Africa World Now Project

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:

1. Why is culture such an important place for contestation?

2. How can hip hop be used as a force for creative resistance?

3. Can hip hop serve as a platform for developing a critical consciousness? If, so, in what must it be rooted?

4. 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!