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.

Abolition, Labor & the Palestine Question by Africa World Now Project Collective

This year represents an important historical conjuncture that has very important implications for our contemporary moment of crisis, yet extremely instructive in how we can move toward a different future. It is the 100th year recognition of the birth of Malik El Shabazz [aka Malcolm X] as well as Frantz Fanon, Patrice Lumumba, Robert F. Williams, and Medgar Evers. There are, have been, and will be an assortment of panels, programs, conferences, talks, and colloquium that explore and contextualize them, individually, and together. What we intend to offer is an identification of the continuities and discontinuities with the conditions and structures that produced the thought and practice of this group, not intended to isolate them for the many others, but to provide a lens to telescope up, down, above, and under the temporality of human geography, paying acute attention to how people resist in the face oppressive forces. Simply stated, we intend to connect the dots across time and space, attempting to read deeply the instructive details of how to construct a new society, a global society that undergirds these and other people’s thought and practice who resist the backwardness of capital, no matter the cost. With this, today, in this Part II of our collaboration with the Kenyan Organic Intellectuals Network, we explore Lumumba’s Pan Africanism. In this session, we intentionally examine the Pan Africanism of Patrice Lumumba, paying attention to role and importance of the Congo in African liberation struggles asking: •What strains of Lumumba’s thought are important to the current struggles, globally? •Why is the Congo region important in Africana liberation struggle? •What is the connection between ecological struggles and the Congo? We are, ultimately, for the entire series, in general, this session, in particular, interested in thinking collectively about: •What are some of the ideas that each of these figures offer for expanding and informing our practice today? And •Most importantly, how do we understand these figures in the long struggle for liberation in the African/a world? Joining us for this conversation are: Gathanga Ndungu is a community organiser with Mathare Social Justice Centre which is under the Social Justice Centres’ Working Group. He is also part of the Revolutionary Social League brigade that organizes political education in different political cells in the respective centres in Nairobi. As well as the Organic Intellectuals Network. Okakah Onyango is a member of the Revolutionary Socialist League, Organic Intellectuals Network and Social Justice Movement. He is a dedicated tech-driven community organizer, blending roles of revolutionary intellectualism and communications strategist. Gerald Kamau is an ecological justice activist based at Kayole Community Justice Centre as well as Organic Intellectuals Network.

This year represents an important historical conjuncture that has very important implications for our contemporary moment of crisis, yet extremely instructive of how we can move toward a different future. It is the 100th year recognition of the birth of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz [aka Malcolm X] as well as Frantz Fanon, Patrice Lumumba, and Medgar Evers. There are and have been, thus far, an assortment of panels, programs, conferences, talks, and consortium on the life of Malcolm. All of them are important in one way or another. We are not here to critique, diminish, distort any of them as they all offer something important, from entry points to study the life of Malcolm to conversations of political and ideological trajectory of Malcolm’s work with those who worked and knew him. What we intend to offer in this ocean of programs, talks, etc is an engagement with the political praxis of Malik El Shabazz, paying attention to the ways we can extend the work of Malik El Shabazz, asking: how are organizer-intellectuals in the long tradition of Malik El Shabazz and those who came before him - Hubert Harrison, Claudia Jones, Esther Jackson, Ella Baker, Vikki Garvin, Marvel Cooke, etc - are working at the contours of the collective work he [& they] left to be undertaken? Today, we will hear a conversation on Malik El Shabazz, part of a collaboration between Africa World Now Project and the Kenyan Organic Intellectual Network, where we will intentionally think through the impact of revolutionary Kenya on El Hajj Malik El Shabazz’s thought and practice. Paying attention to Malik El Shabazz’s clarity on the role of revolutionary struggle as formulated through his relationship with revolutionaries in Kenya specifically, East Africa, more broadly etc … We explore how Malik Shabazz is part of a tradition of African revolutionary thought and practice, which informs us collectively. Mapping the influence of revolutionaries in Kenya … such as the Land and Freedom Army, Pio Gama Pinto, Odinga Odinga, Mohamed Babu and others on Malcolm? And What strains of Malik El Shabazz’s thought, and practice are important to the current struggle? Joining us for the Mailk El Shabazz session of the collaboration [The Impact and Legacies of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, Frantz Fanon & Patrice Lumumba x 100] were: Gacheke Gachihi, Coordinator of Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC) and a member of the Social Justice Centres Working Group Steering Committee in Nairobi, Kenya. Coordinator of the Kenya Organic Intellectuals Network. He is also involved in regional social movements and politics. He researches and writes about police violence, criminalization of the poor, social justice and social struggles, amongst others. His articles and video interviews are published in the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE), Africa Is a Country (AIAC), Daraja Press, Verso Books, and others. Mzalendo Wanjira Wanjiru is co-founder of Mathare Social Justice Center and a member of the social justice movement and organic intellectuals network. Maureen (Mo) Kasuku is a feminist organiser and digital rights advocate based in Kenya. Her work is a dynamic exploration of the crossroads between feminism and technology. With a keen eye on the intricate interplay of gender equality, social justice, and technological advancement in grassroots communities. She is member of Ukombozi Library, Nairobi. And Cadre with the Revolutionary Socialist League. listen intently. think critically. act accordingly.

Writing in ‘How music defines D.C.’s history of ‘resistance and resilience,’ according to historian Maurice Jackson’, Josh Myers, building on the thought of Fred Moten, opens with this: “the history of Blackness in D.C. is a testament to the fact that a sound can and did resist. Myers article is derived from a conversation he had with Maurice Jackson where they explored his work titled, Rhythms of Resistance and Resilience: How Black Washingtonians Used Music and Sports in the Fight for Equality. In it, Maurice Jackson explores what he calls “Great Black Music” and sports in both the history of Washington, DC and the larger history of opposition to racism. Rhythms of Resistance and Resilience is a portion of Jackson’s ongoing research into the people that have shaped Washington, D.C. And is a prequel to his larger work, Halfway to Freedom, forthcoming from Duke University Press. It is the research of research, the figurative rich soil that birthed this forthcoming work. Jackson opens Rhythms of Resistance and Resilience with this line: “The ideas for this book were polyrhythmic, describing many circular currents” [1]. Polyrhythmic, indeed. Africana histories are an ocean of experiences that flow continuously across the known and unknown temporal lines that connect human history. What also must be noted, is that it also takes one who is able to move up and down, in and out, above and below these rhythms, mapping, connecting, and reconnecting, unpacking, repacking the narratives, the experiences, the ideas, the words, the emotion in order that we can make sense of the past that has informed our present, yet open to the possibilities of the future. Maurice Jackson is clearly one of these memory keepers and story tellers. Today, you will hear the full conversation that informed Josh Myers article, ‘How music defines D.C.’s history of ‘resistance and resilience,’ according to historian Maurice Jackson’. This conversation is based on Maurice Jackson’s recently published, Rhythms of Resistance and Resilience: How Black Washingtonians Used Music and Sports in the Fight for Equality. Maurice Jackson is an Associate Professor who teaches in the History and African American Studies Departments and is an Affiliated Professor of Music (Jazz) at Georgetown University. Before coming to academia, he worked as a longshoreman, shipyard rigger, construction worker and community organizer. He is author of a range of peer-reviewed articles and book chapters as well as Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism; co-editor of African Americans and The Haitian Revolution: Selected Essays and Historical Documents; Quakers and their Allies in the Abolitionist Cause,1754-1808; and DC Jazz: Stories of Jazz Music in Washington, DC. He has lectured in France, Turkey, Italy, Puerto Rico, Qatar, served on Georgetown University Slavery Working Group, and is a 2009 inductee into the Washington, D.C. Hall of Fame. He was appointed the Inaugural Chair of the DC Commission on African American Affairs (2013-16) where he presented “An Analysis of African American Employment, Population & Housing Trends in Washington, D.C.” [2017]. He has completed Halfway to Freedom: The Struggles and Strivings of African American in Washington, DC to be released by Duke University Press soon. His next projects will be We Knew No Other Way: The Many-Sided Struggle for Freedom and Black Radicalism: A Very Short Introduction. Josh Myers, in addition to being part of the AWNP collective, is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. A central thread that guides all of this work is an approach to knowledge that takes seriously that peoples of African descent possess a deep sense of reality, a thought tradition that more than merely interprets what is around us but can transform and renew these spaces we inhabit—a world we would like to fundamentally change.

Southern Worker Action Summit 2025 by Africa World Now Project Collective

Notions of time and space are fundamental to orienting one’s place in various experiences. Mapping time/understanding temporality allows us to coordinate ourselves on the map of human geography [shout out to John Henrik Clarke]. But what happens when we understand that time is colonized – a colonial construct – devised as a mechanism of capitalism that maximizes aggressive accumulation and deteriorating processes of human and natural resource extraction? A faint distortion, intentionally designed, to arrest the capacities of a people or peoples to see beyond the moment, limiting the collective capacity to envision a future, not only materially, but non-materially. A process necessary to self-incarcerate our innate ability to map, coordinate, envision, and realize freedom. It is here, Rasheedah Phillips adds more insight by asking, why do some processes—like aging, birth, and car crashes—occur in only one direction in time, when by the fundamental symmetry of the universe, we should experience time both forward and backward? Our dominant perception of time owes more to Western history and social order than to a fact of nature. Phillips dives deeper into understanding and exploring Black and Afrodiasporic conceptions of time, where the past, present, and future interact in more numerous constellations. Rasheedah Phillips unpacks the history of time and its legacy of racial oppression, from colonial exploration and the plantation system to the establishment of Daylight Savings. While simultaneously, highlighting how Black communities have long subverted space-time through such tools of resistance as Juneteenth, tenant organizing, ritual, and time travel. Ultimately, Rasheedah Phillips is interested in the provocation that posits: What could Black liberation look like if the past were as changeable as the future? Thinking deeply about the limited capacity of time as defined and redefined within the historical and material reality of capital, Dismantling the Masters Clock, fits into the long durée of revolutionary praxis, from marronage , self-emancipating Africans who utilized their ancient forms of knowledge of land, warfare, and foodways always with an eye on the undetermined future, freedom, to graffiti artists in Nairobi, merging afro-futuristic concepts with the natural world as way to invoke a radical imagination to redefine their current moment with the multiplicity of future moments. Rasheedah writes, “this book ultimately posits that by decolonizing time – by breaking free from the master's clock that has been instrumental in sustaining systems of oppression – we can forge new pathways for liberation that are attuned to the realities, histories, and futures of Black communities. The act of reclaiming both time and nature of reality itself is a profound step toward manifesting temporalities where Black experiences and knowledges are centered” [23].

Frantz Fanon wrote, you know the famous, often quoted but less applied dictate: “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.” What if we are to intentionally engage this thought by asking, are we on the edge of betraying our mission? Have we even discovered it? Moreover, what can we do to fulfill it? How we go about engaging Fanon’s work gives rise to the corresponding need to reflect on what is urgent, usable, and instructive about his work – identifying the reason that his work matters and is of political consequence in the current moment. There is a need to be more intentional and critical in identifying what ideas and/or concepts and frameworks Fanon offers us that are useful [no, necessary] to us, now? In recognition of Fanon's 100th, we speak with Lou Turner. Professor Lou Turner is Clinical Assistant Professor, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and former Academic Advisor for the Department of African American Studies, 2008-2017. Lou Turner was Research and Public Policy Director for Chicago South Side community organization Developing Communities Project (2000-2014). He is a board member of the African American Leadership & Policy Institute. Turner is the Principal Investigator for Hal Baron Digital Archival, Research, and Publication Project at UIUC. A colleague of the late Hegelian-Marxist philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya, he has written extensively on Fanonian, Marxian and Hegelian dialectics. With Dr. Helen Neville, Lou Turner co-edited Frantz Fanon’s Psychotherapeutic Approaches to Clinical Work: Practicing Internationally with Marginalized Communities (2020). Lou Turner is coauthor of Frantz Fanon, Soweto and American Black Thought (1978; 1986), which circulated in the anti-apartheid underground of the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa. 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; Ghana; Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. listen intently. think critically. act accordingly.

“Every colonial nation carries the seeds of fascist temptation in its Bosom … There is no doubt in the minds of those who have lived through it that colonialism is one variety of fascism.” Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized With the echoes of George Jackson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Cedric J. Robinson, Aimé Césaire, Angela Davis et al., Felicia Denaud & Josh Myers meditate on the moment in crisis.

What you will hear next is Pt II of a four (4) part series where we explore, autobiographically, the origins of Modibo Kadalie’s perspectives on direct democracy, autonomy, Black radical labor history, and Pan Africanism. Pt. II builds upon the autobiographical framework, Modibo outlined in Pt. I [so, do not forget to tap in]. This part of the conversation will explore, in more detail, Modibo’s experience in Detroit, paying attention to the efforts to develop a sharper analysis that can inform various movements more clearly, then and now. Pt. IV will provide a few thoughts on moving forward. 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; Ghana; Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. listen intently. think critically. act accordingly.