Africa World Now Project

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!!!......