DARAJA PRESS PODCASTS

In this urgent, wide-ranging conversation, Kali Akuno—co-founder of Cooperation Jackson—examines the 2026 US midterm elections from the ground in Jackson, Mississippi. He describes a city transformed by population loss, state disinvestment, failing infrastructure and a shift from Black working-class political power towards affluent white influence. Yet he also finds signs of renewed movement energy, especially among young people responding to racism, economic abandonment and organized white supremacy.

Akuno cautions against reading Democratic victories as proof of a durable progressive coalition. Electoral change, he argues, grew from years of grassroots organizing, but also from anger over inflation, tariffs, collapsing farm markets, fuel prices and the material costs of US wars. Mississippi and Michigan reveal different political histories: one shaped by Southern racial power, the other by labour traditions and longstanding Black, Arab and Muslim organizing.

The central challenge begins after election day. Movements must not become campaign machinery that politicians discard once elected. Akuno calls for sustained pressure, protest, strategic disruption and independent organization capable of holding even the "less bloody" choice accountable. Relief from authoritarian danger must not become a return to imperial normality.

The discussion moves from Gaza, Iran and changing attitudes towards Israel to AIPAC's influence inside both major parties. Akuno also explores the fragile political economy of artificial intelligence: speculative investment, data-centre expansion, public subsidy, environmental costs and an economy that creates remarkably few lasting jobs.

He insists that political education must connect household hardship to militarism, empire and financialized capitalism, while developing cooperative structures that let communities retain young people, meet their needs and govern their own futures with collective confidence.

Combining local experience with international analysis, this conversation asks what elections can—and cannot—deliver. It is a clear-eyed argument for building durable institutions, economic democracy and popular power beyond the ballot box.

Kali Akuno, Cooperation Jackson, US midterm elections, Mississippi politics, political economy, grassroots organizing, economic democracy

Fra Hughes, a Belfast-born activist and author of Kidnapped on the Global Sumud Flotilla to Gaza 2026, grew up during the Troubles in 1960s–70s North Belfast—a world of armed British soldiers on the streets, sectarian division, and, as a teenager, a near-abduction by loyalist paramilitaries, the Shankill Butchers. His political awakening came through the 1981 hunger strikes and Bobby Sands' election, the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, and later Israel's 2008–09 Operation Cast Lead and the 2010 Mavi Marmara raid, which killed nine activists including Furkan Dogan. The Marmara attack pushed him into direct action: he founded Belfast Friends of Palestine, sourced a wheelchair-accessible minibus via eBay, and joined George Galloway's Viva Palestina medical convoy to Gaza in 2010, delivering it to a hospital. He later co-founded Palestine Aid Ireland, a volunteer-run charity that has funded solar panels, university scholarships, and—since October 2023—sourced roughly 320,000 meals inside Gaza (around $180,000), along with winter clothing and hygiene supplies. The charity has no offices or paid staff, ensuring every donation reaches Gaza directly through trusted local contacts, including his patron Dr Saeb Shaath.

Fra Hughes, a Belfast-born activist and author of Kidnapped on the Global Sumud Flotilla to Gaza 2026, secured a place on the 2026 Global Sumud Flotilla after an earlier attempt in 2025 ended when his boat's engine failed near Crete. He sailed for 50 days—from 5 April to 24 May 2026—aboard the yacht Diablo with an international crew that included a former RAF fighter pilot turned captain. About 600 miles from Gaza, Israeli forces began intercepting dozens of boats. Hughes broadcast a Mayday before soldiers boarded at gunpoint, zip-tied him, and transferred detainees to a warship. There, they were held barefoot in a shipping container, sprayed with water, and denied food—which he refused in solidarity with starving Gazans. Taken to Keziot prison, he was strip-searched, forced into stress positions, and handcuffed with deliberately tightened cuffs that caused lasting nerve damage. Eleven times he refused to sign a voluntary deportation order, demanding consular access instead. He witnessed fellow detainees with broken bones and heard accounts of sexual abuse. After roughly 36 hours, he was deported via Istanbul, reaching Belfast on 24–25 May to a welcome from family and press. He closes by urging listeners toward boycott, education, and continued solidarity with Palestine.

Taking Up the Spear is the firsthand account of Shadrack Maphumulo, an ordinary South African who becomes a freedom fighter against apartheid. The narrative traces his life from a rural Zulu childhood, shaped by stories of the Bambatha Rebellion, to his early working years in Durban where he faces systemic racism, slave wages, and the humiliating pass laws. His entrepreneurial dreams—first a taxi, then a shop—are systematically crushed by a white supremacist government that reserves prosperity for whites, forcing him to realize that individual effort cannot overcome the oppressive system.

Radicalized, Maphumulo joins the trade union movement SACTU and later the banned ANC and its armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). He details his rudimentary training in sabotage and participates in several missions, including bombing an Afrikaner newspaper office and attacking municipal beer halls. Arrested in 1963, he endures brutal torture and solitary confinement before being sentenced to ten years on Robben Island. On the island, he details the horrific conditions, daily beatings, and hunger strikes, but also the political education and solidarity among prisoners. After his release in 1975, he resumes underground work, leading to another arrest, torture, and banning. The story ends with his escape into exile in Swaziland, where he continues the struggle. The epilogue reveals his assassination by South African security forces in 1986, cementing his legacy as a hero who sacrificed everything for a free South Africa.

Firoze Manji talks to Bill Fletcher Jr about his ideas for organizing against the right. What are the weaknesses of the left? What lessons are there from organizing in the labour movement? What are the possibilities of creating a mass movement against the right?

Bill Fletcher Jr has been an activist since his teen years. Upon graduating from college he went to work as a welder in a shipyard, thereby entering the labor movement. Over the years he has been active in workplace and community struggles as well as electoral campaigns. He has worked for several labor unions in addition to serving as a senior staffperson in the national AFL-CIO.

Fletcher is the former president of TransAfrica Forum; a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies; and in the leadership of several other projects. Fletcher is the co-author (with Peter Agard) of "The Indispensable Ally: Black Workers and the Formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1934-1941"; the co-author (with Dr. Fernando Gapasin) of "Solidarity Divided: The crisis in organized labor and a new path toward social justice"; and the author of "'They're Bankrupting Us' – And Twenty other myths about unions." He is co-editor with Firoze Manji of Claim No Easy Victories: the legacy of Amilcar Cabral.

Fletcher is a syndicated columnist and a regular media commentator on television, radio and the Web.

Firoze Manji, publisher of Daraja Press and Adjunct Professor in the Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, argues that asking how Africa can stop being an "afterthought" in global negotiations is the wrong question. Africa is already central—a theater of competition between superpowers. The real issue is internal: which Africa? Three billionaires hold more wealth than half the continent, and 75% of elite wealth sits offshore. Drawing on Fanon, Manji shows post-colonial elites have simply replaced the colonial settler, recreating the Manichean divide. Giving this "Africa" more power only serves a class aligned with global oligarchs. The deeper question: What is our conviction? Integration into an unequal order—or building something new?

In an era defined by neocolonial capitalism, resurgent fascism, and the horrifying spectacle of genocide, the need for a new emancipatory politics has never been more urgent. Our guest today, Professor Michael Neocosmos, confronts this global crisis head-on in his groundbreaking new work, Beyond the Neocolonial: Africa and the Dialectics of Human Emancipation. Refusing the comfortable confines of liberal critique, Neocosmos issues a radical challenge: to think freedom, we must break with the very "state modes of thought" that imprison us.

Drawing inspiration from ancient Egypt, pre-Socratic philosophy, and contemporary African social movements, he makes a powerful case for reviving dialectical thought—a way of thinking that grasps the world not as a static set of classifications, but as a process of constant movement and becoming. The book centres the often-silenced voices of the oppressed, exploring how the collective intelligence of popular struggles, expressed through proverbs and community assemblies like the Palaver, contains the latent potential for a universal politics of equality. From the revolutionary experiments of the Haitian Bossales to the anti-apartheid uprisings in South Africa, Neocosmos unearths histories of genuine popular sovereignty, analyzing why they succeeded, how they were defeated, and what lessons they hold for us today. Beyond the Neocolonial is not just a work of political theory; it is an urgent invitation to think, and to act, for a future beyond domination.

What if the poetry that inspired revolutions, that gave voice to the colonized and the exiled, that was watched by the CIA and funded by the Kremlin, had been almost entirely forgotten?

This podcast is a journey into that hidden history.

In the wake of the historic Bandung Conference, a revolutionary literary movement was born. Poets from across Africa and Asia—from Palestine to South Africa, from Vietnam to Algeria—came together with a shared purpose: to forge a cultural weapon against colonialism, racism, and imperialism. They created two journals, Lotus and The Call, and filled them with poetry that was defiant, angry, and full of hope. These were poets who wrote from prison cells and in exile, who knew that a poem could be as powerful as a gun.

But their movement was torn apart by the Cold War, caught between the competing ambitions of the Soviet Union and China, and relentlessly surveilled by Western intelligence. Their work was scattered, their legacy fragmented. Until now.

Lines of Fire is a landmark new collection that brings this forgotten poetry back to life. It is a book of voices that refused to be silenced: from Mahmoud Darwish's aching laments for Palestine to Faiz Ahmad Faiz's defiant anthems against dictatorship, from the revolutionary songs of Vietnam to the anti-apartheid cries of South Africa.

In this episode, we sit down with Tariq Mehmood, the editor of Lines of Fire. For years, he has been on a quest to unearth this treasure trove of resistance literature. He takes us behind the scenes of the movement, explaining the bitter split between its two factions, the role of intelligence agencies in the cultural Cold War, and the incredible challenge of collecting poems originally written in dozens of languages.

But more importantly, we talk about why this poetry matters today. As the world watches a genocide unfold in Gaza, as the fight for freedom continues from Sudan to Kashmir, Tariq explains why these poems from the 1960s and 70s feel more urgent than ever. They remind us that the struggle for liberation is not new, and that poetry, as he writes in the book, is "not just an outlet for anger, grief, or love. It is resistance. It is resilience. It is the refusal to be erased."

Join us for a powerful conversation about the poetry that set the world on fire and why it is essential reading for anyone fighting for a better one. Tune in to hear the story behind Lines of Fire—a story of solidarity, struggle, and the enduring power of the written word.

In the final part, James describes the long legal battle for his freedom and his eventual release. Following three traumatic parole denials, his luck began to turn in 2001 when a Supreme Court ruling allowed him to appeal his deportation order. Despite the anxiety of 9/11 occurring while he was still incarcerated, he successfully won a 212C waiver hearing in 2002, effectively stopping his deportation. In 2003, after nearly a decade behind bars, he was transferred to Arthur Kill, where he finally encountered a parole board that recognized his humanity rather than just his crime. James concludes by explaining why he is now an abolitionist rather than a reformer; he argues that the carceral system is a direct descendant of chattel slavery and is predicated on the exploitation of Black and brown bodies. He emphasizes that true justice requires dismantling these interconnected systems of imperialistic and racist violence rather than simply making them more "humane".

This second part of a three-part podcast focuses on James's time at Coxsackie (the "Cat") and Greene Correctional Facility, where he began to "decolonize his mind" through the guidance of mentors. At Coxsackie, he met an elder named Pops, a former Black Panther who introduced him to revolutionary thinkers like George Jackson, Frantz Fanon, and Amílcar Cabral. Pops taught him the vital philosophy of "doing time" rather than letting "time do you," encouraging him to use his incarceration as an opportunity to build his mind and body. This period marked James's first "doctorate," as he became a voracious reader and began to see his struggle as part of a broader historical foundation of slavery maintained by the 13th Amendment. Later, at Greene, he met Bliss, who helped him find the power in his own voice through the Youth Assistance Program (YAP), where James shared his story with at-risk children. This section also details the devastating impact of the 1996 immigration laws, which resulted in James receiving a retroactive deportation order while already serving his sentence.