Africa World Now Project

In a speech delivered in 1971 in Cape Town, South Africa, Steve Bantu Biko proclaimed that the “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” This time-less expression is undoubtedly just as important today, than when these words were first uttered. More importantly, they are fueling grassroots organizing and resistance efforts in South Africa, as well as in Burkina Faso, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Brazil and other places. We see the echoes of this axiom in movements across South Africa from the Rhodes Must Fall uprisings to the organizational expressions of resistance of organizations such as Black First, Land First. Today, in South Africa…the tide is changing. Many are developing a critical consciousness that is informing their resistance to the failures of post-Apartheid South Africa, with support and solidarity from around the African world…the people of South Africa are no longer sitting idly by waiting for justice and equality to be legislated for them. Important to note, the historical timeline is just 23 years since…this point is vital to highlight for a number of reasons… They are responding to what some analysts call…the neocolonial policies that maintains the deadly economic and sociopolitical structure of apartheid that is bolstered by still present white supremacist ideological practices, which continually exacerbate inequalities and class divisions in a "new" South Africa. Chris Hani, another one of South Africa’s important radical activist intellectuals is vital to examine in tandem with Steve Biko. Often, intentionally left out of any conversation about the struggle against the racist apartheid regime, Chris Hani praxis brings a clarity to the resistance within South Africa today, as it did when he was alive. The ability of Chris Hani to galvanize masses, his ideological clarity, and full commitment to the people of South Africa was clear. It was so clear that it, of course, threaten the “broker” peace between the apartheid government and the ANC. According to a 1991 confidential cable by a Pretoria-based US diplomat, "[He] often appears on public platforms in the townships wearing quasi-combat fatigues and delivering fiery speeches that arouse and delight the audience…the cable goes on to highlight that...“many observers believe that Hani would trounce Mbeki if there were a popular vote among ANC supporters.” This method of response by perceived power elites, is not relegated to African radical activist/intellectuals. This response is global. Nevertheless, Chris Hani and Steve Biko provide a deep and clear archetype of what it means to the change we wish to see. It is our job to expand, evolve the path that has been set. What we will hear next is Steve Biko explore Black Consciousness, in his own words, and then Chris Hani. Listen intentionally. Clearly. But most importantly, listen for and to extract the ideas…understand the historical continuities, to see toward a different future. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Enjoy the program.

According to Patterson and Kelley (2000) attempts to identify and make sense of the African diaspora are almost as old as the diaspora itself. Dating back at least to Juan Latino (a 16th century Spanish black professor at Granada), Ottobah Cuagano and Olaudah Equiano in the eighteenth century, and Jose Manuel Valdes (a Afro Peruvian physician who proved that cancer was not contagious) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, black writers and activists have often defined themselves as part of a larger international black community. The presumption that black people worldwide share a common culture was a response to a political imperative. An imperative that led to the formation of political and cultural movements premised on international solidarity. Thus, while acknowledging that African cultural elements survived the forced dispersal throughout the Americas and the Caribbean, we must always keep in mind that diasporic identities are socially and historically constituted, reconstituted, and reproduced; and that any sense of a collective identity among black peoples wherever they are found throughout the word is contingent and constantly shifting. Neither the fact of blackness nor shared experiences under racism nor the historical process of their dispersal makes for community or even a common identity. Yet it was precisely out of the historical struggle to resist this domination that a concept of "authentic" identity emerged alongside a discourse of difference and discontinuity. Stuart Hall (1990) identifies these two opposing but dialectically linked conceptions of identity in his essay "Cultural Identity and Diaspora." He writes: "The first position defines cultural identity in terms of one, shared culture, a sort of collective 'one true self,' hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed 'selves,' which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common. Within the terms of this definition, our cultural identities reflect their common historical experiences and shared cultural codes which provide us, as 'one people,' with stable, unchanging and continuous frames of reference and meaning, beneath the shifting divisions and vicissitudes of our actual history." What we will hear next is a recent talk from Dr. Joseph Harris where he explores the evolution, current state and the challenges of diaspora studies it faces moving forward. Dr. Joseph Harris a retired distinguished professor emeritus of history from Howard University. His seminal Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora (1982), a collection of essays that grew out of conferences he organized at Howard University in 1979 and at the University of Nairobi in 1981, is widely credited with establishing the field of African Diaspora Studies. He was founder and first president of the West African Research Association in Senegal, and he served as vice president of the International African Studies Association. From 1994 to 2004, he collaborated with the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s “Slave Route Project.” In January 2008, Harris organized and moderated an important symposium at the National Archives on the abolition of the trans-Atlantic trade in captive Africans. He has collaborated with L. Douglas Wilder, former governor of Virginia and past mayor of Richmond, to establish a National Slavery Museum in Petersburg, Va. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Enjoy the program!

For Enrique Dussel: “Modernity dawned in 1492 and with it the myth of a special kind of sacrificial violence which eventually eclipsed whatever was non-European.” For Walter Mignolo, 1492 is the moment at which “there is a bifurcation of history”. For Sylvia Wynter: “(T)he 1492 event would set in motion the bringing together of separated branches of our human species within the framework of a single history that we all now live, and while it led to incredible techno-scientific and other such dazzling achievements, as well as to the material well-being of one restricted portion of humanity, it also led to the systemic large-scale degradation and devalorization, even the extinction, of a large majority of the peoples of the earth.” Taking this idea further, Wynter argues that the struggle of our new millennium will be one between the ongoing imperative of securing the well-being of our present ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the human species itself/ourselves. Because of this overrepresentation, which is defined in the first part of the title as the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom, any attempt to unsettle the coloniality of power will call for the unsettling of this overrepresentation as the second and now purely secular form of what Aníbal Quijano identifies as the “Racism/Ethnicism complex,” on whose basis the world of modernity was brought into existence from the fifteenth/sixteenth centuries onwards (Quijano 1999, 2000). And of what Walter Mignolo identifies as the foundational “colonial difference” on which the world of modernity was to institute itself, thus institutionalizing the the human vs. man dialectic. The historical legacy and violent structures that are a vestige of racial mixing (albeit out of clear survival and necessity from the perspective of the Portuguese settler colonialist) and a lack of explicit apartheid laws, have allowed Brazilian elites to advance the myth of Brazil’s racial democracy. Conversely, these same elites lament that the affirmative action and anti-discrimination policies, despite being held up by the Brazilian Supreme Court, are US imports bent on inciting racial distrust and violence. Brazilian and US police have much in common. Both are waging an intensified militarized war on black, brown, and the poor that results in a reinscripton the power relations that are in a large part based on 14th century ideas of race; 18th-19th century colonialism/chattel slavery…but all are frankly rooted in the false notion of white supremacy. What we will hear next is Africa World Now Project’s collective associate producer, Dr. Keisha-Khan Perry and myself in conversation with Dr. Christen Smith. Dr. Christen Smith is a Black feminist anthropologist, social justice advocate and Associate Professor of Anthropology and African and African Diaspora Studies at The University of Texas at Austin where work focuses on the gendered dimensions of anti-Black state violence and resistance in the Americas, particularly Brazil. Based on her long-term collaborations with black organizers in Brazil, Christen Smith’s, Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence and Performance in Brazil (University of Illinois Press, 2016). Today’s program was executive produced by Keisha-Khan Perry. And as always in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Enjoy the program.

On the evening of Wednesday, March 14, 2018 Marielle Franco, a city councilor for Brazil’s Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL), was killed as she was riding in a car in Rio de Janeiro. Reports suggest that a Cobalt-model car pulled up beside her and fired thirteen bullets into the vehicle. The bullets killed her and her driver. Franco’s press secretary, who was in the backseat with her, survived. According to an article titled, Who Killed Marielle Franco? in Jacobin magazine, currently, evidence suggest that Franco’s death was in fact a well-planned political execution. Before Marielle Franco was murdered, she had attended an event earlier that evening in Rio’s Lapa neighborhood called “Black Women Changing Power Structures.” While working and raising a daughter as a single mother, she pursued bachelor’s and master’s degrees, ultimately defending a dissertation that criticized police “pacification” campaigns in Rio’s largest favelas. She wrote, “The police state is aimed at the repression and control of the poor. The most emblematic mark of this picture is the militaristic siege of the favelas and a growing process of incarceration.” She goes on to argue that “the campaigns worked to contain the dissatisfied or ‘excluded’ of this process, the majority of them poor, and increasingly relegated to the city’s ghettos and in prisons.” Today, AWNP will bring to you an recent conversation between Dr. Keisha-Khan Perry and Dr. Vera Benedito that explored the deep implications of the recent death of Marielle Franco. Examining the origins of Franco’s politics rooted in fighting for a radical change in the Brazil’s sociopolitical and economic structures and mapping the future of Brazil’s black radical left, Keisha-Khan and Professor Benedito provide an important context of global violence and the African world. Initially trained as a journalist and literary critic, Dr. Benedito was a founding member of the Black Movement in São Paulo. She was recruited by the late Ruth Simms Hamilton at Michigan State University in the 1990s to complete her Masters and PhD in Sociology. She was an inaugural contributor to the African Diaspora Research Project that brought together scholars and activists from around the world to carry out collaborative and comparative research on black culture and politics. The late Minister of Racial Equality, Luiza Bairros, was part of that cohort of students at Michigan State who along with Dr. Benedito profoundly shaped African Diaspora Studies in the United States. She has written on the history of Caribbean labor migration to Brazil as well as to narrate the complex political history of the struggle for affirmative action in higher education and in the labor market. She returned to Brazil in the mid-2000s where she has worked as a teacher and administrator in the public school system while also training teachers to implement Afro-Brazilian and African history into the curriculum. In addition to being the newest member of the Africa World Now Project collective as an associate producer, 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 Professor Perry is also author of Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil. Today’s program was executive produced by Keisha-Khan Perry and as always in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Enjoy the program.

Today…we will explore the work of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o with Dr. Josh Myers, Assistant Professor in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (b. 1938) is one of the African world’s most prolific writers, thinkers, cultural workers, play-write, activist. Growing up in colonial Kenya, his dream of a free Africa has shaped his works. In 1977, with ‘Ngaahika Ndeenda', Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o sought to liberate the theatrical process from what he considered “the general bourgeois education system.” Despite its success, the authoritarian Kenyan regime shut it down and he was subsequently imprisoned for more than a year. He was eventually released and left for the U.S., where he still resides... Early on Ngũgĩ understood the interdependent relationship between the politics of memory, language, and resistance…a process that prompted him to write in his language—Kikuyu. Among his extensive works, are novels, plays, short stories and essays, such as, but not limited to, Writers in Politics (1981 and 1997); Decolonising the Mind (1986); Moving the Center (1994); and Penpoints Gunpoints and Dreams (1998);‘Weep Not, Child’ (1964), ‘Petals of Blood’ (1977), ‘Wizard of the Crow’ (2006), ‘Dreams in a Time of War’ (2010) and ‘In the House of the Interpreter: A Memoir’ (2015). Currently Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has also taught at Yale University, and New York University. He is recipient of 10 honorary doctoral degrees and is the founder and editor of the Kikuyu-language journal. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is a frequent Nobel nominee... Before we delve into a deep exploration of Ngũgĩ work with Dr. Josh Myers, Assistant Professor in the Department of Afro American Studies at Howard University, we will first listen to Ngũgĩ himself…in a talk titled: Re-Membering Africa: Retrieval and Exchange of African Memory Enjoy!!!......

The ability to make language—words extend from the page…to become alive… to dance in the mind of a reader…creating vivid pictures that map time and space…weaving multiple experiences into a common tapestry of human history is an ability that only a few writers possess. It would not be a stretch to place such writers in the deep tradition passed down by generations of ancient priest, mystics, thinkers, storytellers, teachers who are often referred to as oracles. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o fits seamlessly in the long line of historical oracles who possess foresight and insight in the continuities that crisscross our human past, present, and future. Every group of people have these oracles, but to hear them…to see them is an art. We have lost the patience and humility to listen to them. These vessels of ancestors, conveyors of deep thought…channelers of truths…that provide guidance for our deep praxis of humanity. Ngũgĩ, as he is known, comes from an oral tradition of storytellers. A novelist, playwright, and essayist who sits alongside the likes of Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka in the modern African pantheon, he is a recurrent favorite for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Ngũgĩ’s life encompasses British colonialism and the anticolonial struggle for Kenyan independence; the tragedy of despotism in a free Africa; and exile…all of which he effortlessly weaves into his work. According to a November 16, 2016 interview in the Financial Times with Ngũgĩ , the author recounts Ngũgĩ’s reflection of winning a Nobel: “A Nobel would be validating but not essential.” Ngugi wa Thiong’o was born in 1938 a village north of Nairobi, one of 28 children. In the 1950s, his older brother, Good Wallace, joined the Mau Mau anticolonial resistance against the British occupation whose prison camps were described by the then-solicitor general as having been “distressingly reminiscent of conditions in Nazi Germany or Communist Russia”, according to previously secret documents released by the British Foreign Office in 2012. According to Ngũgĩ in the article: The British response to the rebellion was brutal and relentless. It even extended to weaponizing language itself” Further recalling this period, Ngũgĩ goes on in the article to say that it is was “the British who gave movement the name of Mau Mau— as if to say it was a meaningless movement”. Ngũgĩ reasons that “If they had said or called it the, ‘Land and Freedom Army’, as [the fighters] called it themselves, then they would be articulating the aims of the movement, right?” Today, I invite you to listen to a recent reflection by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Dr. Micere Githae-Mugo…on their work…The Trail of Dedan Kimathi. The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, a collaboration between Ngũgĩ and Micere Githae-Mugo, is a response to colonialist writings about the Land and Freedom Army (aka the Mau Mau movement), which traditionally depicted the movement and its leader, Dedan Kimathi, as mentally unbalanced and vicious. They choose to present a counter narrative to this image by highlighting how the movement and its leader was seen by many of the peasants and laborers of Kenya. In this reflection, they explore the politics of memory; the relationship between naming, forms of power, and resistance. Enjoy the program

The dominant narrative presented on the ANC, the struggle against South African Apartheid, the conditions and systems implemented when the ANC became the ruling party suggest that in a post-Apartheid South Africa, the people of South Africa experience distinctly identifiable improvements in their lived-conditions. However, according to Benjamin Fogel and Sean Jacobs, in their article Zuma is not the Only Problem, “Over two decades after taking power, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) is less associated with national liberation than with corruption, cronyism, and neoliberal economic policies.” Radical platforms remain at the grassroots. Many farm workers in the Western Cape province, for instance, have joined the Commercial Stevadoring and Allied Workers Union (CSAAWU) — a relatively small union that employs militant class politics in its struggle against some of the most powerful commercial agricultural interests in the country. As well as, the Shack Dwellers Movement, South Africa’s oldest social movement, who continue to mobilize for more equitable access to land, housing, and services with tremendous success, even in the face of state repression and political assassinations.” The former trade union leader turned billionaire, Ramaphosa with the backing of the ANC, unseated, Zuma, who was once considered to be the shrewd, political astute Teflon-lined leader of the ANC, to become the current president of South Africa. While Ramaphosa’s “supporters have heralded his victory as a triumph over the corruption, criminality, incompetence, and repression that have characterized Zuma’s presidency. Once a darling of the Left, Ramaphosa’s reputation will forever be stained by his involvement in the 2012 Marikana massacre. To relegate systemic inequality, corruption, and violence to one person, negates the reality that the nexus within which these interdependent practices thrive are contradictory to the values and ideals that South Africans rooted, and root, their resistance in. Today, we invited Nii Akuetteh back to have a much-needed conversation on the current conditions in South Africa. Nii Akuetteh is an independent Africa policy analyst based in Washington, DC and was the Executive Director of African Immigrants Caucus. He was formerly the Executive Director of Africa Action and former director of OSI West Africa in Nigeria. Prior to that he was a Georgetown University Adjunct Professor of African Affairs and former Research Director at TransAfrica Forum. Mr. Akuetteh appears regularly on various media outlets such as Al Jazeera, BBC, CCTV, NPR, The Real News Network and many more. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Enjoy the program

“As I face Africa, I ask myself: What is it between us that constitutes a tie that I can feel better than I can explain?” This was a question W.E.B. Du Bois asked himself in 1940 and we might imagine time and again before and after that moment. It was the question that guided his scholarship and his activism. Africa, was as Nahum Dmitri Chandler has argued, “the limit of the world,” and thus we might say, the beginning of Du Bois’s imagination for a future world, free of the toil and misery of modernity. How to explain this feeling was also how to produce an epistemological break that would generate a liberative politics out of that very feeling. Born 150 years ago on February 23, 1868, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois began his journey back to the future through his grandmother Violet’s memory of a song her ancestors brought from Africa. It was that song which he heard again in the churches he visited while attending Fisk University. The search for the meaning of that song took him to the libraries of all the major Western universities, whilst becoming the first African to receive a PhD from Harvard. And then to Atlanta, where he found it being sang again in the deep South. He wrote about it in The Negro, published in 1915 and then attempted to place the urgency of the plight of its producers before the international community with his series of Pan African Conferences during the 1920s. He then connected it to the Mother herself, with his 1924 trip to Liberia. Its meaning was loudest to him in 1945, where in Manchester England, a younger Du Bois discoverers of what it meant to be African in the world during the 5th Pan African Congress, inaugurating in many respects the African independence movements. A year later, he sat down to remap his earlier works on Africa in his major undertaking, The World and Africa. He connected the song back to the soil when he left the United States to live permanently in the Ghana imagined by Kwame Nkrumah’s movement. And it was there where he uttered the words: “Awake, awake, O sleeping world, Honour the sun; Worship the stars, those vaster suns Who rule the night Where black is bright And all unselfish work is right And greed is sin. And Africa leads on; Pan Africa...” And so it must lead… We will think of W.E.B. Du Bois as more than a narrator of American racial experiences, but as one who understood those experiences to be “but a local phase of a world problem.” Or we will not think truly with Du Bois. For this is what his work ultimately meant, and what it should continue to mean for us. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, 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.

According to Hotep Idris Galeta, the famed south African jazz-musician and educator, in his article, "The Development of Jazz in South Africa", he wrote that "South African Jazz has had many elements contributing to its evolution and development. The most prominent and significant being the rich eclectic cultural diversity of the country’s inhabitants and the influence of African/American musical culture upon it over the years. These two variants coupled with an environment of legislated racism, gross human rights violations, created the unique artistic forge and mold responsible for the evolution of South African Jazz. The first informal contact the inhabitants of Cape Town had with African Americans was during the American Civil War, when the Confederate warship the “Alabama” came into the port of Cape Town in 1862 to replenish its supplies. The “Alabama” patrolled the South Atlantic where it would lie in wait for Union Ships to come around the Cape from the Far East on its way to the east coast ports of Philadelphia, New York, New Port and Boston. It would then attack, plunder and sink them. The “Alabama” was one of the most notorious and feared Southern commerce raiders on patrol in the South Atlantic sending some fifty-eight Union vessels to the bottom of the ocean during her two year patrol. The Alabama was finally tracked down and sunk off the coast of France by a Union Warship on the 19th of June 1864. On June 19th 1890 South Africans had their first formal contact with black-Americans and Black-American music when the “Virginia Jubilee Singers” from Hampton Virginia presented a series of concerts in Cape Town. Orpheus McAdoo was born in 1858 in Greensborough, North Carolina. As a young man he attended the Hampton Institute in Hampton Virginia, where he studied and graduated as a teacher in 1876. Before turning to music as a professional career in 1886 he taught school in Pulaski and Accomac Counties in the state of Virginia for ten years. In 1886 he toured Europe, Australia, New Zealand and the Far East after joining five members of the original Fisk Jubilee singers. Upon his return to the U.S. a year or two later McAdoo formed his own company by recruiting some ex students and graduates from Hampton amongst who were his future wife Mattie Allen and his brother Eugene. South Africa has deep and clearly identifiable connections to the African diaspora, particularly in the experiences of people of African descent who live in the U.S. What we will hear next is Africa World Now Project’s tribute to Hugh Masekela who transition to the ancestral realm on January 23 2018, through a collage of music, a 2012 Ted-talk by Hugh Masekela himself, 2014 interview with AWNP’s Mwiza Munthali, and reflections from various people who live in Southern African—specifically Malawi where Mwiza Munthali is currently on the ground… Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, 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. Music: J Dilla-African Rhythms Hugh Maskela-Herb Alpert & Hugh Masekela - Foreign Natives Hugh Masekela - Night in Tunisia Hugh Masekela - The Big Apple HUGH MASEKELA Bajabula Bonke (Healing Song) Hugh Masekela- If Theres Anybody Out There

To understand, analysis, or critique the conditions within which the African world lives without centering the role of settler colonialism as a function of racial capitalism has proven to be limited in range and scope in understanding the conditions within which the African world finds itself, today. Virtually no part of the modern United States—the economy, education, constitutional law, religious institutions, sports, literature, economics, even protest movements—can be understood without first understanding the slavery and dispossession that laid its foundation. It is because of this fact that radical historian Gerald Horne digs deeply into Europe’s colonization of Africa and the New World, when, from Columbus’s arrival until the Civil War, some 13 million Africans and some 5 million Native Americans were forced to build and cultivate a society extolling “liberty and justice for all.” In The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean, released January 22, 2018, Gerald Horne shows that the seventeenth century was an era when the roots of slavery, white supremacy, and capitalism became inextricably tangled into a complex-self-sustaining system involving war and revolts in Europe, England’s conquest of the Scots and Irish, the development of formidable new weaponry able to ensure Europe’s colonial dominance, the rebel merchants of North America who created “the United States,” and the hordes of Europeans whose newfound opportunities in this “free” land amounted to “combat pay” for their efforts as “white” settlers. Centering his book on the Eastern Seaboard of North America, the Caribbean, Africa, and what is now Great Britain, Gerald Horne provides a harrowing map of the apocalyptic loss and misery that likely has no parallel in human history. Monthly Review Press argues that Gerald Horne’s work is an essential tool that will not allow history to be told by the victors. It is especially needed now, in the age of Trump. For it has never been more vital, Horne writes, “to shed light on the contemporary moment wherein it appears that these malevolent forces have received a new lease on life.” What we will hear next is Africa World Now Project’s senior research, content contributor, and production director, Dr. Tasneem Siddiqui conversation with Dr. Gerald Horne. Gerald Horne is John J. and Rebecca Moores Professor of African American History at the University of Houston. A prolific scholar, he has published more than three dozen books, including Confronting Black Jacobins and Race to Revolution, Monthly Review Press; The Counter Revolution of 1776 among many. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, 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.