possible and unusually effective by the presence of the poor whites…” Adding more perspective, Eric Williams writing in Slavery and Capitalism, argued that capitalism was an economic modality that replaced the practice of chattel slavery once European elites accumulated the vast surplus capital to firmly fuel the industrial revolution.
Adding more perspective, Eric Williams writing in Slavery and Capitalism, argued that capitalism was an economic modality that replaced the practice of chattel slavery once European elites accumulated the vast surplus capital to firmly fuel the industrial revolution.
Contemplating the conditions within which African descendant folk where living during the 1960s, Sydney Wilhelm in, Who Needs the Negro? argues that the conditions which produced the rebellions were caught in the complex relationship of internal colonial conditions that were directly related to the nature of work, the historic role and dependency of black labor, and the shift in the needs of a more technologically advanced global economy.
In the tradition of those mentioned above, today we ask: Is it important (or time) be critical of labor?...What is the use of labor in this moment, as we live in a world of algorithms and move toward an artificial intelligent future? What does "Labor" mean in a settler colonial society...?
It is within this context that Africa World Now Project’s own, Mwiza Munthali caught up with Bill Fletcher. Bill Fletcher, Jr., co-founder of the Center for Labor Renewal, is a syndicated columnist and long-time labor activist. He has served as President of TransAfrica Forum and was formerly the Education Director and later Assistant to the President of the AFL-CIO. He is the author and co-author of a number of books which include: The Indispensable Ally: Black Workers and the Formation of the Congress of Industrial Relations, 1934-1941; They are Bankrupting US!; Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice; Claim No Easy Victories: The legacy of Amilcar Cabral.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
Esteban Morales Dominguez’s herculean efforts to offer a thoughtful and deeply critical view of the persistence of racism in Cuba is an important frame from which one can approach the question of race in Cuba.
Not only is it an important project for anyone interested in substantively addressing the evolutionary nature of racism local and/or global context, but its salience continually threatens any progress of the Cuban to move closer to an equal society as well as any other society.
Along with Morales’ efforts, Dr. Devyn Spence Benson author of Antiracism in Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution has offered another meditation on the question of race in cuba.
Analyzing the ideology and rhetoric around race in Cuba and south Florida during the early years of the Cuban revolution, Devyn Benson argues that ideas, stereotypes, and discriminatory practices relating to racial difference persisted despite major efforts by the Cuban state to generate social equality. Drawing on Cuban and U.S. archival materials and face-to-face interviews, Benson examines 1960s government programs and campaigns against discrimination, showing how such programs frequently negated their efforts by reproducing racist images and idioms in revolutionary propaganda, cartoons, and school materials.
Building on nineteenth-century discourses that imagined Cuba as a raceless space, revolutionary leaders embraced a narrow definition of blackness, often seeming to suggest that Afro-Cubans had to discard their blackness to join the revolution. This was and remains a false dichotomy for many Cubans of color. While some Afro-Cubans agreed with the revolution's sentiments about racial transcendence--"not blacks, not whites, only Cubans"--others found ways to use state rhetoric to demand additional reforms. Still others, finding a revolution that disavowed blackness unsettling and paternalistic, fought to insert black history and African culture into revolutionary nationalisms. Despite such efforts by Afro-Cubans and radical government-sponsored integration programs, racism has persisted throughout the revolution in subtle but lasting ways.
It is instructive for every movement—particularly movements of color, today—to engage in the same self-critique…deep analysis…which informs honest activity to address the deep structures of race…while at the same time understanding that the salience of racism is thoroughly entangled in the capitalist construction of society.
It must not be lost that, capitalism…the creation of wealth, according to Hardt and Negri in their work titled Empire, tends ever more toward should be understood as biopolitical production, the production of life itself, in which the economic, the political, and the economic overlap and invest one another.
Devyn Spence Benson assistant professor of Africana and Latin American Studies at Davidson College. Devyn has published articles and reviews in the Hispanic American Historical Review, Journal of Transnational American Studies, Journal of Cuban Studies, World Policy Journal, and PALARA: Publication of the Afro-Latin / American Research Association. Her work has been supported by the Doris G. Quinn, Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS), and Gaius Charles Bolin dissertation fellowships. She has held post-doctoral residencies at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem and the WEB Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at the Hutchins Center at Harvard University.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
Enjoy the program.
The control of information…the foundation of knowledge formation…is a crucial tool of oppression. The manufactured ignorance of the masses has been utilized to create a globalized order that positions one group of people against another group of people, nevertheless, the reality suggest that… groups of people who are in bitter conflict with each other...actually have more in common than differ.
The methods to free one’s self from not-knowing (an ignorance) are many-fold, and bound by the conditions within which it this ignorance is formed.
The Cuban revolution was one in a protracted line of resistance movements in world-historical moments when the people decided to move beyond their manufactured realities.
Che Guevara is undeniably one of the chief architects of this moment.
The influence of Che is displayed in his December 11, 1964 UN speech where he proclaims that: “Cuba comes here to state its position on the most important points of controversy and will do so with the full sense of responsibility that the use of this rostrum implies, while at the same time fulfilling the unavoidable duty of speaking clearly and frankly...
We would like to see this Assembly shake itself out of complacency and move forward. We would like to see the committees begin their work and not stop at the first confrontation. Imperialism wants to turn this meeting into a pointless oratorical tournament, instead of solving the serious problems of the world. We must prevent it from doing so. This session of the Assembly should not be remembered in the future solely by the number 19 that identifies it. Our efforts are directed to that end.
It is vital that we interrogate the forms of knowledge with which we use to understand our past and present, as the answers we collect are directly related to how we move toward a future…how we navigate the world…
In short, it essential to consistently think about the way we think…ask individual and collective critical questions.
The ideas that form is only dangerous to those who seek to control lived realities of the masses.
The more we seek the continuities in our experiences…the closer we come to a reconstructed world. This has been…and still is the central premise of African world resistance movements…Cuba has without doubt shown material and ideological effect on this premise…
Let’s listen to Che Guevara ideas on democracy, radical humanism, etc in his own words, unfiltered.
What you will hear in today’s program:
1) An excerpt of Che’s December 11, 1964, speech at the 19th General Assembly of the United Nations in New York
2) We then will hear a December 16, 1964 informal interview gave to several journalists at the Cuban Mission Headquarters in New York narrated by journalist Chris Couch
3) Lastly, we will hear a segment of a panel interview Che participated in on Face the Nation, December 13, 1964 where he faced a barrage of questions from Richard C Hut-ta-let; Ted Shultz, Paul Niven.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
Enjoy the program.
What we witnessed in Charlottesville, Virginia highlighted the deep contradictions in the U.S. socio-historical and cultural fabric of racialized capitalism, where the creation of a mythologized identity centered on empty notions of racial supremacy forged in a settler-colonial nation…is in deep crisis before the world very eyes.
The seeds of this moment was planted almost 500+ years ago. We see its material manifestations in every corner of the world, where Western sociopolitical organization and cultural mechanisms are given primacy over indigenous systems.
The implications of building a system grounded in settler colonial social organization are bearing its fruit. To view or understand what happened that weekend through another lens produces impotent analysis.
As Aimé Césaire wrote in Discourse on Colonialism: “A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization (31).
Nevertheless, the apparent surprise by many, who watched in pure horror, produced rationalizations that can be understood to them in one concept---anomaly. To this segment of the population, what they were witnessing was in fact, an anomaly in the great sociopolitical project called the United States. For them, the liberalism that undergirds the US nation-state project is sanctified.
On the other hand, what was displayed and represented that weekend was a longer socio-historical narrative of national myths that produced institutionalized chattel slavery; the savagery of colonialisms…all rooted in a hyperaggressive racialized capitalism. The environment within which manifestations of these narratives evolved were implicitly forged within liberal—and neoliberal guided institutions and systems of thought. The attendant effect produces...an unbridled violence.
So where does this bring us? Where do we go from here? What can we bring to this conversation that has not been already been shared? More importantly, what are the questions we are not asking, but are important to ask? How do we being to stop reacting and start responding?
Can we or should we expect a settler colony where racial capitalism is the modus operandi of everything; every institution, every system to give up its legitimacy by recognizing “public space”?
The fallacy in the rationalization of some who question the logic of erecting Confederate monuments because they lost the war is flaw in every sense of its liberal roots.
What do I mean? Let us critically examine the question that posits did the Confederates actually lose? I, as many noted historians, political scientists, etc would argue the Confederates did not lose. The ideas, morals, values, and standards they represented are and have always been with right where they were rooted. They are weaved into the very fabric of the US nation-state…its national myths which produce contradictory identities; contradictory policies; contradictory values; contradictory ideals.
Today, we are joined by Dr. Josh Myers, Assistant Professor in the Department of Afro American Studies at Howard University where he examines Black intellectual traditions and the conditions of its existence in the Western academy.
We will engage in a wide-ranging discussion about the implications of Charlottesville; pubic space in a capitalist society; and the long history and salience of racialized ideas.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
Enjoy the program.
In a speech delivered in 1971 in Cape Town, South Africa, Steve Bantu Biko proclaimed that the “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”
This time-less expression is undoubtedly just as important today, than when these words were first uttered. More importantly, they are fueling grassroots organizing and resistance efforts in South Africa, as well as in Burkina Faso, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Brazil and other places.
We see the echoes of this axiom in movements across South Africa from the Rhodes Must Fall uprisings to the organizational expressions of resistance of organizations such as Black Frist, Land First.
Today, in South Africa…the tide is changing. Many are developing a critical consciousness that is informing their resistance to the failures of post-Apartheid South Africa, with support and solidarity from around the African world…the people of South Africa are no longer sitting idly by waiting for justice and equality to be legislated for them. Important to note, the historical timeline is just 23 years since…this point is vital to highlight for a number of reasons…
They are responding to what some analysts call…the neocolonial policies that maintains the deadly economic and sociopolitical structure of apartheid that is bolstered by still present white supremacist ideological practices, which continually exacerbate inequalities and class divisions in a "new" South Africa.
Chris Hani, another one of South Africa’s important radical activist intellectuals is vital to examine in tandem with Steve Biko. Often, intentionally left out of any conversation about the struggle against the racist apartheid regime, Chris Hani praxis brings a clarity to the resistance within South Africa today, as it did when he was alive.
The ability of Chris Hani to galvanize masses, his ideological clarity, and full commitment to the people of South Africa was clear. It was so clear that it, of course, threaten the “broker” peace between the apartheid government and the ANC.
According to a 1991 confidential cable by a Pretoria-based US diplomat, "[He] often appears on public platforms in the townships wearing quasi-combat fatigues and delivering fiery speeches that arouse and delight the audience…the cable goes on to highlight that...“many observers believe that Hani would trounce Mbeki if there were a popular vote among ANC supporters.”
This method of response by perceived power elites, is not relegated to African radical activist/intellectuals. This response is global.
Nevertheless, Chris Hani and Steve Biko provide a deep and clear archetype of what it means to the change we wish to see. It is our job to expand, evolve the path that has been set.
What we will hear next is Steve Biko explore Black Consciousness, in his own words, and then Chris Hani.
Listen intentionally. Clearly. But most importantly, listen for and to extract the ideas…understand the historical continuities, to see toward a different future.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
Enjoy the program.
According to Patterson and Kelley (2000) attempts to identify and make sense of the African diaspora are almost as old as the diaspora itself. Dating back at least to Juan Latino (a 16th century Spanish black professor at Granada), Ottobah Cuagano and Olaudah Equiano in the eighteenth century, and Jose Manuel Valdes (a Afro Peruvian physician who proved that cancer was not contagious) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, black writers and activists have often defined themselves as part of a larger international black community.
The presumption that black people worldwide share a common culture was a response to a political imperative. An imperative that led to the formation of political and cultural movements premised on international solidarity.
Thus, while acknowledging that African cultural elements survived the forced dispersal throughout the Americas and the Caribbean, we must always keep in mind that diasporic identities are socially and historically constituted, reconstituted, and reproduced; and that any sense of a collective identity among black peoples wherever they are found throughout the word is contingent and constantly shifting.
Neither the fact of blackness nor shared experiences under racism nor the historical process of their dispersal makes for community or even a common identity. Yet it was precisely out of the historical struggle to resist this domination that a concept of "authentic" identity emerged alongside a discourse of difference and discontinuity.
Stuart Hall (1990) identifies these two opposing but dialectically linked conceptions of identity in his essay "Cultural Identity and Diaspora." He writes: "The first position defines cultural identity in terms of one, shared culture, a sort of collective 'one true self,' hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed 'selves,' which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common. Within the terms of this definition, our cultural identities reflect their common historical experiences and shared cultural codes which provide us, as 'one people,' with stable, unchanging and continuous frames of reference and meaning, beneath the shifting divisions and vicissitudes of our actual history."
What we will hear next is a recent talk from Dr. Joseph Harris where he explores the evolution, current state and the challenges of diaspora studies it faces moving forward.
Dr. Joseph Harris a retired distinguished professor emeritus of history from Howard University.
His seminal Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora (1982), a collection of essays that grew out of conferences he organized at Howard University in 1979 and at the University of Nairobi in 1981, is widely credited with establishing the field of African Diaspora Studies.
He was founder and first president of the West African Research Association in Senegal, and he served as vice president of the International African Studies Association. From 1994 to 2004, he collaborated with the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s “Slave Route Project.” In January 2008, Harris organized and moderated an important symposium at the National Archives on the abolition of the trans-Atlantic trade in captive Africans. He has collaborated with L. Douglas Wilder, former governor of Virginia and past mayor of Richmond, to establish a National Slavery Museum in Petersburg, Va.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
Enjoy the program!
For Enrique Dussel: “Modernity dawned in 1492 and with it the myth of a special kind of sacrificial violence which eventually eclipsed whatever was non-European.”
For Walter Mignolo, 1492 is the moment at which “there is a bifurcation of history”.
For Sylvia Wynter: “(T)he 1492 event would set in motion the bringing together of separated branches of our human species within the framework of a single history that we all now live, and while it led to incredible techno-scientific and other such dazzling achievements, as well as to the material well-being of one restricted portion of humanity, it also led to the systemic large-scale degradation and devalorization, even the extinction, of a large majority of the peoples of the earth.”
Taking this idea further, Wynter argues that the struggle of our new millennium will be one between the ongoing imperative of securing the well-being of our present ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the human species itself/ourselves. Because of this overrepresentation, which is defined in the first part of the title as the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom, any attempt to unsettle the coloniality of power will call for the unsettling of this overrepresentation as the second and now purely secular form of what Aníbal Quijano identifies as the “Racism/Ethnicism complex,” on whose basis the world of modernity was brought into existence from the fifteenth/sixteenth centuries onwards (Quijano 1999, 2000). And of what Walter Mignolo identifies as the foundational “colonial difference” on which the world of modernity was to institute itself, thus institutionalizing the the human vs. man dialectic.
The historical legacy and violent structures that are a vestige of racial mixing (albeit out of clear survival and necessity from the perspective of the Portuguese settler colonialist) and a lack of explicit apartheid laws, have allowed Brazilian elites to advance the myth of Brazil’s racial democracy. Conversely, these same elites lament that the affirmative action and anti-discrimination policies, despite being held up by the Brazilian Supreme Court, are US imports bent on inciting racial distrust and violence.
Brazilian and US police have much in common. Both are waging an intensified militarized war on black, brown, and the poor that results in a reinscripton the power relations that are in a large part based on 14th century ideas of race; 18th-19th century colonialism/chattel slavery…but all are frankly rooted in the false notion of white supremacy.
What we will hear next is Africa World Now Project’s collective associate producer, Dr. Keisha-Khan Perry and myself in conversation with Dr. Christen Smith.
Dr. Christen Smith is a Black feminist anthropologist, social justice advocate and Associate Professor of Anthropology and African and African Diaspora Studies at The University of Texas at Austin where work focuses on the gendered dimensions of anti-Black state violence and resistance in the Americas, particularly Brazil.
Based on her long-term collaborations with black organizers in Brazil, Christen Smith’s, Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence and Performance in Brazil (University of Illinois Press, 2016).
Today’s program was executive produced by Keisha-Khan Perry.
And as always in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
Enjoy the program.
On the evening of Wednesday, March 14, 2018 Marielle Franco, a city councilor for Brazil’s Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL), was killed as she was riding in a car in Rio de Janeiro. Reports suggest that a Cobalt-model car pulled up beside her and fired thirteen bullets into the vehicle. The bullets killed her and her driver. Franco’s press secretary, who was in the backseat with her, survived.
According to an article titled, Who Killed Marielle Franco? in Jacobin magazine, currently, evidence suggest that Franco’s death was in fact a well-planned political execution. Before Marielle Franco was murdered, she had attended an event earlier that evening in Rio’s Lapa neighborhood called “Black Women Changing Power Structures.”
While working and raising a daughter as a single mother, she pursued bachelor’s and master’s degrees, ultimately defending a dissertation that criticized police “pacification” campaigns in Rio’s largest favelas. She wrote, “The police state is aimed at the repression and control of the poor. The most emblematic mark of this picture is the militaristic siege of the favelas and a growing process of incarceration.” She goes on to argue that “the campaigns worked to contain the dissatisfied or ‘excluded’ of this process, the majority of them poor, and increasingly relegated to the city’s ghettos and in prisons.”
Today, AWNP will bring to you an recent conversation between Dr. Keisha-Khan Perry and Dr. Vera Benedito that explored the deep implications of the recent death of Marielle Franco. Examining the origins of Franco’s politics rooted in fighting for a radical change in the Brazil’s sociopolitical and economic structures and mapping the future of Brazil’s black radical left, Keisha-Khan and Professor Benedito provide an important context of global violence and the African world.
Initially trained as a journalist and literary critic, Dr. Benedito was a founding member of the Black Movement in São Paulo. She was recruited by the late Ruth Simms Hamilton at Michigan State University in the 1990s to complete her Masters and PhD in Sociology. She was an inaugural contributor to the African Diaspora Research Project that brought together scholars and activists from around the world to carry out collaborative and comparative research on black culture and politics. The late Minister of Racial Equality, Luiza Bairros, was part of that cohort of students at Michigan State who along with Dr. Benedito profoundly shaped African Diaspora Studies in the United States. She has written on the history of Caribbean labor migration to Brazil as well as to narrate the complex political history of the struggle for affirmative action in higher education and in the labor market. She returned to Brazil in the mid-2000s where she has worked as a teacher and administrator in the public school system while also training teachers to implement Afro-Brazilian and African history into the curriculum.
In addition to being the newest member of the Africa World Now Project collective as an associate producer, Dr. Keisha-Khan Perry is Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University where she specializes in the critical study of race, gender, and politics in the Americas Professor Perry is also author of Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil.
Today’s program was executive produced by Keisha-Khan Perry and as always in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
Enjoy the program.
Today…we will explore the work of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o with Dr. Josh Myers, Assistant Professor in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (b. 1938) is one of the African world’s most prolific writers, thinkers, cultural workers, play-write, activist.
Growing up in colonial Kenya, his dream of a free Africa has shaped his works.
In 1977 he began a new form of theatre ‘Nihega Ndeenda’(Ngaahika Ndeenda), which sought to liberate the theatrical process from what he considered “the general bourgeois education system.”
Despite its success, the authoritarian Kenyan regime shut it down and he was subsequently imprisoned for more than a year. He was eventually released and left for the U.S., where he still resides...
Early on Ngũgĩ understood the interdependent relationship between the politics of memory, language, and resistance…a process that prompted him to write in his language—Kikuyu. Among his extensive works, are novels, plays, short stories and essays, such as, but not limited to, Writers in Politics (1981 and 1997); Decolonising the Mind (1986); Moving the Center (1994); and Penpoints Gunpoints and Dreams (1998);‘Weep Not, Child’ (1964), ‘Petals of Blood’ (1977), ‘Wizard of the Crow’ (2006), ‘Dreams in a Time of War’ (2010) and ‘In the House of the Interpreter: A Memoir’ (2015). Currently Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has also taught at Yale University, and New York University. He is recipient of 10 honorary doctoral degrees and is the founder and editor of the Kikuyu-language journal.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is a frequent Nobel nominee...
Before we delve into a deep exploration of Ngũgĩ work with Dr. Josh Myers, Assistant Professor in the Department of Afro American Studies at Howard University, we will first listen to Ngũgĩ himself…in a talk titled: Re-Membering Africa: Retrieval and Exchange of African Memory
Enjoy!!!......
I opened today's program with a track titled ALie Nation Ft. John Trudell by A Tribe Called Red. As a tribute to all indigenous peoples of the Americas. Considering tomorrow, we at AWNP pay tribute to the survival of indigenous peoples despite decades of marginalization, oppression, and attempts to rewrite their historical contributions to the formation of the US.
Through their material and spiritual contributions…captured in cultural production, indigenous communities continue to live and evolve their traditional ways of being…
This process of and evolution in the development of cultural production is not categorically different than the processes of cultural production from Africans and people of Africa descent around the world…
Today, we will listen to Part 1 of a two-part series titled: Hip Hop as Critical Consciousness. In this series, we will engage a range of artists, activist, & thinkers in deeply exploring the essence of and finding the continuities in African and Diasporic sociopolitical thought and behavior—focusing on hip hop as a form of cultural expression and creative resistance.
The series specifically seeks to engage in a substantive discourse on the viability of hip hop being a platform for developing a critical consciousness. A platform based in Pan African activity that has implications for all oppressed people.
The idea is rooted in moving the conversation beyond "mainstream" discourse about hip hop and situate it in a proper context…addressing real-time problems faced by African and African descendant communities across the globe…
It does this…by examining the origins and continuities in African and Diasporic dimensions of hip hop…and secondly, looking @ its ability to transmit complex messages that have collective sensibilities in inform the formation of a critical consciousness…
With this, a number of fundamental questions arise, which asks, but are but are not limited to:
1. What culture is hip hop reflecting—globally?
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How can hip hop be used as a force for creative resistance?
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Can hip hop serve as a platform for developing a critical consciousness? If, so, in what can we root it?
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What is the role of the artist?...Or More importantly what is the role and responsibility of the listeners?
Today, in this Part I of this series…will explore East African hip hop—specifically Kenyan hip hop with Dr. Priscilla Gitonga. Dr. Gitonga is an scholar and artist who currently lives in Nairobi, Kenya.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, Palestine, South Africa, and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
Enjoy the program!
The ability to make language—words extend from the page…to become alive… to dance in the mind of a reader…creating vivid pictures that map time and space…weaving multiple experiences into a common tapestry of human history is an ability that only a few writers possess. It would not be a stretch to place such writers in the deep tradition passed down by generations of ancient priest, mystics, thinkers, storytellers, teachers who are often referred to as oracles.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o fits seamlessly in the long line of historical oracles who possess foresight and insight in the continuities that crisscross our human past, present, and future. Every group of people have these oracles, but to hear them…to see them is an art. We have lost the patience and humility to listen to them. These vessels of ancestors, conveyors of deep thought…channelers of truths…that provide guidance for our deep praxis of humanity.
Ngũgĩ, as he is known, comes from an oral tradition of storytellers. A novelist, playwright, and essayist who sits alongside the likes of Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka in the modern African pantheon, he is a recurrent favorite for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Ngũgĩ’s life encompasses British colonialism and the anticolonial struggle for Kenyan independence; the tragedy of despotism in a free Africa; and exile…all of which he effortlessly weaves into his work.
According to a November 16, 2016 interview in the Financial Times with Ngũgĩ , the author recounts Ngũgĩ’s reflection of winning a Nobel:
“A Nobel would be validating but not essential.”
Ngugi wa Thiong’o was born in 1938 a village north of Nairobi, one of 28 children. In the 1950s, his older brother, Good Wallace, joined the Mau Mau anticolonial resistance against the British occupation whose prison camps were described by the then-solicitor general as having been “distressingly reminiscent of conditions in Nazi Germany or Communist Russia”, according to previously secret documents released by the British Foreign Office in 2012.
According to Ngũgĩ in the article:
The British response to the rebellion was brutal and relentless. It even extended to weaponizing language itself”
Further recalling this period, Ngũgĩ goes on in the article to say that it is was “the British who gave movement the name of Mau Mau— as if to say it was a meaningless movement”. Ngũgĩ reasons that “If they had said or called it the, ‘Land and Freedom Army’, as [the fighters] called it themselves, then they would be articulating the aims of the movement, right?”
Today, I invite you to listen to a recent reflection by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Dr. Micere Githae-Mugo…on their work…The Trail of Dedan Kimathi.
The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, a collaboration between Ngũgĩ and Mi Sheree-Mugo, is a response to colonialist writings about the Land and Freedom Army (aka the Mau Mau movement), which traditionally depicted the movement and its leader, Dedan Kimathi, as mentally unbalanced and vicious. They choose to present a counter narrative to this image by highlighting how the movement and its leader was seen by many of the peasants and laborers of Kenya.
In this reflection, they explore the politics of memory; the relationship between naming, forms of power, and resistance.
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The dominant narrative presented on the ANC, the struggle against South African Apartheid, the conditions and systems implemented when the ANC became the ruling party suggest that in a post-Apartheid South Africa, the people of South Africa experience distinctly identifiable improvements in their lived-conditions.
However, according to Benjamin Fogel and Sean Jacobs, in their article Zuma is not the Only Problem, “Over two decades after taking power, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) is less associated with national liberation than with corruption, cronyism, and neoliberal economic policies.”
Radical platforms remain at the grassroots. Many farm workers in the Western Cape province, for instance, have joined the Commercial Stevadoring and Allied Workers Union (CSAAWU) — a relatively small union that employs militant class politics in its struggle against some of the most powerful commercial agricultural interests in the country. As well as, the Shack Dwellers Movement, South Africa’s oldest social movement, who continue to mobilize for more equitable access to land, housing, and services with tremendous success, even in the face of state repression and political assassinations.”
The former trade union leader turned billionaire, Ramaphosa with the backing of the ANC, unseated, Zuma, who was once considered to be the shrewd, political astute Teflon-lined leader of the ANC, to become the current president of South Africa.
While Ramaphosa’s “supporters have heralded his victory as a triumph over the corruption, criminality, incompetence, and repression that have characterized Zuma’s presidency. Once a darling of the Left, Ramaphosa’s reputation will forever be stained by his involvement in the 2012 Marikana massacre.
To relegate systemic inequality, corruption, and violence to one person, negates the reality that the nexus within which these interdependent practices thrive are contradictory to the values and ideals that South Africans rooted, and root, their resistance in.
Today, we invited Nii Akuetteh back to have a much-needed conversation on the current conditions in South Africa.
Nii Akuetteh is an independent Africa policy analyst based in Washington, DC and was the Executive Director of African Immigrants Caucus. He was formerly the Executive Director of Africa Action and former director of OSI West Africa in Nigeria. Prior to that he was a Georgetown University Adjunct Professor of African Affairs and former Research Director at TransAfrica Forum. Mr. Akuetteh appears regularly on various media outlets such as Al Jazeera, BBC, CCTV, NPR, The Real News Network and many more.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
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“As I face Africa, I ask myself: What is it between us that constitutes a tie that I can feel better than I can explain?”
This was a question W.E.B. Du Bois asked himself in 1940 and we might imagine time and again before and after that moment. It was the question that guided his scholarship and his activism. Africa, was as Nahum Dmitri Chandler has argued, “the limit of the world,” and thus we might say, the beginning of Du Bois’s imagination for a future world, free of the toil and misery of modernity. How to explain this feeling was also how to produce an epistemological break that would generate a liberative politics out of that very feeling.
Born 150 years ago on February 23, 1868, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois began his journey back to the future through his grandmother Violet’s memory of a song her ancestors brought from Africa. It was that song which he heard again in the churches he visited while attending Fisk University. The search for the meaning of that song took him to the libraries of all the major Western universities, whilst becoming the first African to receive a PhD from Harvard. And then to Atlanta, where he found it being sang again in the deep South. He wrote about it in The Negro, published in 1915 and then attempted to place the urgency of the plight of its producers before the international community with his series of Pan African Conferences during the 1920s. He then connected it to the Mother herself, with his 1924 trip to Liberia.
Its meaning was loudest to him in 1945, where in Manchester England, a younger Du Bois discoverers of what it meant to be African in the world during the 5th Pan African Congress, inaugurating in many respects the African independence movements.
A year later, he sat down to remap his earlier works on Africa in his major undertaking, The World and Africa.
He connected the song back to the soil when he left the United States to live permanently in the Ghana imagined by Kwame Nkrumah’s movement. And it was there where he uttered the words:
“Awake, awake, O sleeping world,
Honour the sun;
Worship the stars, those vaster suns
Who rule the night
Where black is bright
And all unselfish work is right
And greed is sin.
And Africa leads on;
Pan Africa...”
And so it must lead…
We will think of W.E.B. Du Bois as more than a narrator of American racial experiences, but as one who understood those experiences to be “but a local phase of a world problem.” Or we will not think truly with Du Bois. For this is what his work ultimately meant, and what it should continue to mean for us.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
According to Hotep Idris Galeta, the famed south African jazz-musician and educator, in his article, "The Development of Jazz in South Africa", he wrote that "South African Jazz has had many elements contributing to its evolution and development. The most prominent and significant being the rich eclectic cultural diversity of the country’s inhabitants and the influence of African/American musical culture upon it over the years. These two variants coupled with an environment of legislated racism, gross human rights violations, created the unique artistic forge and mold responsible for the evolution of South African Jazz. The first informal contact the inhabitants of Cape Town had with African Americans was during the American Civil War, when the Confederate warship the “Alabama” came into the port of Cape Town in 1862 to replenish its supplies. The “Alabama” patrolled the South Atlantic where it would lie in wait for Union Ships to come around the Cape from the Far East on its way to the east coast ports of Philadelphia, New York, New Port and Boston. It would then attack, plunder and sink them. The “Alabama” was one of the most notorious and feared Southern commerce raiders on patrol in the South Atlantic sending some fifty-eight Union vessels to the bottom of the ocean during her two year patrol.
The Alabama was finally tracked down and sunk off the coast of France by a Union Warship on the 19th of June 1864.
On June 19th 1890 South Africans had their first formal contact with black-Americans and Black-American music when the “Virginia Jubilee Singers” from Hampton Virginia presented a series of concerts in Cape Town. Orpheus McAdoo was born in 1858 in Greensborough, North Carolina. As a young man he attended the Hampton Institute in Hampton Virginia, where he studied and graduated as a teacher in 1876. Before turning to music as a professional career in 1886 he taught school in Pulaski and Accomac Counties in the state of Virginia for ten years. In 1886 he toured Europe, Australia, New Zealand and the Far East after joining five members of the original Fisk Jubilee singers. Upon his return to the U.S. a year or two later McAdoo formed his own company by recruiting some ex students and graduates from Hampton amongst who were his future wife Mattie Allen and his brother Eugene.
South Africa has deep and clearly identifiable connections to the African diaspora, particularly in the experiences of people of African descent who live in the U.S.
What we will hear next is Africa World Now Project’s tribute to Hugh Masekela who transition to the ancestral realm on January 23 2018, through a collage of music, a 2012 Ted-talk by Hugh Masekela himself, 2014 interview with AWNP’s Mwiza Munthali, and reflections from various people who live in Southern African—specifically Malawi where Mwiza Munthali is currently on the ground…
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
Music:
J Dilla-African Rhythms
Hugh Maskela-Herb Alpert & Hugh Masekela - Foreign Natives
Hugh Masekela - Night in Tunisia
Hugh Masekela - The Big Apple
HUGH MASEKELA Bajabula Bonke (Healing Song)
Hugh Masekela- If Theres Anybody Out There
To understand, analysis, or critique the conditions within which the African world lives without centering the role of settler colonialism as a function of racial capitalism has proven to be limited in range and scope in understanding the conditions within which the African world finds itself, today.
Virtually no part of the modern United States—the economy, education, constitutional law, religious institutions, sports, literature, economics, even protest movements—can be understood without first understanding the slavery and dispossession that laid its foundation. It is because of this fact that radical historian Gerald Horne digs deeply into Europe’s colonization of Africa and the New World, when, from Columbus’s arrival until the Civil War, some 13 million Africans and some 5 million Native Americans were forced to build and cultivate a society extolling “liberty and justice for all.”
In The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean, released January 22, 2018, Gerald Horne shows that the seventeenth century was an era when the roots of slavery, white supremacy, and capitalism became inextricably tangled into a complex-self-sustaining system involving war and revolts in Europe, England’s conquest of the Scots and Irish, the development of formidable new weaponry able to ensure Europe’s colonial dominance, the rebel merchants of North America who created “the United States,” and the hordes of Europeans whose newfound opportunities in this “free” land amounted to “combat pay” for their efforts as “white” settlers.
Centering his book on the Eastern Seaboard of North America, the Caribbean, Africa, and what is now Great Britain, Gerald Horne provides a harrowing map of the apocalyptic loss and misery that likely has no parallel in human history.
Monthly Review Press argues that Gerald Horne’s work is an essential tool that will not allow history to be told by the victors. It is especially needed now, in the age of Trump. For it has never been more vital, Horne writes, “to shed light on the contemporary moment wherein it appears that these malevolent forces have received a new lease on life.”
What we will hear next is Africa World Now Project’s senior research, content contributor, and production director, Dr. Tasneem Siddiqui conversation with Dr. Gerald Horne.
Gerald Horne is John J. and Rebecca Moores Professor of African American History at the University of Houston. A prolific scholar, he has published more than three dozen books, including Confronting Black Jacobins and Race to Revolution, Monthly Review Press; The Counter Revolution of 1776 among many.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
In a 1968 lecture, Walter Rodney argued that “the first dilemma which one faces in attempting to utilize African history as one of the weapons in our struggle is a realization that, in a very real sense, we, as black people, are placed in [the] invidious position of having to justify our existence by antecedents, having to prove our humanity by what went before. Now this is very invidious. Humanity is not a thing one proves. One asserts [it] perhaps, or one accepts [it]. One doesn't really set out to prove it.
Rodney continues, “But, unfortunately, the historical circumstances in which black people have evolved in recent centuries have implanted in the minds of black brothers and sisters a certain historical conception and, in order to destroy that historical conception, one has to engage in this type of game of saying, "This is what the white man said but no, it isn't really so, we have a past," and that sort of thing.”
It is absolutely not surprise, and quite frankly highly problematic that overtly racist comments in main stream discourse are once again being normalized. A la the days of Jim Crow U.S., colonial Africa and Caribbean, Apartheid South Africa.
The fall out (albeit I personally am not sure why there is such surprise) from the recent report of comments from the White House about African countries and Haitian citizens being from s-hole countries.
According to a Washington Post article by Philip Bump titled Most Americans consider Trumps s-hole comments racist, the racist comment also started another line of questioning that unfolded on Google. On the afternoon of Jan. 11, after The Post report, searches for “is Trump racist” spiked in the United States. The article highlights a recent Quinnipiac University poll found that “Nearly 6 in 10 Americans think that Trump’s comments were racist. That includes majorities of independents and nearly all Democrats. It includes just over half of whites, 7 in 10 Hispanics and nearly 9 in 10 black Americans. White men, Republicans and white people without college degrees were more likely to say that the comments weren’t racist.”
The African Union, South Africans protested in Johannesburg, Haitian and Haitian-American citizens, Namibia, Senegal, Nigeria, Bostwana, Ghana, nearly all African countries responded to the comments made by Trump. Have not read nor heard much about the Northern portion of the African continent. Likely Trump nor these nations consider themselves a part of the African continent, hence the often-proliferated separation of Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. But hat for another show.
Today, we will move beyond racist comments made by an undebatable racist President (there’s no debate on this issue). Our program will explore the context, historical and contemporary within which these comments can actually be made, but more importantly why is this a surprise
Joining us today is Nii Akuetteh an independent Africa policy analyst based in Washington, DC and is the Executive Director of African Immigrants Caucus. He was formerly the Executive Director of Africa Action and former director of OSI West Africa in Nigeria. Prior to that he was a Georgetown University Adjunct Professor of African Affair and former Research Director at TransAfrica Forum. Mr. Akuetteh appears regularly on various media outlets such as Al Jazeera, BBC, CCTV, NPR, The Real News Network and more.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
The idea and practice of maroonage is an intriguing part of the vast story of African world resistance; a story that has deep implications on the idea and practice of freedom for the 21st century; it provides alternative models of social organization that challenge the current model of the nation-state; and a lens through which an African world future can be brought into sharp view—a sort of lens through which the thoughts and actions of those who say they are for liberation, justice, and equality can be measured.
It must be noted that freedom was difficult to maintain for many maroon communities. For example, a settlement of rebellious slaves was razed on Hispaniola in 1522. In Peru, Gonzalo Pizzaro sent a force to conquer 200 maroons who were living in a marshy area just north of Lima. In 1545, a bloody battle was fought in which every one of these “blacks” was killed. In 1795, a large band of Venezuelan slaves from the Ser-ra-nia de Coro region rose in revolt and established a close-knit chain of mountain retreats. Expeditions sent out by the Spanish quickly subdued them. A group of local planters reduced a runaway community near Mobile, Alabama, in 1827. The fugitives had inhabited the site for "years" prior to its destruction.
At least four cases exist of Cuban maroon settlements that negotiated permanent treaties with the island's Spanish colonizers. Carlos Rojas, in the province of Matanzas, and Palenque, near Havana, are two examples. A third is the settlement of Poblado del Cobre in Oriente province. The origins of this last community went far back to the beginning of the seventeenth century. For two hundred years its inhabitants thwarted Spanish attempts to destroy them. In 1800, the blacks signed a treaty of freedom with the whites. The town they established is still occupied today.
There are three documented instances in which maroon groups in Mexico were parties to enduring treaties with white colonizers. The first recorded example is a treaty agreed to in 1609, between Spanish officials from the port of Veracruz and a group of blacks under the leadership of an African named Yanga. As in all the previously cases, the whites agreed to this type of accommodation only after repeated failures to reduce the blacks. The treaty declared the maroons free men, and gave them a royal license to found a town, which they named San Lorenzo, or Yanga.
Nevertheless, the anti-black root of the current discourse surrounding U.S. anti-immigration policy and rhetoric must not be lost.
Here today is Dr. Beau Gaitors. Dr. Gaitors is an Assistant Professor of History where he teaches courses on Afro Latin American History and Latin American History at Winston Salem State University.
He received his PhD from Tulane University, in Latin American History. Dr. Gaitors holds a B.A. in International Relations and a B.A. in Africana Studies from Brown University (2008). He received his M.A. in Colonial Latin American History from Purdue University (2010). He has been a Fulbright scholar where he studied in Mexico. He just completed his book manuscript titled, Presence and Persistence in the Port: African Descendants in Early-Independence Veracruz, Mexico
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, the Avalon Village in Detroit; Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, cooperation Jackson in Jackson Mississippi; Palestine, South Africa, and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!
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This program is intent to push the boundaries of Black thought as Black Critique.
What do I mean?
Contextualization is an art, an art that I find an affinity with and seek to perfect. Not for a personal gratification, but to discover and map a “rhythm” ---much like John Coltrane or an African shaman---that can serve as a spark of our critical consciousness.
Black critique is a process of organic and evolutionary resistance to complicity, racial capitalism, colonialism/neocolonialism, imperialism, neo imperialism sexism, racism, as well as any and all forms of discrimination/marginalization against people historically and contemporarily marginalized, centering the African world experience, and mapping outward.
To understand Cornel West’s critique of Coates, one must engage with the long genealogy of Black Critique centered on Black Reason.
Social media has its way of Christopher Columbus-ing things that have already been (for centuries in fact). The critique of West on Coates is in line with a long tradition of intellectual and ideological engagement; an invocation of critical dialogue and reasoning to discover paths towards freedom. To find ways to correct sociopolitical wrongs, with economic rights, cultural degradation with spiritual revitalization. Black Critique is built upon Black Reason. This argument is not simply aesthetically— racial. Black is used, here, as qualifier of resistance. An assertation of African world humanity. A notice that declares---it has always been.
To understand Black reason is to understand the nature of the universe of thought and action itself. Both, its negative and positive reactions and responses.
As Achille Mbembe writes in Critique of Black Reason, to understand Black reason is to understand what constitutes reason as we know it— the reason of state, the reason of capital, the reason of history.
Today, we intend to start a critical conversation that moves beyond the aesthetic of critique...
What follows is an exploration of the current state and future of Black Critique with Dean Corey Walker.
Dr. Corey Walker is currently Vice President and Dean of the Samuel Dewitt Procter School of Theology as well as Professor of Religion and Society at Virginia Union University.
Dean Walker is the author of A Noble Fight: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America (University of Illinois Press) and has completed the manuscript for his next book entitled Between Transcendence and History: An Essay on Religion and the Future of Democracy in America. He is editor of the special issue of the journal Political Theology on “Theology and Democratic Futures” and Associate Editor of the award-winning SAGE Encyclopedia of Identity. He has published over fifty articles, reviews, book chapters, and essays appearing in wide range journals such as the C.L.R. James Review, Journal of American History, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and South Atlantic Quarterly.
Recently, Dean Walker was named to the Task Force for the Identification of the History of Formerly Enslaved African Americans in Virginia
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
Enjoy!
The conceptual and practical use of racial capitalism by many young activists who were shocked and ignited by their exposure to the events that spurred Ferguson, the uprising in Baltimore, continual state violence at the hands of a hyper militarized police force…and the many reflective actions produced in settler colony seeking to still become a nation-state…has taken on a life that I would argue is less a tool of analysis, but simply a catch phrase.
The work to bridge the gap in intellectual engagement and the work it necessitates once understood, is still wide.
However, this work is not something that Africana thinkers and activist have shied away from. The long tradition of radical thought and revolutionary practice is found in the cultural membrane of African peoples wherever they are found. The struggle—internal and external—to express and evolve ones’ full humanity is the eternal beacon that motivates Africana social, economic, political, and cultural life—whether consciously or unconsciously.
So, what is racial capitalism? What did Cedric Robinson mean when he highlighted and explored the development of racial capitalism?
Cedric Robinson challenged the Marxist idea that capitalism was a revolutionary negation of feudalism. Instead capitalism emerged within the European feudal order and flowered in the cultural soil of a Western civilization already thoroughly infused with racialism. Capitalism and racism, in other words, did not break from the old order but rather evolved from it to produce a modern world system of “racial capitalism” dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide.
In addition to this, Robinson was acutely aware of Du Bois’s articulation of racial capitalism in his work Black Reconstruction, where he wrote that “The giant forces of water and of steam were harnessed to do the world’s work, and the black workers of America bent at the bottom of a growing pyramid of commerce and industry; and they not only could not be spared, if this new economic organization was to expand, but rather they became the cause of new political demands and alignments, of new dreams of power and visions of empire,
Today, we will take a deep dive in expanding and solidifying our understanding of racial capitalism in the context of this temporal space we call…right now…with Robin D.G. Kelley.
Robin D. G. Kelley is Distinguished Professor of History and Black Studies & Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA, and current Chair of the Department of African American Studies. He is author of a number of books, which include Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times; Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression; Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original; Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class;
His latest book project is tentatively titled, The Education of Ms. Grace Halsell: An Intimate History of the American Century.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
Enjoy!
Image: Johana Londono
South African president Jacob Zuma often boasts that the African National Congress (ANC) “will rule until Jesus comes back.” Voters have consistently given the ANC clear majorities in national, provincial, and local elections since 1994, when South Africa first made the transition to democracy. A certain level of hubris may have been inevitable.
However, the 2016 local elections shattered the party’s complacency: its share of the national vote dipped below 60 percent for the first time, shaving off some 8 percent of the ANC’s support since the last local election.
South Africa struggle is well documented. The contributions of its most radical elements, however, are not. These radical elements were essential to the struggle against brutally repressive Apartheid regime.
The marginalization of their contributions and the solidification of ANC party elite exacerbates class divisions and ethnic tensions.
The ideas and practice of Steve Biko, Chris Hani, Robert Sobukwe, and others are finding practical expression in the various South African youth resistance movements--#feesmustfall; #rhodesmustfall; land struggles…captured in Shack Dwellers movements, eviction resistance, labor vs. corporation struggles, etc.
Twenty-three (23) years after South Africa democratic elections—considered by some as being the post-apartheid era…South African youth are finding that those ‘radical’ elements of Apartheid resistance are essential to framing a South African future.
Today, Mwiza Munthali, Africa World Now Project’s executive producer, international journalist, and human rights activist caught up with Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool. Ebrahim Rasool who served as South African ambassador to the United States between 2010-2015.
Mwiza and Ambassador Rasool explores the challenges of the ANC; its moral compass; and its internal dynamics.
In second segment, we turn our attention to the situation and conditions in Togo.
Since August, people have taken to the streets in protest of the lived-conditions of millions of Togolese under the current ruling family. The first protest was led by the Pan-African National Party (PNP), which called for constitutional and institutional reform. These demands later evolved to a call for the president to step down.
Again, joining us was Mwiza Munthali who spoke with Muhammed Lamin Saidykhan who was on the ground in Togo.
Gambian Human Rights Activist, Muhammed Lamin Saidykhan, is Coordinator of Africans Rising for Justice, Peace and Dignity.
A human rights activist who organized widespread protests to get longtime Gambian dictator Yahya Jammeh out of office, Muhammed Lamin Saidykhan, a young activist from The Gambia with a background in youth development is taking over the reins from global human rights and environmental justice activist and launch director, Kumi Naidoo.
Here Africa World Now Project’s in-depth discussion on the current and future situation in Togo.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
In his poem “Countries want independence, nations want liberation, and the people, the people want revolution”, Amiri Baraka writes:
“Revolutionary Unity gained only thru struggle
long sought for
must be fought for
Revolutionary Unity
a fiery beacon in a world made perpetual night
by imperialism
The basis of struggle Unity Revolutionary Unity
Unity gained thru struggle
The basis of the party yet to be built
in a land of "instant everythings" (Oct, 1979)
On today's programs, we will hear Critical Reflections on the Organic Nature of Africana Sociopolitical Thought and Cultural Resistance: Contributions from Amiri Baraka w/ Tom Porter.
This program is a mix of poetry, music, and various interviews with and on Amiri Baraka that focus on exploring the organic nature of and practical application of forms of resistance.
The underlining premise of exploration is centered upon asking the simple question: How can culture be used as a platform for critiquing and creating a world beyond struggle?
This organic process of thinking and doing is central to Africana sociopolitical thought that informs its resistance. The cornerstone of critical consciousness formation.
The program ends with a conversation I had with Tom Porter, who represents the Black Radical Tradition in all of its manifestations. A close friend of Amiri Baraka, Professor Porter is still, today, an important activist intellectual who has contributed his life to fighting for a world beyond struggle. A veteran activist, educator, radio host and jazz critic, Tom Porter has run for political office in Ohio, served as Director of Antioch Graduate program, and runs a jazz music promotion organization.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
Enjoy the program!
Music and Other things:
1. J Dilla—African Rhythms
2. Outkast—Wailin
3. Snippet of the introduction of Leroi Jones by Maulana Karenga at UCLA, April 5 1967
4. Amiri Baraka—Against Bourgeois Art
5. Vallis Alps—Young
6. Hugh Maskela—If There’s Anybody Out There
7. The Roots ft. Amiri Baraka—Something in the Way of Things
8. Picture Credit—Tom Porter and Amiri Baraka, circa 2013 (available here: http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=13497 and imixwhatilike.org )
In this episode.... we can listen to Pt. 2 of the conversation I had with Fred Moten where we explore the ideas set forth by radical thinkers ranging from anti-colonialist such as Sylvia Wynter and Aimé Césaire to scholar-activists such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Amiri Baraka. You can catch Pt. 1 of our conversation on our SoundCloud archive.
Professor Fred Moten is currently Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, where he teaches courses and conducts research in black studies, performance studies, poetics and literary theory. He is author of number of books including, but not limited to In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition; B. Jenkins; The Feel Trio, A Poetics of the Undercommons; consent not to be a single being; and co-author, with Stefano Harney, of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study.
We then shift our mental energy a bit…
In a January 2017 article in the Boston Review, Robin D. G. Kelley asks: So what did Robinson mean by “racial capitalism”?
Professor Kelley answers this question, by arguing that: Cedric Robinson, building on the work of another forgotten black radical intellectual, sociologist Oliver Cox, challenged the Marxist idea that capitalism was a revolutionary negation of feudalism. Instead capitalism emerged within the European feudal order and flowered in the cultural soil of a Western civilization already thoroughly infused with racialism. Capitalism and racism, in other words, did not break from the old order but rather evolved from it to produce a modern world system of “racial capitalism” dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide. Capitalism was “racial” not because of some conspiracy to divide workers or justify slavery and dispossession, but because racialism had already permeated Western feudal society. The first European proletarians were racial subjects (Irish, Jews, Roma or Gypsies, Slavs, etc.) and they were victims of dispossession, colonialism, and slavery within Europe.
Cedric Robinson goes on to suggest that racialization within Europe was very much a colonial process involving invasion, settlement, expropriation, and racial hierarchy. Insisting that modern European nationalism was completely bound up with racialist myths… "
What we will hear next, Professor Kelley reflect on race, class, and movements using Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Cedric Robinson) in the wake of the emergence of the Movement for Black Lives.
Dr. Robin D. G. Kelley is Distinguished Professor of History and Black Studies & Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA, and current Chair of the Department of African American Studies. His work explores the history of social movements in the U.S., the African Diaspora, and Africa; black intellectuals; music; colonialism/imperialism; organized labor; constructions of race; Marxism, nationalism, among other things.
He is author of a number of books, which include, but not limited to, Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times; Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression; Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class; and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
Enjoy the program.
Music:
J Dilla-African Rhythms
Amiri Baraka-Why's/Wise
De La Soul-Stakes is High
John Coltrane-Kulu S Mama
Robert Glasper-Somebody Else ft. Emeli Sandé
Black radicalism [consequently] cannot be understood within the particular context of its genesis. It is not a variant of Western radicalism whose proponents happen to be Black. Rather, it is a specifically African response to an oppression emergent from the immediate determinants of European development in the modern era and framed by orders of human exploitation woven into the interstices of European social life from the inception of Western civilization. . .Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism (79)
How do we map the Black Radical tradition? How can we understand its praxis? If we are to truly to refashion the world…to make it better…to remake its institutions…to address its systemic inequities. Find justice. Seek peace. What language can we use to transmit it once we are able “see” it? What are the concepts that it will produce that will allow us to see the world differently? How can we codify the thoughts and practices in an effort to create a new vision of the world while simultaneously resisting the present?
What questions do we need to ask that begins to provide insight, and foresight to muddle through the Man vs. Human conflict explored in the work of Sylvia Wynter.
Aimé Césaire argues that we cannot look to Western notions of “man”, as this man has been forged out of an arrested understanding of humanity. A narrow conception which consistently depends on the systematic degradation of non-European men and women. He writes in Discourse on Colonialism: “At the very time when it most often mouths the word, the West has never been further from being able to live a true humanism—a humanism made to the measure of the world” (73).
More than this…Where do we look? Fred Moten and Stefano Harney suggest that we pay attention closer attention to the undercommons. It is the space in between space that we should look to study blackness.
According to Jack Halberstam in Chapter 0 of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study: “If you want to know what the undercommons wants, what Moten and Harney want, what black people, indigenous peoples, queers and poor people want, what we (the “we” who cohabit in the space of the undercommons) want, it is this – we cannot be satisfied with the recognition and acknowledgement generated by the very system that denies a) that anything was ever broken and b) that we deserved to be the broken part; so we refuse to ask for recognition and instead we want to take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the places that we know lie outside its walls” (6).
In this episode, we present a recent conversation I had with Professor Fred Moten where we explore the ideas set forth by radical thinkers ranging from anti-colonialist such as Sylvia Wynter and Aimé Césaire to scholar-activists such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Amiri Baraka.
Professor Fred Moten is currently Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, where he teaches courses and conducts research in black studies, performance studies, poetics and literary theory. He is author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Hughson’s Tavern (Leon Works, 2009); B. Jenkins (Duke University Press, 2010). Moten is also co-author, with Stefano Harney, of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study.
Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.
Enjoy the program.
Music:
J Dilla--African Rhythms
Tribe Called Quest--Vibes and Stuff
A Tribe Called Red--The Virus Feat. Saul Williams & Chippewa Travellers
De La Soul--Drawn ft Little Dragon