Africa World Now Project

What does it mean, in this moment – echoes of and the culmination of moments before, to teach, learn, share, and evolve within increasingly violent conditions. What is and where are our (your) terrains of struggle for the Black working class, heretical intellectuals, and inherently rebellious minded youth? What are our weapons? Where do we find our center? Upon what do we build our barriers of resistance? How do we organize a people who do not, yet, fully know, they should be organized? What is the meaning of joining an organization, when the organization is content to be caught in a cycle of ‘actions’ that are not attached or show any real signs of impacting the critical consciousness of the very people they say they are organizing? What does liberation mean, when the Congo has been in a constant state of conflict, fueled by external interests, for over the past 140+ years? What are the contours of our conjuncture? The nexus of our time? What does it mean to offer an intersectional analysis built upon colonial conceptualizations of our realities and what it means to be human? What does it mean to live in a so-called intellectual world with so much criticism and no real critique? What is our center? What traditions and genealogies of living do we study to find our weapons of theory? Our pedagogy of revolution? Where do we go to create, connect, and expand our forms of knowledge and ways of being? What is our conceptualization of a new society through an intentional study of the one that is decaying, to bring into being the one as yet to form? There is hope, some say, the old forms of oppression are at their limit, capitalism is at a breaking point … but what do we say when we look closely to see capital is becoming something else too (something old, yet new)?

W.E.B. Du Bois at the second annual meeting of the Niagara Movement at Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, August 19, 1906, captured an early idea of the Black University concept in his speech titled: An Address to the Country. Du Bois writes: “And when we call for education, we mean real education. We believe in work. We ourselves are workers, but work is not necessarily education. Education is the development of power and ideal. We want our children trained as intelligent human beings should be, and we will fight for all time against any proposal to educate black boys and girls simply as servants and underlings, or simply for the use of other people. They have a right to know, to think, to aspire. We do not believe in violence, neither in the despised violence of the raid nor the lauded violence of the soldier, nor the barbarous violence of the mob, but we do believe in John Brown, in that incarnate spirit of justice, that hatred of a lie, that willingness to sacrifice money, reputation, and life itself on the altar of right.” Where would we or could we start more intentionally study into the practice of the Black University concept? We would argue we initially start with these formations: Peoples College (Nashville, Atlanta, and Chicago), the Institute of Black World (also in Atlanta); Malcolm X Liberation University (Durham and Greensboro); and the experiences of the African Liberation Support Committee/Movement (ALSC). According to Alkalimat, Peoples College wanted to serve working class people in Nashville. Alkalimat writes, “we sought a curriculum to link students to a working class ideological and political orientation for activism in the Black liberation movement. As part of the nationwide and even global demand for Black Power, we focused first on Black history and Pan-Africanism” (Alkalimat, Peoples College: A Black Liberation Project Based at Fisk University, 1970-1975, 2023: 6). “The Peoples College is an independent educational program for African communities in the Americas. We are trying to develop an alternative to existing educational programs because they serve the interests of racism, imperialism, and colonialism. Peoples College serves the interests of the people, and the necessity for Black liberation and world revolution” (Alkalimat, Peoples College: A Black Liberation Project Based at Fisk University, 1970-1975, 2023: 6).

A River of Prophecy: Constructing a Sacred History of African Americans w/ Nubia Kia by Africa World Now Project Collective

What we you hear next is a recent community dialogue that explored the impact of Africa on El Hajj Malik El Shabzz’s thought and practice and Malik Shabazz’s impact on Africa. What we are concerned with, specifically, with this dialogue is the impact of East Africa, generally, revolutionary Kenya, in particular on Malik Shabazz’s thought and practice. We pay attention to attention to the evolutions of Malik Shabazz’s clarity on the role of revolutionary struggle through his direct relationship with revolutionaries in Kenya [East Africa more broadly]. The question[s] that framed this dialogue were: 1.What was the influence of revolutionaries in East Africa, generally, Kenya, specifically on Malik El Shabazz political, cultural, and economic praxis? Here, we mapped the Land and Freedom Army [known in colonialist discourse and historical memory as the Mau Mau Rebellion as well as was his relationship with Pio Gama Pinto, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, and Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu? 2.What strains of Malik Shabazz’s praxis are important to contextualizing current geopolitical and national questions, and are applicable to this current moment? Here I think it would useful to suggest to you, our listeners, to explore some of his work; intentionally engaging his speeches, lectures, and/or talks as well as his project to take the U.S. [in relation to the colonial question that includes people of African descent in the US, and ultimately Western nations] to a world court, his developing application [and it can be argued implicitly, critique] of human rights [where there is a clear sharpening of human rights theory and practice to engage an African world perspective]; his contributions and attempts to extend Pan Africanism, challenging Black Internationalism as framework to understanding national oppression, autonomy, and personhood. For more, it is highly recommended to explore the work of Africa World Now Project Collaborative … as well as the •Kenyan Organic Intellectuals [a very important collective of revolutionaries in Kenya who are extensions of this history and more!] •Engage an article titled: El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz: the Continuity and Legacy of a Critical Africana Human Rights Consciousness [an article that extends and expands on many of the points made in the lecture, which is also available if you follow Africa World Now Project Collective’s social media and look in the bios of our various social platforms for access to the this article and extensive archive] •Visit https://alkalimat.org/ and https://www.brothermalcolm.net/mxcontent.html, where Professor Abdul Alkalimat has developed a series lectures called MalcolmX100 as well as an absolutely incredible archive of work on and by Bro Malcolm complied by Abdul Alkalimat] [Selected Work on Malcolm X]. •Black Men Build where you can find work on contemporary implications of Malcolm X as well as a re/released and update of a Study Guide on Malcolm developed by Abdul Alkalimat and co. •Of course, you can explore the work of Africa World Now Project Collective, where you will find a playlist of programs that explore, in more depth, some of these questions. As well as explorations and extensions of Africana sociopolitical thought and 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; Ghana, Ayiti, and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! Listen intently. Think critically. Act accordingly. Enjoy the program!

History, the writing of history, can be a messy process. Movement history, that is an exploration and examination of the forces that constitute struggle, its successes and on-going defeats adds even more complexity to understanding and the uses of history. Specifically as it relates to the building of a historical consciousness that is necessary to wage contemporary struggle. This notion, when applied to Southern Africa’s liberation struggles, is useful when attempting to delineate and extract frameworks for understanding current conditions and building liberatory objectives, particularly if the objectives are motivated by the desire to not reconstitute past mistakes. The process to identify where to extend and expand upon practices that were left incomplete and needed to continue struggle, cannot negate the centrality of the impetus to ‘tell no lies, claim no easy victories.’ This means, above all, developing the requisite historical consciousness to understand what was done in order to know ‘what is to be done’. “Success” in southern Africa came, paradoxically, when capital, finding itself under substantial political pressure (especially in South Africa) came slowly but surely to be convinced that the profitable links that the global capitalist system had forged with racist and apartheid-defined structures in southern Africa were making capitalism itself dangerously vulnerable to mass action. And this in turn moved capital to reconsider its options and to admit to itself that its links to race-defined rule were now best understood as having been merely a contingent, time-bound tactic in its quest, most centrally, for class privilege and power. How much wiser, capitalists increasingly thought, to abandon apartheid, to coopt the vanguard of the popular movement into capital's camp, and to thus preempt any more radical, even revolutionary possibilities [Saul, On Building a Social Movement: The North American Campaign for Southern African Liberation Revisited, 2017]. The fact is that it was on such grounds that liberation movements conceded to capital for change in South Africa. Martha Biondi is Lorraine H. Morton Professor of Black Studies and Professor of History at Northwestern University and author of The Black Revolution on Campus and To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City. Born in Chicago, Illinois, Prexy Nesbitt was educated at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, earning a degree in Political Science with a minor in Nineteenth Century Russian Literature. He went on to attend the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Northwestern and Columbia University. His work includes direct and indirect activity in six Southern African liberation movements: African National Congress (ANC); Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO); Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA); Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU); and the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU); the Southwest African People's Organization (SWAPO), as well as with the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC). Returning to Chicago in the 1980s, he worked as a labor organizer and as special aid to then Chicago mayor Harold Washington. He was later appointed consultant to represent the country and its interests in the United States, Canada, and Europe by the independent Mozambican government. As an activist and an educator, he has organized and taught throughout the U.S. and around the world. 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; Ghana, Ayiti, and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! Listen intently. Think critically. Act accordingly. Enjoy the program!

We are honored to have with us, again, The Honorable Fravia Marquez Silva, 2nd Advisor To Venezuela’s National Assembly and Spokeswomen for Cumbe International and recently launched Bring The Back Movement and Venezuela’s Charge D’Affaires to Belgium and Venezuela’s Preeminent Trade Unionist H.E. Ambassador Marcos Garcia. This program explored: 1) The effects of US imperial aggression on the working class in Venezuela? 2) The [immediate and long term] impact on the working class throughout the hemisphere? 3) What are some ways the working class in the Americas can support the working class in Venezuela that can possibly be expanded to other regions under attack? 4) How can we think about this moment in a way that can increase class solidarity in the hemisphere and throughout the world? This program is a collaborative project between Shirley Graham Du Bois/William Worthy Media and Friendship Collective & Africa World Now Project Collective.

The struggle of the LRBW was centered on the political development of Black workers inside the development of global capitalism in the United States and within a leading sector of capitalist production in the early and mid-twentieth century, which was then, the auto-industry. This socio-economic location molded a section of Black workers into working-class revolutionaries. The historical moment that shaped LRBW was located at the nexus of the post-World War II capitalist expansion and the beginning of capitalist globalization, rooted in the new technical evolution of the forces of production: a turn to industrial automation of the workplace. The very process of their pedagogy of revolution, was their study of theory and what is produced when this theory is applied to real-world experiences, which shaped their practice into workers power. To study the intellectual processes of the LRBW in the context of a developing global capitalism, as they are identifying a pedagogy of revolution is an essential frame of reference that can offer contemporary working-class movements a guide of action. Meaning, the point of discovering the intellectual processes (theoretical development) of the LRBW opens space for us to understand the processes of how [and in what ways] they were intent to developing a worker’s movement. As we pay attention to their ability to identify and name the world around them and the steps they took to then engage their realities in a larger context is an important point of entry to building working class unity. This development, seen as a process, serves to situate them historically, while also guiding us to identify what to extract from their practice that can be applied to the [static] and evolving conditions workers find themselves in today. What questions were left for us to take up, what are the contours of their thought and practice that be extended and expanded? What are the similarities and dissimilarities in the conditions that workers find themselves across sectors? And What is to be done? The LRBW is an interesting and complicated expression of the relationship between Black workers in Detroit and the global capitalist system. It was a struggle between autoworkers, the union, and the automobile industry. It encompassed the struggles and contradictions between the workers and the bosses, as well as between workers and the union of which they were a part. This period exposed the glaring internal and external contradictions of racism within and around the workers movement, historically and in that moment. Yet, the LRBW was able to develop a process of struggle combining both theory and practice. Today, we explore the story of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers with Jerome Scott and walda katz-fishman, authors of Motown and the Making of Working-Class Revolutionaries: The story of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. walda katz-fishman is a scholar activist and professor of sociology at Howard University. A founding member and former board chair of Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty & Genocide, she is a contributing author or editor of popular education toolkits and books, including The United States Social Forum: Perspectives of a Movement and The Roots of Terror, among others. Jerome Scott is a former autoworker, labor organizer in Detroit auto plants, and member of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. The founding director of Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty & Genocide, he is a contributing author or editor of popular education toolkits and books, including The United States Social Forum: Perspectives of a Movement and The Roots of Terror, among others, as well.

This cannot be repeated enough, as the dialectical relationship between anti-colonial praxis and the colonial logic of capital becomes ever more fascistic, we must be ever more clear on how violence is necessary to distort and make imperceptible … the possibilities of a future. Simply put, the ever more overt application of violence as a means to maintain oppressive social structures that guide the formation of consciousness, the more it arrests our ability to engage with ‘the beyond struggle’, beyond the now moment. The vast majority of us are caught within the cyclical patterns of manufactured realities of capitalist imagination. Capital needs the literal life-[blood] of those who are constituent parts of these manufactured realities; realities captured in incorrect notions of the inevitability of conflict, induced resource scarcity, the logic of private property, aggressive individualism, and the insolvability of the climate crisis. We are expected to spend majority of our time and energy surviving the daily crucible designed by capital. Ok, I can go on … but let’s not get lost in the rhetoric and now that you are probably equally lost in this long opening thought, we should, at this point, circle back to what I suggest cannot “be repeated enough” …: And that is…: Colonial violence and colonial discourse are at the heart of Western modernity. They are constituent features of Western European modern ontology, knowledge production and distribution, and sociopolitical thought and economic practice codified in the 14th century. The use of ontology is another way of saying, the study of the reality of ‘being’; in simpler terms, what makes a thing, a thing. It is clear [or at least it should be] what and who the ‘monsters’ are, so it is not necessarily novel in itself. But it still bears repeating. To add more clarity, adding more perspective, hoping to make more sense, what I am suggesting here is that we are living in the 21st century with 14th century conceptualizations of reality produced from the subsequent violence inherent in the contradictions built over centuries through capitalist logic … all interdependent on supremacist notions of a constructed whiteness. A world where false notions of reality are attached to color [and class, culture, gender, and formations of consciousness]. This violence we are facing is what Fanon was unpacking. Structures of violence is what Fanon was intent to deconstruct, and one of his important contributions to a: decolonial imperative. Therefore, it is, here, within the material and nonmaterial parameters of violence that we can explore and examine Fanon’s corpus to construct frameworks of analysis. Though we should never neatly apply, nor seek to use linear logic, without taking into consideration the historical evolution in the material [and nonmaterial] conditions over time and space, Fanon’s decolonial imperative stands as an important point of entry to understanding the current historical moment. Nicholas Mwangi is a writer, organiser, and member of the Ukombozi Library in Kenya. He contributes regularly to People’s Dispatch. Nicholas has co-edited Breaking the Silence on NGOs in Africa and Kenyan Organic Intellectuals Reflect on the Legacy of Pio Gama Pinto. He is currently working on a forthcoming book titled The Crisis of Capitalism in Africa with the Organic Intellectuals Network in Kenya. Waringa Wahome is an organizer, political theorist, lawyer and also the coordinator of the legal empowerment hub at Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC). Waringa Wahome is a lawyer at Waringa Wahome & CO Advocates as well as member of the Kenyan Organic Intellectuals Network. Please forgive the quality of audio in certain parts of our conversation, the ideas and voices are essential and vital, so we choose to share with you. Not to mention one of our comrades/colleagues was outside of Nairobi at the time of the recording.

It was 1839 and Frank and Lucy McWorter were getting married for the second time. The wedding was a reaffirmation of their love and a recommitment to all they’d built together. They had come to Illinois with four of their children and built a farm of golden wheat fields and towering stalks of corn. Though there was plenty of symbolism in their renewed vows, the McWorters remarried for a more pragmatic reason — they had been enslaved in Kentucky when they first committed to each other, but such marriages were rarely respected by U. S. courts. They had still been enslaved when they started their family, but Frank quickly began to plot their way to freedom. Frank’s owner and father, George McWhorter, trusted Frank to manage his farm and gave him leeway to earn money doing extra work. So, Frank learned how to mine and manufacture his own saltpeter, a necessary component in gunpowder. He used the money he earned selling saltpeter to buy freedom for him and his family. He began freeing his family in 1817. By this time Lucy and Frank were raising Judah, Frank Jr., Sarah, and Solomon, but Frank first bought Lucy’s freedom. She was pregnant at the time, so not only did he free Lucy, but his purchase also ensured that their son, Squire, would be born free. In 1819, he bought his own freedom, becoming Free Frank, and later changed his name to Frank McWorter — dropping the “h” from his former enslaver’s last name. Frank and Lucy, along with several children they had managed to free, moved west to Illinois in 1830 to the land that would become their farm in Pike County. He traded his saltpeter operation for Frank Jr.’s freedom after Junior had fled his enslavement to Canada. Frank made trips back to Kentucky to purchase the freedom of each of his three remaining enslaved children and at least one grandchild. On each trip, Frank McWorter had to make the gut-wrenching decision of which child he would free and which he would leave behind to endure slavery. The McWorters spent $14,000 to free their family. Adjusted for inflation, that is nearly $500,000 in 2023. Frank McWorter began his farm with 160 acres and eventually increased those holdings to over 500 acres. Along with his corn and wheat, he grew oats and raised cattle, hogs, and horses. In 1836, Frank divided forty-two acres of his land into town lots and founded the town of New Philadelphia. The town, the first officially founded by African Americans, prospered with both Black and white residents and formed part of a larger rural community of farmers. The town’s very existence as a biracial community in a state with repressive Black Codes on the books until 1865 was a defiant statement against racial inequality. New Philadelphia was an audacious project, a prelude to Black communities like Nicodemus, Kansas; DeWitty, Nebraska; Blackdom, New Mexico; and Boley, Oklahoma, founded in the West after the Civil War. For more: New Philadelphia, Gerald A. McWorter and Kate Williams-McWorter Sign the petition: https://chng.it/q5Q5XS9cFd

Colonial violence and colonial discourse are at the heart of Western modernity. They are constituent features of Western European modern ontology, knowledge production and distribution, and sociopolitical thought and economic practice codified in the 14th century. The use of ontology is another way of saying, the study of the reality of ‘being’; in simpler terms, what makes a thing, a thing. It is clear [or at least it should be] what and who the ‘monsters’ are, so it is not necessarily novel in itself. But it still bears repeating. To add more clarity, adding more perspective, hoping to make more sense, what I am suggesting here is that we are living in the 21st century with 14th century conceptualizations of reality produced from the subsequent violence inherent in the contradictions built over centuries through capitalist logic … all interdependent on supremacist notions of a constructed whiteness. A world where false notions of reality are attached to color [and class, culture, gender, and formations of consciousness]. This violence we are facing is what Fanon was unpacking. Structures of violence is what Fanon was intent to deconstruct, and one of his important contributions to a: decolonial imperative. Therefore, it is, here, within the material and nonmaterial parameters of violence that we can explore and examine Fanon’s corpus to construct frameworks of analysis. Though we should never neatly apply, nor seek to use linear logic, without taking into consideration the historical evolution in the material [and nonmaterial] conditions over time and space, Fanon’s decolonial imperative stands as an important point of entry to understanding the current historical moment. Nicholas Mwangi is a writer, organiser, and member of the Ukombozi Library in Kenya. He contributes regularly to People’s Dispatch. Nicholas has co-edited Breaking the Silence on NGOs in Africa and Kenyan Organic Intellectuals Reflect on the Legacy of Pio Gama Pinto. He is currently working on a forthcoming book titled The Crisis of Capitalism in Africa with the Organic Intellectuals Network in Kenya. Waringa Wahome is an organizer, political theorist, lawyer and also the coordinator of the legal empowerment hub at Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC). Waringa Wahome is a lawyer at Waringa Wahome & CO Advocates as well as member of the Kenyan Organic Intellectuals Network.