Black Agenda Radio 12.21.20

Welcome to the radio magazine that brings you news, commentary and analysis from a Black Left perspective. I’m Margaret Kimberley, along with my co-host Glen Ford. Coming up: The post-colonial regime in Zimbabwe was determined to, literally, keep Black women in their place. We’ll speak with an author who has studied that era.  And, a new book details how sex was a leading item of political discussion among anti-colonial activists in the Dutch West Indies. 

But first -- Before famed Black Power advocate Stokely Carmichael changed his name to Kwame Ture, he made a big impression on freedom organizations in Africa – some of it good, some not so favorable. Back in 1967, Carmichael took part in several conferences on the continent, and offered a critique of how the Black Liberation movement was going on the continent. Toivi Asheeke is a post-doctoral fellow in the sociology department at Vassar College. He wrote an article titled, ““Black Power and Armed Decolonization in Southern Africa: Stokely Carmichael, the African National Congress of South Africa, and the African Liberation Movements.”

Rudo Mudiwa is a Phd in Communication and Culture, and currently a Research Fellow at Princeton University. Mudiwa is a native of Zimbabwe, and is critical of how the Black government that replaced white rule treated Black women. Dr. Mudiwa wrote a recent article titled, “Stop the Woman, Save the State. Policing, Order, and the Black Woman’s Body.”

In the years after World War Two, sex was the big topic of discussion among pro-independence activist in the Dutch Caribbean colonies of Aruba and Curaçao  

New York City University History professor Chelsea Shield has studied this era, and written a book titled “Offshore Attachments: Oil and Intimacy after Empire.” We at Black Agenda Report had never heard of a colonial struggle in which sexual issues – including prostitution – played such an important role.