Africa World Now Project

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...