Africa World Now Project

In The Price of Racial Reconciliation, Dr. Ronald Walters writes “the power of history is not only its description of events, but also its relation to the identity of those who shape it, and those “who suffer from such shaping. As such, “history” comprises events that groups select as a resource to derive identity and meaning from the past, and to inform present understanding or action. The selectively of such events politicizes history, for the powerful can determine an understanding of historical events consistent with a narrative they wish to advance” (2).

Dr. Walters goes on to suggest that a “step toward dismantling systems of oppression in which one cultural group dominates another, reparations are more than simply “payment” for past injury. They are a national question” (3).

It is here the myths that support a tenuous national identity crumble with the realities of the systems, conditions and institutions that were constructed to maintain a social order that supports an economic system—in this case racial capitalism.

We do not have time to go into the long history of the movement, but highlighting its continuities throughout the world is essential in this period of planetary crisis that are disproportionately impacting the African world.

On one level, the essential question of reparations is rooted in the fact that slavery was unjust because it refused to recognize and compensate the labor of those subjected to slavery. In a capitalist society built upon plantation economies, the idea of unpaid labor is in fact a violation of the fundamental principles of the so-called free-market exchange that regulates the notion of supply and demand the establishes the value of both labor and what this labor produces (From Slavery to Genocide: The Fallacy of Debt in Reparations Discourse:109). On another level, the clear morality and legal violations are brought to fore.

It is not a question of either, or, but a question of both/and.

We will hear Professor Sir Hilary Beckles (older lecture Kingstown, SVG) expand upon reparations.

Professor Sir Hilary Beckles is Vice Chancellor of the University of the West Indies. He is a distinguished university administrator, economic historian, and specialist in higher education and development thinking and practice; and an internationally reputed historian.

Sir Hilary has published and lectured extensively in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. His work includes: Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados and the Caribbean (Rutgers University Press/Zed Book, 1989); Centering Woman: Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slave Societies (James Currey Press/Randle Publishers, 1999; White Servitude and Black Slavery: white indentured servitude in the Caribbean, 1627-1715 (Tennessee University Press, 1989); The First Black Slave Society: Britain’s Barbados, 1627-1876; Britain’s Black Debt: Reparations for Slavery and Native Genocide in the Caribbean, (UWI Press, 2015).

He is Chairman of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Commission on Reparation and Social Justice.

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

Dr. Ichile in her article titled, Black Magic Woman: Towards a Theory of Africana Women's Resistance suggest that when properly contextualized, the role of enslaved African women in history was multiple, but two primary roles are prevalent, they were both spiritual and political leaders. Contextualized as such, Dr. Ichile then show that three major aspects of women's resistance emerge:

(1) African women acted as queens and queen mothers, activated at key moments to galvanize enslaved people seeking not only freedom, but sovereignty;

(2) In maroon communities, women's maintenance of African cultural traditions, agricultural production and motherhood made long-term settlements possible;

(3) As priestesses and "conjurers," women attacked slaveholders with their spiritual gifts and knowledge, in ways that were sometimes more effective than direct, military confrontation, and were often coordinated to work in tandem with armed conflict.

According to Dr. M Bahati Kuumba in, African Women, Resistance Cultures and Cultural Resistances, “for African and African diasporan women, culture is a societal dimension that has complex and contradictory implications with respect to their interests, freedom and rights. On the one hand, established/'traditional' African and African diasporan cultures are replete with practices and perceptions that hegemonize patriarchal interests and women's oppression (McFadden, 1997). And “to make matters worse, nationalist discourse and praxis in many African descendent communities position women as the custodians of and conduits for its customary practices, often serving as their own worst enemies.” Nevertheless, the lives of Africana women “have a long and varied 'herstory' of challenging social injustice by deploying, opposing and transforming cultural systems (Collins, 1990, 2000; Steady, 1987, 1993;Terborg-Penn, 1986).”

Another important scholar, Dr. Valethia Watkins in Contested Memories: A Critical Analysis of the Black Feminist Revisionist History Project, suggest that “properly framing and naming the intellectual and political tradition of Black women has become contested terrain and reflects the political and ideological diversity and differences among Black women. Black women are often treated as if they are a homogenous group when, in reality, they are diverse in their political consciousness, perspectives, ideas and commitments as any other group. Black women do not speak with a single voice; hence, efforts to articulate “the” Black women’s standpoint or perspective are misleading and hegemonic by definition.

These views, taken together, provide a contested and expands the narrow view of gender, broadly, Women-Africana women, specifically.

Dr. Iyelli Ichile earned her PhD in African Diaspora History from Howard University and a Master’s in African American Studies from Columbia University. She has worked with the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, and developed a research agenda that has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, The DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and several university grants.

Dr. Ichile has held positions at Temple University, Prince Georges Community College, Virginia Commonwealth University, Florida A&M University, and Goddard College. She is currently a Smithsonian Faculty Fellow at Montgomery College-Rockville.

Her work has appeared in Journal of African American History; Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society; Journal of Pan African Studies to name a few.

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

In a Washington Post article titled, Recent protests in Sudan are much more than bread riots, Nisrin Elamin and Zachariah Mampilly, writes “On Dec. 19 2018, the town of Atbara in northeastern Sudan erupted in protest against the military dictatorship that has ruled the country for almost three decades. People took to the streets following a tripling of bread prices to demand “freedom, peace, justice and the downfall of the regime.” But international coverage framing the protests as bread riots obscures the larger political context, misrepresents protesters’ demands and supports the regime’s insistence that the crisis can be resolved by simply reintroducing targeted subsidies and stabilizing the Sudanese pound.”

Let’s contextualize this important moment in the African world that is directly related to the long tradition of protest and resistance in the region referred to as Sudan further.

According to Nisrin and Zachariah, “It is no coincidence that the protests began in Atbara, a town known for its powerful railroad workers union. Sudan has a history of successful revolutions against military regimes, most notably in 1964 and in 1985, in which trade unions and student movements played a pivotal role.

But the absence of formal trade unions and independent local governing structures did not prevent people from forming alternative grass-roots structures for mobilizing against political repression. Youth movements and independent farmer and worker formations multiplied over the last decade as people lost faith in established opposition parties and politics. Most notably, from 2012 to 2014, students and the urban poor held a variety of creative protests before being repressed by the regime.

With the oil-export economy emerging in the 1990s, other sectors that produced food and cash crops were left to wither away or were privatized and handed off to foreign investors or regime loyalists.

All in all, the conditions that spurred the current Sudan uprisings, were proliferated and promoted by austerity measures recommended by the IMF in 2017 (known as structural adjustment programs).

Today, Africa World Now Project’s Mwiza Munthali discusses the uprisings in Sudan with Nisrin Elamin.

Nisrin Elamin is a Sudanese writer, activist and PhD candidate in Anthropology, based in the New York City area. She has over 15 years of experience working with community-based organizations as an educator, organizer and advocate. Most recently, she served as a Director of the Sadie Nash Leadership Project’s summer leadership and social justice program for young women and non-binary folks at City College. She also works part-time with the group African Communities Together, which organizes around immigrant, civil and workers’ rights in New York and in Washington DC. Her research examines the ways Saudi and Emirati ‘land grabs’ are reconfiguring social relations between landholding and landless communities in central Sudan. In January of 2017, she was one of the first people to be detained under the Trump administration’s Muslim ban, causing her work to be interrupted. But since then, she has been able to return to Sudan to complete her research.

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

For more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/12/28/recent-protests-in-sudan-are-much-more-than-bread-riots/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.fce161deb4fd

https://www.thenation.com/article/sudan-protests-revolution-bashir/

Image: Alaa Salah, 22, stands on a vehicle as she sings to the crowd. Photograph: -/AFP/Getty Images

Writing in Where is the ‘African’ in African Studies, on African Arguments, Robtel Pailey asserts that “the extent to which the ‘African’ in African Studies is concealed or revealed depends entirely on the politics of the knowledge producer, the ethos of the institution they represent, the pedagogy and methods they employ, and their level of commitment to the continent and its people.”

In Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive, Achille Mbembe presents a theoretical lens through which we can use to examine current conditions in present societies who are a product of settler colonialism, (neo)colonialism, chattel slavery, etc. Mbembe introduces us to the notion of a ‘negative moment’ (2015).

Mbembe goes on to argue that “blackness” is fracturing. “Black consciousness” today is more and more thought of in fractions.”

It is here, the clarity of what a negative moment comes to the fore, it is a moment when new antagonisms emerge while old ones remain unresolved. It is a moment when contradictory forces—undeveloped, fractured, fragmented—are at work but what might come out of their interaction is anything but certain. It is also a moment when multiple old and recent unresolved crises seem to be on the path towards a collision.”

It is in this moment that knowledge, understanding, and power converge. It here is that the mere prohibitive structures, institutions, and systems that promote some forms of knowledge, and demonize others is an act of violence.

What we suggest is a real attempt to decolonize not only the university and knowledge, we must decolonize, decolonization. Decolonization is not new, of course. In fact, its dominant conceptualization and current discourse is a product of African postcolonial experiments in the 1960s and 1970s.

Where does this negative moment place us in the context of addressing current planetary crises, rooted in the aggressive proliferation of racial capitalist logic(s)? Where do we start an intentional and serious commitment to decolonize?

Today we will explore the possibilities of an African future through decolonizing African Studies with Dr. Robtel Pailey.

Robtel Pailey is a Liberian academic, activist and author with more than 15 years of combined personal/professional experiences in Africa, Europe and North America. She is also author of Gbagba and Jaadeh, critically acclaimed anti-corruption children’s books.

Robtel completed BA degrees in African Studies and English Literature at Howard University, a MSc in African Studies at the University of Oxford, and a doctorate in Development Studies at SOAS, University of London, as a Mo Ibrahim Foundation PhD Scholar.

Robtel currently serves as Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Oxford's Department of International Development (ODID), where she conducts research on race, citizenship, ‘South-South’ migration and development cooperation in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

Today, Africa World Now Project collectives' Tasneem Siddiqui and Keisha-Khan Perry sit down with Dr. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and explore the contours, continuities, and evolutions in Africana radical sociopolitical thought.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University.

Professor Taylor is author of, Haymarket Books 2016, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, where it examines the history and politics of Black America and the development of Black Lives Matter in response to police violence in the United States.

Professor Taylor’s most recent book, How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, also with Haymarket Books (2017) won the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction.

Dr. Taylor’s research examines race and public policy including American housing policies.

Dr. Taylor's current work: Race For Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownersip (2019), explores U.S. federal government's promotion of single-family homeownership in Black communities after the urban rebellions of the 1960s. Taylor looks at how the federal government's turn to market-based solutions in its low-income housing programs in the 1970s impacted Black neighborhoods, Black women on welfare, and emergent discourses on an urban “underclass”. Professor Taylor is particularly interested in the role of private sector forces, typically hidden in the development and implementation of public policy, in the “urban crisis” of the 1970s.

Professor Taylor’s work has been supported, in part, by a multiyear Northwestern University Presidential Fellowship, the Ford Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation.

Our show was executive produced by Keisha-Khan Perry and Tasneem Siddiqui and as always in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

Enjoy the program!

Race For Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownersip available: https://www.amazon.com/Race-Profit-Industry-Undermined-Homeownership/dp/1469653664/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=keeanga-yamahtta+taylor&qid=1555627062&s=gateway&sr=8-3

Sterling A. Brown work amplifies and materialize the nature of the aesthetic connections that find continuity in contemporary black life.

Brown opens, Southern Road with an epigraph of an old negro spiritual:

‘O de ole sheep dey knows de road,

Young lambs gotta find de way.’

It is with this, Sterling A Brown highlights the intentions of his work which is ‘to face two directions at simultaneously'. To look forward into the future while facing the past, the poems in Southern Road consider the relationship between the [past and present] and its relevance to Black people entering the European conceptualization of modernity (Gabbin, Sterling A Brown, Building the Black Aesthetic Tradition, 1985: 3.

For Sterling A. Brown, diving into the depths of human experience and character necessitated a close look at language. In a 1978 interview Brown stated that, “The poets that struck me were those who were poets of the people and poets of direct—not florid…American speech.” The contribution that Brown offered is a clear understanding that what the ‘new’ poets were doing with language was not new (30).

Today Dr. Josh Myers will explore the work of Sterling A. Brown in a presentation titled, A Blue(s) (Note) for Sterling Brown.

In addition to being a valued member of the AWNP collective and its affiliates, Dr. Josh Myers is currently an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University.

He currently serves on the board of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations and the editorial board of The Compass: Journal of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations, he works with the DC area collectives, Positive Black Folks in Action and the Nu Afrikan Cultural Vanguard.

His research interests include Africana intellectual histories and traditions, Africana philosophy, critical university studies, and disciplinarity. His work has been published in The Journal of African American Studies, The Journal of Pan African Studies, The African Journal of Rhetoric, The Human Rights and Globalization Law Review, Liberator Magazine, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Knowledge, and Society, Critical Ethnic Studies, and Pambazuka, among other literary spaces.

His book, “We are Worth Fighting For: The Howard University Protest of 1989” is forthcoming.

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

Enjoy the program!

On Thursday March 14, Cyclone Idai made landfall on the coast of Mozambique at Beira. Since hitting the South-East African coast, directly impacting Mozambique, Malawi, and Zimbabwe, Cyclone Idai brought massive destruction in the region—including numerous deaths, countless people displaced and rivers overflowing. The impact of the cyclone has brought the multi-leveled implications of climate change to the fore: In Mozambique, flood waters that have destroyed crops, homes, cultivated water-borne disease, in Zimbabwe, mud slides has permanently altered landscapes; in Malawi, more flood damage.

According to William Minter in his article titled In the Wake of Cyclone Idai: The North has a Climate Debt to Pay , in Foreign Policy in Focus, “weeks after Cyclone Idai struck the coast of Mozambique, near Beira, the flood waters have receded to reveal a shattered landscape.

Houses and roads were washed away; crops awaiting harvest were destroyed. Confirmed deaths are high across Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi, with the total still growing. Emphasis has shifted from the rescue of survivors clinging to treetops and rooftops to organizing the delivery of provisions of food, secure housing, and medical care for hundreds of thousands left homeless.

Even as local and international relief efforts ramp up their efforts, there is a need to also focus on broader global implications. The causal connection between climate change and extreme weather events, such as Cyclone Idai, is clear. The need for climate actions in both the global North and South are beyond dispute. These needs include making the response to crises sustainable, increasing resilience to the effects of climate change through adaptation, and rapidly accelerating action to cut greenhouse emissions from fossil fuels.

The question, ironically is centered on whose responsibility should this be? At the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the first global climate agreement affirmed that much of the burden should be shouldered by the nations in the Global north. The Summit agreement stated that: The Parties should protect the climate system for the benefit of present and future generations of humankind, on the basis of equity and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.

Accordingly, the developed country Parties should take the lead in combating climate change and the adverse effects thereof.

Today, providing a more in-depth, on-the-ground assessment of the effects of Cyclone Idai, specifically in Mozambique and Zimbabwe are: [a little editorial note…we will examine Malawi next week]:

Estacio Valoi, an investigative journalist based in Mozambique and is part of Center for Investigative Journalism (CIJ); and

Ruth Castel-Branco, a labor scholar-activist based at the University of the Witwatersrand, and an editor of Alternactiva—a Mozambican progressive media platform.

Briggs Bomba, currently coordinates the Zimbabwe Alliance, a funding collaborative that works to promote a vibrant civil society and a successful democratic transformation in Zimbabwe. Anchored by TrustAfrica, it identifies, engages and supports local initiatives through grant making, capacity building, networking and mobilizing international solidarity.

All three are in conversation with Africa World Now Project’s Executive Producer, human rights activist, and international media journalist, Mwiza Munthali.

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

We begin our program today with an update on current activities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Mwiza Munthali, Africa World Now Project executive producer, human rights activist, and international journalist recently caught up with Kambale Musavuli.

Kambale Musavuli, a native of the Democratic Republic of Congo and one of the leading political and cultural Congolese voices, is a human rights advocate, Student Coordinator and National Spokesperson for the Friends of the Congo.

Kimbale has work his appeared in Washington Post.com, Foreign Policy in Focus, The Huffington Post and numerous other academic and news publications. He has appeared on various media outlets on National Public Radio, Democracy Now, ABC News, Al Jazeera English Television, Radio France International.

We then turn our attention to Brazil, specifically the role of black women and the fight for racial justice against the land grab.

In her book, Black Woman Against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil, Dr. Keisha-Khan Perry argues that “spatial exclusion is at the core of gendered racial stratification in Brazilian cities, the thus exclusion produces mass black political organization, as is occurring in neighborhoods in the city of Salvador. The racial logic of modernization and urban renewal informed by European models of development nurtures a nostalgic desire for the colonial past on the part of white Brazilians. Taken together, with various construction projects that separated black residents from white residents and access to other resources in the 1960s, the need to articulate a politics of land permeance and ownership was formed” (xv).

In South Africa, according to an April 2017 article on Black Opinion, the author asserts that: “The liberation of Black People in South Africa can only be truly complete once the majority of the Black Nation has full access to the land and all its offerings. Land provides means for people to fend for themselves and it endows them with a sense of dignity and pride."

The question of human freedom rest at the intersection of land, identity, and collective responsibility.

This question was, once again highlighted here in the U.S. a number of times in the various manifestations of Diasporic struggle for human rights.

Dr. King brings sharp critique and clarity on the contradictions that are exposed when the question of human freedom does not meet at the intersection of land, identity, and collective responsibility. Weeks before he was assassinated he highlights what happened just after the Civil War…

Next, we will listen to a recent conversation that I had with Dr. Keisha-Khan Perry on the question of land, racial justice, and black women in Brazil.

Dr. Keisha-Khan Perry is Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University where she specializes in the critical study of race, gender, and politics in the Americas with a particular focus on black women's activism, urban geography and questions of citizenship, feminist theories, intellectual history and disciplinary formations, and the interrelationship between scholarship, pedagogy, and political engagement. She has conducted extensive research in Mexico, Jamaica, Belize, Brazil, Argentina, and the United States.

Professor Perry recently completed Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil which is an ethnographic study of black women's activism in Brazilian cities. The book examines their participation and leadership in neighborhood associations and how and in what ways their interpretations of racial and gender identities intersect with urban spaces. She is currently writing Anthropology for Liberation: Research, Writing and Teaching for Social Justice while working on two other research projects. She is engaged in a study, which documents and analyzes the historical paradox of citizenship and black land ownership and loss in Brazil, Jamaica, and the United States.

Dr. Todd Steven Burroughs asserts that, fantasy can be a form of social protest, but fantasy can also be a form of mental conquest.

The imagination of the black mind has produced some the most advanced conceptualizations of justice, freedom, citizenship, and peace. The sovereignty of the black imagination has also been constantly under assault. It is the duty of those who create to educate their audience into the habits of thinking. According to David Scott in his interview with George Lamming, the sovereignty of the imagination has neither to do with the sequestering of creativity from, nor its absorption by, the world of affairs—this would be merely bad faith. Rather an authentic sovereignty of the imagination has to do with the active will to refuse submission to the customs that seek at every turn to inspire our self-contempt and our unthinking docility, and to command our understanding of, and our hopes for, what it might mean to live as a free community of valid persons”.

The use of and control of popular cultural platforms are a documented method of social control and political consolidation.

Today, Drs. Todd Steven Burroughs, Jared Ball, and Mark Bolden explore the continuities in popular culture, futurism in black literature, and the sociopolitical implications on the histories and futures of black think.

Dr. Todd Steven Burroughs is an independent researcher and writer based in New-ark, New Jersey. He has taught at Howard and Morgan State University. A professional journalist since 1985, he has written for The Source, Colorlines, Black Issues Book Review and The Crisis magazines, web-based blackamerica.com and The Root.com, and newspapers such as The New York Amsterdam News, The Afro-American (New Jersey edition) and The Star-ledger. He is author of Marvel’s Black Panther: A Comic Book Biography From Stan Lee to Ta-Nahisi Coates, as well as co-author of Civil Rights: Yesterday and Today with Herb Boyd, and A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable’s Malcolm X and Warrior Princess: A People's Biography of Ida B. Wells.

He also curates a popular culture blog: drumsintheglobalvillage.com

Dr. Jared Ball is a father and husband. After that, he is a Research Professor of Communication Studies in the Institute for Urban Research at Morgan State University in Baltimore, MD. and is the curator of imixwhatilike.org, an online hub of multimedia dedicated to the philosophies of emancipatory journalism and revolutionary beat reporting.

He is author of I Mix What I Like: A Mixtape Manifesto and co-author of, A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable’s Malcolm X. His work has been published in The Black Scholar, Radical Teacher, International Journal of Communication, The Journal of Pan-African Studies, Journal of Black Studies, The Global Journal of Hip-Hop Culture, Journal of Pan African Studies.

He is the creator and curator of the multimedia platform: www.imixwhatilike.org

I mix what I like is Dr. Ball’s homage to the great activist-theorist Steve Biko’s I Write What I Like.

Dr. Mark Bolden is an African sovereignty psychologist in private practice.

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

For more: Visit imixwhatilike.org

Writing in his 2006 work titled, Yoruba Culture: A Philosophical Account, Dr. Kola Abimbola argues that Yoruba sociopolitical religious practices—( Òrìṣa tradition and culture) were expanded and intensified throughout the Americas due to the Transatlantic human trade which saw the enslaved millions of Africans.

He writes: “Today, the Òrìṣa tradition and culture is practices by about 100 million people in Argentina, Australia, Benin Republic, Brazil, Cuba, France, Germany, Ghana, Haiti, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, Sierra Leon, Spain, Togo, Trinidad and Tobago, the UK, the US, Venezuela, and other places. In all of these places, Yorùbá religious practices play a significant role in, music, dance, the arts, and many facets of day-to-day living.” (24)

Kola Abimbola goes on to suggest that while there is a significant amount of good material available on various aspects of Yorùbá and Òrìṣa culture in different parts of the world, no one has yet fully explained its philosophical underpinnings. What philosophical affinities do Candomblé and Batuque (Ba—Tooque) in Brazil, Santeria in Cuba, Vodun in Benin Republic, Vodou in Haiti, and Òrìṣa worship in Nigeria all share in common? (24)

To date, many scholars have been content with explaining the details of the rituals, the arts, the music, and even the languages that all these different manifestations of Yorùbá culture share. But no good account of what unifies these traditions, that is, their philosophy, exists. Simply put, the philosophical and theological ideas that unify all these traditions under the rubric Yorùbá have not been adequately explained. (24)

For Dr. Abimbola, the widespread inadequacy of the treatment of Yorùbá culture can be traced to three separate but interdependent erroneous assumptions implicit in the writing of some scholars. He captures these inadequacies, conceptually as: tribal fetishism, methodological straitjacketing; and hierarchical dogmatism. (24)

Toady. We will hear a recent conversation I had Dr. Kola Abimbola on Ifa’s Anceint Future…meditations on the deep tradition of African thought and its relationship to the physical and non-physical world…

Dr. Kọ́lá Abímbọ́lá studied the Ifá Literary Corpus as an apprentice under Wándé Abímbọ́lá and Babalọ́lá Adébóyè Ifátóògùn. He received his PhD studies in Philosophy of Science under John Worrall at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a second PhD in the Law of Evidence and Criminal Justice under C. John Miller at the University of Birmingham. He has taught at Seattle University, Haverford College, Temple University, and at the University of Leicester (Lester) School of Law. He is currently an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Howard University in Washington DC. Kọ́lá is the Editor of Journal of Journal of Forensic Research and Criminology. He was President of the International Society for African Philosophy and Studies from 2006 to 2010, and a British Council Commonwealth Academic Scholar from 1989 to 1992.

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, Palestine, South Africa, and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

Enjoy the program!