Africa World Now Project

“History teaches us clearly that the battle against colonialism does not run straight away along the lines of nationalism. For a very long time the native devotes his energies to ending certain definite abuses: forced labour, corporal punishment, inequality of salaries, limitation of political rights, etc. This fight for democracy against the oppression of mankind will slowly leave the confusion of neo-liberal universalism to emerge, sometimes laboriously, as a claim to nationhood. It so happens that the unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and, let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps. National consciousness, instead of being the all-embracing crystallization of the innermost hopes of the whole people, instead of being the immediate and most obvious result of the mobilization of the people, will be in any case only an empty shell, a crude and fragile travesty of what it might have been.” [Frantz Fanon’s, The Pitfalls of National Consciousness in The Wretched of Earth.] The pitfalls of national consciousness is one of the many important theoretical contributions from Frantz Fanon. Fanon argues that nationalism often fails at achieving liberation across class boundaries because its aspirations are primarily those of the colonized bourgeoisie, a privileged middle class who perhaps seeks to defeat the prevailing colonial rule only to usurp its place of dominance and surveillance over the working-class, the lumpenproletariat. With the current discourse around limited notions of nationalism and the so-called rise of an global ultra-nationalist right…Today’s program is an intentional disruption in this milieu. It is designed to offer streams of thought that invoke critique and inform paths of study toward solutions. Today’s conversation attempts to offer perspective by focusing specifically on the sociopolitical and cultural conditions in Brazil, Venezuela and Cuba. What you will hear next is a recent conversation with James Early. James Early is former Director of Cultural Studies and Communication at the Center for Folklife Programs and Cultural Studies at the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC. Mr. Early has served in various positions at the Smithsonian Institution, including Assistant Provost for Educational and Cultural Programs, Assistant Secretary for Education and Public Service, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Service, and Executive Assistant to the Assistant Secretary for Public Service. Prior to his work with the Smithsonian, Mr. Early was a humanist administrator at the National Endowment for the Humanities, Washington, D.C., a producer, writer, and host of "Ten Minutes Left," a weekly radio segment of cultural, educational and political interviews and commentary at WHURFM radio at Howard University, and a research associate for programs and documentation. He currently serves on the Board of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and is a consultant on various issues related to human rights, labor, land, state craft. Today’s program was produced in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, the Avalon Village in Detroit; Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, Cooperation Jackson in Jackson Mississippi; 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! Inquires/Comments/Ideas: [email protected] Photo Credit: https://qz.com/africa/694858/the-influence-of-revolutionary-frantz-fanon-endures-with-africas-intellectuals/

The histories of cooperative practice and ownership of Africana communities have a long history, particularly when we account for an Africana human agency in the face of hyper-exploitation and hyper-extractive logics and practice of racial capitalism. These systems and logic encompass the privatization and monopoly over agriculture, manufacturing, finance, housing, healthcare, land, water, and other natural resources, etc. Articulated through plantation/neo-plantation-based economic systems and power relations, aligned with industry and codified in the state and/or state-sanctioned violence animated by false notions of racial supremacy. The affect has produced an active intergenerational disaccumulation of wealth for Africana people, evolving forms of political disenfranchisement and a sustained attack on “programs designed to lessen ethnic and class exploitation,” “the spread of mass impoverishment, the erosion of human rights protections, and the increased deadliness of daily life” (Woods 1998, 5). The question must be posed, at its core, did the state, as birthed as a settler colonial project ever have a twinkling of a notion of the existence of other human beings? History and analysis would suggest in some ways yes, in many more ways, not even close. Foregrounded by Africana ontology and epistemologies that produced (and continues to produce) a distinct and radical paradigm of land use, social organization, and economic development, which cultivates political power in the form of strategies for realizing global social justice. Today, Africa World Now Project’s senior researcher, content contributor, and production designer Dr. Tasneem Siddiqui and associate producer Dr. Keisha-Khan Perry speak with Dr. Jessica Gordon Nembhard about the History of African and Diasporic Cooperative Thought and Practice. Author of Collective Courage: A History African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice. Dr. Jessica Gordon Nembhard is a professor of Community Justice and Social Economic Development in the Department of Africana Studies at John Jay College, of the City University of New York (CUNY) in New York City. Dr. Gordon Nembhard is a political economist specializing in community economics, Black Political Economy and popular economic literacy. Her research and publications explore problematics and alternative solutions in cooperative economic development and worker ownership, community economic development, wealth inequality and community-based asset building, and community-based approaches to justice. Dr. Nembhard is an affiliate scholar at the Centre for the Study of Co-operatives at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, where she is co-investigator for the “Measuring the Impact of Credit Unions,” Community and University Research Partnerships (CURA) project; and an affiliate scholar with the Economics Department’s Center on Race and Wealth at Howard University. Today’s program was executive produced by Dr. Tasneem Siddiqui and as always in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, the Avalon Village in Detroit; Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, Cooperation Jackson in Jackson Mississippi; Palestine, South Africa, and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

According to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz in an article titled, Settler Colonialism and the Second Amendment in Monthly Review, which is adapted from her recently published book, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, Professor Dunbar-Ortiz points out that: “in a book first published in 1876 but written decades earlier, historian Joseph Doddridge (1769–1826), a minister and early settler in the Ohio country, wrote: "that the early settlers on the frontiers of this country were like Arabs of the desert of Africa, in at least two respects; every man was a soldier, and from early in the spring till late in the fall, was almost continually in arms..." According to Dunbar-Ortiz, the Second Amendment thus reflects this dependence on individual armed men, not just in terms of a right to bear arms, but also as a requirement to bear arms, which was crucial to the integrity of the state and the conception of security achieved through a relationship between state and citizen. In 1783, the British withdrew from the fight to maintain sovereignty over their thirteen colonies, not due to military defeat, but rather in order to redirect their resources to occupy and colonize South Asia. Britain’s transfer of its claim to Indian Country west of the colonies spelled a nightmarish disaster for all Indigenous peoples east of the Mississippi, and ultimately all of North America that would be claimed and occupied by the United States. Britain’s withdrawal in 1783 opened a new chapter of unrestrained racist violence and colonization of the continent. The Anglo-American settlers’ violent break from Britain in the late eighteenth century paralleled their search-and-destroy annihilation of Delaware, Cherokee, Muskogee, Seneca, Mohawk, Shawnee, and Miami, during which they slaughtered families without distinction of age or gender, and expanded the boundaries of the thirteen colonies into unceded Native territories. The Declaration of Independence of 1776 symbolizes the beginning of the “Indian Wars” and “westward movement” that continued across the continent for another century of unrelenting U.S. wars of conquest. Today, AWNP's Dr. Tasneem Siddiqui explores the disarming history of the second amendment and its relationship to Africa and African descendant peoples with Dr. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Having grown up in rural Oklahoma, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, the daughter of a tenant farmer and part-Indian mother, has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than four decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. After receiving her PhD in history at the University of California at Los Angeles, she taught in the newly established Native American Studies Program at California State University, Hayward, and helped found the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies. Her 1977 book The Great Sioux Nation was the fundamental document at the first international conference on Indigenous peoples of the Americas, held at the United Nations’ headquarters in Geneva. Dunbar-Ortiz is the author or editor of seven other books, including An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States; Blood on the Border: Memoir of the Contra War; Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico; and Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment. She lives in San Francisco. Today’s program was executive produced by Dr. Tasneem Siddiqui and as always in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, the Avalon Village in Detroit; Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, Cooperation Jackson in Jackson Mississippi; Palestine, South Africa, and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

Reconstruction, the period so named after the U.S. Civil War, is a period that in its totality is a clear articulation of the lasting implications of settler colonialism. Take the conceptualization of ‘reconstruction’ itself. This concept implies an implicit notion of equality, collectivism, cooperation, rebuilding, togetherness, democracy, so on and so forth. W. E. B. Du Bois writing in a chapter titled, “The Propaganda of History” in his seminal work Black Reconstruction argues that: “the facts of American history have in the last half century been falsified because the nation was ashamed. The South was ashamed because it fought to perpetuate human slavery. The North was ashamed because it had to call in the black men to save the Union, abolish slavery and establish democracy...." Further solidifying the sharp analysis of Du Bois on the creation and power of nation creating myths, Cedric Robinson, in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, argues that when examined properly it can be understood that the formation of nation-states and political reigns precipitate the development of founding myths—such as myths of origins. Citing Du Bois, Robinson writes, the “bourgeoisie use of print and press, their appeals to and seduction of the classes they intended to dominate facilitated the fabrication of these national myths. These myths sole purpose was to be recognized in the official instruments of class hegemony: national creeds, social ideologies, philosophical tenets, constitutions, etc. They functioned to legitimate the social orders that they create. As they begin to inform the social consciousness of everyone forced and freely a part of the social order, these myths were substituted for history.” They provide the appearance of being a historical narrative when in fact they are actually nothing more than class-serving rationales for exploitation. The formation of the American state is no different. In fact, when properly contextualized, the American Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the considerations in the Federalist Papers were all expressions of the interests and creed of the American bourgeoisie. Today, Dr. Greg Carr explores this period called, (re)construction. Dr. Carr is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University and on the Faculty at the Howard School of Law. He holds a Ph.D. in African American Studies from Temple University and a JD from the Ohio State University College of Law. The School District of Philadelphia’s First Resident Scholar on Race and Culture (1999-2000), Dr. Carr led a team of academics and educators in the design of the curriculum framework for Philadelphia’s mandatory high school African American History course. These materials are the first to approach African American History using an Africana Studies methodology. He is a co-founder of the Philadelphia Freedom Schools Movement, a community-based academic initiative that has involved over 13,000 elementary, high school and college students. Dr. Carr has presented his curriculum work for the Board of Public Education in Salvador, Bahia, and has lectured across the U.S. as well as the world. His publications have appeared in, The African American Studies Reader, Socialism and Democracy, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, The National Urban League’s 2012 State of Black America and Malcolm X: A Historical Reader. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, the Avalon Village in Detroit; Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, Cooperation Jackson in Jackson Mississippi; Palestine, South Africa, and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

In Two Thousand Seasons, Ayi Kwei Armah writes: “we are not a people of yesterday. Do they ask how many single seasons we have flowed from our beginnings till now? We shall point them to the proper beginning of their counting. On a clear night when the light of the moon has blighted the ancient woman and her seven children, on such a night tell them to go alone into the world. There, have them count first the one, then the seven, and after the seven all the other stars visible to their eyes alone." "After the beginning they will be ready for the sand. Let them seek the sea-line. They will not have to ponder where to start. Have them count the sand. Let them count it grain from singe grain. And after they have reached the end of that counting, we shall not ask them to number the raindrops in the ocean. But with the wisdom of the aftermath have them ask us again how many seasons have flowed by since our people were unborn." "The air everywhere around is poisoned with truncated tales of our origins. That is also part of the wreckage of our people. What has been cast abroad is not a thousandth of our history, even if its quality were truth. The people called our people are not a hundredth of our people. But the haze of this fouled world exists to wipe out knowledge of our way, the way. These mists are here to keep us lost, the destroyers’ easy prey.” It is in the mist of the destroyers that Randy Weston battled. With the spirit of the ancestors, the stories he created were maps to piece the fragments together. The fragments of a fractured history—a torn being. And the rhythm upon which he built these stories are the reminders to seek oneness—a wholeness. Rhythm according to Amiri Baraka, is “the natural motion of matter.” The rhythm Randy Weston created was the material (re)creation of the map of harmony from which the world—the African/a world was dislodged. The universe, which is materialized through creative human expression. Baraka adds, “the composite rhythm of everything is everywhere. The whole life (Time, Place, and Condition) shapes rhythm, the where you be at (bloods say). And it is a physical/mental construct. Finally, it is deeper because it goes deeper. Will grow deeper, i.e., the perception of the finest(?) particular (of a) rhythm accesses properties in the perceiver (or confirms them). Rhythm’s infinite “circles” of transformation, in modes and forms and direction we do not even know exist.” “Africans used rhythm to speak and sing, to dance—to communicate over long distances with each other and to the forces of the universe.” Its censorship. Its control. Its banning was not without political, social, and cultural imposition. As a result, Africans in the diaspora cultivated new methods and evolved technologies of spiritual practice. It was inevitable as, “African religion sought to discover the human relationship to what exists always by tuning in to it, and becoming, at whatever level, at one, cognizant, conscious, “with knowing”, be possessed, by it, as the direct expression of the whole, and as a direct experience. This is the holiness (Whole/ness, at/one), the revelation.” Today, we pay tribute to Rand Weston. The artist. Theorist. Freedom seeker. The spiritual warrior. The historian. The manifestation of the healing and creative spirits of nature and universe. What you will hear next and what we present to you…are the words, artistry, ideas of Randy Weston. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, the Avalon Village in Detroit; Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, Cooperation Jackson in Jackson Mississippi; Palestine, South Africa, and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

Samir Amin wrote in 2016 that: “Partial awareness emerges from particular struggles, for example, from the struggles of peasants or women for the defense of human commons or the struggle for respect of popular sovereignty. The progress of the convergence of these particular types of awareness would make it possible to advance towards the formulation of new ways to surpass capitalism. But note…increased awareness will not happen through successive adaptations to the requirements of capitalist accumulation, but through awareness of the necessity of breaking with those requirements. The most enlightened segments of the movement should not isolate themselves by brandishing their disdain for others. Rather, they should involve themselves in all struggles in order to help the others to advance their understanding.” According to John Bellamy Foster in his Monthly Review article titled, Samir Amin at 80: An Introduction and Tribute, Amin’s work, as wide-ranging as it is, can be succinctly described in terms of the dual designation of the The Law of Value and Historical Materialism. For Amin, this basic division of Marxist theory is not to be denied. However, what makes Amin’s work vital and innovative is his insistence that the economic laws of capitalism, summed up by the law of value, are subordinate to the laws of historical materialism. Economic science, while indispensable, cannot explain at the highest level of abstraction, as in mathematical equations, the full reality of capitalism and imperialism, since it cannot account either for the historical origins of the system itself, or for the nature of the class struggle. Nor indeed can it present in a strictly determinant fashion the contemporary historical manifestation of the law of value, expressed as the theory of “globalized value,” which requires recognition of such factors as monopoly power and unequal exchange. At best we can see value relations as historically “transformed” in ways that are less determinant than in the abstract models based on a freely competitive economy, but which are still subject to meaningful political-economic analysis. The rise of monopoly capital and imperialism from the late nineteenth century on consolidated a system of “apartheid on a world scale” dividing the affluent countries of the North from those of the South. Today, Africa World Now Project will present a 2013 lecture that Samir Amin gave at School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London as part of the series "Samir Amin: Six Decades of Development Debate" Samir Amin was born in Cairo in 1931 and was educated at the Lycee Francais there. He gained a Ph.D. in Political Economy in Paris (1957), as well as degrees from the Institut de Statistiques and from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques. He then returned home where he was attached to the planning bodies of Nasser's regime. He left Egypt in 1960 to work with the Ministry of Planning of the newly independent Mali (1960-1963), and following this, he commenced an academic career. He has held the position of full professor in France since 1966 and was for ten years (1970-1980) the director of the U.N. African Institute for Economic Development and Planning (in Dakar). Since 1980 he was directing the African Office of the Third World Forum, an international non-governmental association for research and debate. He is author of many books, which include, but are not limited to, Accumulation on a World Scale: A Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment; Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism; Maldevelopment: Anatomy of a Global Failure; The People's Spring: The Future of the Arab Revolution

Hip hop, as a cultural product of Africa and African descendant peoples is a rich field of inquiry. Hip hop as a viable platform that highlights calls for social change is the life-giving breath of hip hop. Nevertheless, a viable work that dives deep into the sociopolitical and philosophical foundations of hip hop as a human expression of African futures is still yet to be written. Most work on hip hop is still grasping with it at its surface level. Still justifying its existence. Resisting the clutches of the ever-evolving attempts of racial capitalism to control it, hip hop as the historical and ancestral culmination of art, philosophy, politics, collectivism, questions of humanity is simultaneously evolving. Africa, as Dr. Msia Clark writes in her book, Hip Hop in Africa: Prophets of the City and Dustyfoot Philosophers (https://hiphopafrican.com/2017/12/17/hip-hop-in-africa-prophets-of-the-city-and-dustyfoot-philosophers/), is where the origins of hip hop can be found. According to Dr. Clark, when Africans were forcibly taken from their homelands, enslaved, they carried with them their human traditions, their cultural traditions that linked them with heaven and earth. One of these traditions were the rhythmic meditations on life, love, politics, the future—we call music. These traditions were forged in the conditions within which those Africans found themselves, the Americas, South, Central, North—to become jazz, the blues, gospel…and of course hip hop. Therefore, to understand the roots of hip hop in Africa—its origins—adds a depth and breadth to studying hip hop that is vital to understand its salience and ability to invent the future. What we will hear next is a recent conversation with Dr. Msia Clark on her recently published book…Hip Hop in Africa: Prophets of the City and Dustyfoot Philosophers Dr. Msia Kibona Clark is an Associate Professor in the Department of African Studies at Howard University. She is originally from Tanzania and received her doctorate in African Studies from Howard University in 2006. Her research has focused on African migration and identity, as well as hip hop and popular culture in Africa. Dr. Clark has published several scholarly publications on African migration, African immigrant identities, relations between African migrants and African Americans, and hip-hop culture’s intersections with social change, gender, and politics in Africa. She has published two books (Hip Hop and Social Change in Africa: Ni Wakati and Hip-Hop in Africa: Prophets of the City and Dustyfoot Philosophers) and over ten scholarly articles and book chapters, and currently produces the Hip Hop African blog and monthly podcast hosted at hiphopafrican.com. Dr. Clark is also an accomplished photographer. She has participated in exhibits in Tanzania and the U.S. Her work was also featured in the book project Mfon: Women Photographers in the African Diaspora. 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.

Amie Césaire writes that: “at the very time when it most often mouths the word, the West has never been further from being able to live a true humanism—a humanism made to the measure of the world.” Sylvia Wynter adds clarity in that “[O]ur now immensely large-scale systemic injustices, as extended across the planet, are all themselves as law-likely and co-relatedly indispensable to the institutionalization of our now purely secular and therefore Western and Westernized liberal/neoliberal Man’s homo economicus’s biocosmogonically chartering origin narrative!” Elsewhere, Wynter writes that “Human beings are magical. Bios and Logos. Words made flesh, muscle and bone animated by hope and desire, belief materialized in deeds, deeds which crystallize our actualities […] And the maps of spring always have to be redrawn again, in undared forms.” Wynter’s vocation, according to Katherine McKittrick, works towards “the possibility of undoing and unsettling—not replacing or occupying—Western conceptions of what it means to be human.” According to David Scott, “The story of humanism is often told as a kind of European coming of age story. But this coming of age story has another aspect or dimension that is often relegated to a footnote, namely the connection between humanism and dehumanization.” This fact, in all of its complexities and simplicity, is the foundation upon which, as I argue in my work, human rights theory and practice was constructed. However, the tradition of resistance to this othering process and all of its knowledge production capabilities and capacities, an alternative conception of the world was formed. Conceptions that I call an Africana critical human rights consciousness. The processes of creating whiteness, and its antithesis blackness being stripped of its agency, its human—being was essential. Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks highlights this dialectical process as the ‘zone of non-being’. Since its inception, capitalism has displaced and disappeared peoples not only through commodification and mystification, but also through marginalizing non-Western understandings of the world. For Wynter, social categories such as class, race and gender are all part of “the performative enactment of the Western world system’s [allocation of] degrees of domination/subordination.” What we will hear next is Dr. Paget Henry engage the life and work of Sylvia Wynter. Dr. Paget Henry is Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Brown University. He is the author of Caliban's Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy (Routledge, 2000), Peripheral Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Antigua (Transaction Books, 1985), and co-editor of C.L.R. James's Caribbean (Duke UP, 1992) and New Caribbean: Decolonization, Democracy, and Development (Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1983). Henry is editor of The C.L.R. James Journal and co-editor of the Routledge series Africana Thought. Sylvia Wynter is professor emeritus at Stanford University. She is normally described by some as a Caribbean novelist and playwright. Her thought is centered on advancing our understanding of the contradictions in the Man/human dialectic universalized by a Western project to assert its philosophical, ontological, epistemological, cosmological understanding as being THE standard to which all others should be measured—modeled. By will or force. Professor Wynter was born of Jamaican parents in the Oriente Province of Holguin, Cuba. Educated at King's College, University of London, gaining her MA in 1953 for a thesis on Spanish drama. In 1977 she became Professor of African and Afro-American Studies at Stanford University. Wynter is among the most noted contemporary women playwrights of the Caribbean, rooting much of her work in the folk idioms of the region. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities...

Today, we will take a look the legacy and contributions of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz as he expands the notions and ideas of African world history, justice, freedom, & citizenship… The collective and historical consciousness of the world in general—and the Africana world, specifically are still trying to grasp and in many instances are still grappling with the profound impact of the trajectory setting praxis of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz. In fact, interestingly most of us are still trying to deal with basic questions related to Malcolm X…the breadth and depth of his praxis prompts us to still ask: Who is Malcolm X?… Still, one question rises above all others: Have we been able to truly hear to understand the deep thought of El Shabazz? Malcolm is given to us as an enigma—an object—he was and is still feared—not only by those current power elite—who by the way directly remember the time of Malcolm as many of them were in positions of authority then and still are now (Malcolm was assassinated 55years ago) … But he is feared by many black folk who are comfortable with their positions in this segmented society—he is fragmented—disassociated from the larger Africana struggle for a more just and humane world. This disassociation becomes important to note as the civil rights manifestation of the freedom struggle is given as representing the completion of entire movement itself—consequently he seen as a rupture in black political, social, cultural, economic thought and behavior---he is juxtaposed to Dr. King... As we know, there have been many works that analyze Brother Malcolm, particularly by people of African descent in the U.S. One of the most potent reflections on this corpus on Malcolm was given in (1992) by Amiri Baraka when he argued that most of the work on Malcolm has been “distorted and co-opted by a generation of backward Black petty bourgeoisie who have never lived with Black people, never lived in the ghetto. Children of Black people who are a part of the anti-us apartheid movement of the 50s and 60s allowed to move to the suburbs and be the token. The masses of Black people did not move forward, only a small sector identified as “role models” for the rest. For them Black culture is abstract—a style, understood only in theory.” What this all suggest is that in order to truly understand Malcolm X we must do a few things: 1) El Hajj Malik El Shabazz must be situated and mapped in a longer context of Africana world resistance…his praxis is not an anomaly in the sociopolitical and cultural praxis of the African world---it is part and parcel of a larger Black Radical Tradition…a strain of radical thought and action centered on the connectedness of all oppressed African peoples; 2) once mapped this praxis must be placed in its proper place---it must understood as a human rights discourse. Or more appropriately an Africana critical human rights consciousness; and 3) in being understood as so… this framework can then be applied as deep critique—a theory critical of the complexities and nuances found in a society that is a product of racial capitalism. What we will hear next is El Hajj Malik El Shabazz in his own words... Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Brazil; Colombia; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson Mississippi; Avalon Village in Detroit; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! Enjoy the program…!

The control of information…the foundation of knowledge formation…is a crucial tool of oppression. The manufactured ignorance of the masses has been utilized to create a globalized order that positions one group of people against another group of people, nevertheless, the reality suggest that… groups of people who are in bitter conflict with each other...actually have more in common than differ. The methods to free one’s self from not-knowing (an ignorance) are many-fold, and bound by the conditions within which it this ignorance is formed. The Cuban revolution was one in a protracted line of resistance movements in world-historical moments when the people decided to move beyond their manufactured realities. Che Guevara is undeniably one of the chief architects of this moment. The influence of Che is displayed in his December 11, 1964 UN speech where he proclaims that: “Cuba comes here to state its position on the most important points of controversy and will do so with the full sense of responsibility that the use of this rostrum implies, while at the same time fulfilling the unavoidable duty of speaking clearly and frankly... We would like to see this Assembly shake itself out of complacency and move forward. We would like to see the committees begin their work and not stop at the first confrontation. Imperialism wants to turn this meeting into a pointless oratorical tournament, instead of solving the serious problems of the world. We must prevent it from doing so. This session of the Assembly should not be remembered in the future solely by the number 19 that identifies it. Our efforts are directed to that end. It is vital that we interrogate the forms of knowledge with which we use to understand our past and present, as the answers we collect are directly related to how we move toward a future…how we navigate the world… In short, it essential to consistently think about the way we think…ask individual and collective critical questions. The ideas that form is only dangerous to those who seek to control lived realities of the masses. The more we seek the continuities in our experiences…the closer we come to a reconstructed world. This has been…and still is the central premise of African world resistance movements…Cuba has without doubt shown material and ideological effect on this premise… Let’s listen to Che Guevara ideas on democracy, radical humanism, etc in his own words, unfiltered. What you will hear in today’s program: 1) An excerpt of Che’s December 11, 1964, speech at the 19th General Assembly of the United Nations in New York; 2) We then will hear a December 16, 1964 informal interview gave to several journalists at the Cuban Mission Headquarters in New York narrated by journalist Chris Couch; and 3) Lastly, we will hear a segment of a panel interview Che participated in on Face the Nation, December 13, 1964 where he faced a barrage of questions from Richard C Hottelet; Ted Shultz, Paul Niven. 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!