One Africa Worldview

As U.S. COVID-19 deaths exceed 200,000, we talk with two African professionals about:

The state of the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on the African community along with the state of health and healthcare in general, for African people in the U.S. and around the world.

What African people can do to guard against infection by the virus and what we can do if we do become infected.

Strategies for African communities to take charge of our own overall health and well-being.

Dr. Aisha Fields is a physicist who became the International Director of the All African People’s Development & Empowerment Project, a non-profit organization founded in 2007. 

As the group’s Director, Dr. Aisha is responsible for coordinating African community-led health care, agricultural and educational programs throughout the U.S., on the continent of Africa, and in African communities world-wide.

They’ve built clean water systems, vocational and nursery schools, community farms, maternity centers and a variety of youth and adult educational programs.

They also established the Project Black Ankh to provide African community-based disaster relief, responding to hurricanes in Texas, Ebola in Sierra Leone and now, COVID-19 worldwide.

Dr. Loretta King is a family nurse practitioner with a Doctor of Nursing Practice degree from Chatham University.  

With more than 30 years of nursing experience, Dr. King has worked in Emergency care, ICU, Dialysis, Women's Health and Primary Care. 

She’s a recipient of the 2005 Houston Salute to Nurses award.

Today, Dr. King is a member of the Project Black Ankh Medical Advisory Team and serves as the Project’s lead Medical Provider.

Hip-Hop is a cultural movement that was formed following the defeat of the African Revolution of the 1960s.  Its poetics, aesthetics, and politics reflect African life under the US counterinsurgency.  

The conditions that define the moment hip-hop arose were: increased privatization, mass unemployment and poverty, increased colonial violence and a decrease in mass mobilization. Hip-Hop shares these conditions with other African art forms such as the blues and calypso, of an earlier period, and reggae music of the 1970s.  

Hip-Hop’s enduring character is attributed to its origins in the African working class.  

Hip-Hop and rap music has, at times, offered political prescriptions to the African Working Class.  More than often, rappers and other cultural workers have reflected the revolutionary upsurge amongst the masses.

Historically, the most remarkable rap group was Dead Prez.  As this episode's guests noted, Dead Prez did not just rap about political topics, they had excellent skill and production but were also African Internationalist organizers.  This year is the 20th anniversary of Dead Prez’s album Let’s Get Free.

In 2020, rappers and African cultural workers have entered into political debates over police violence and electoral politics.  As we see in this episode, their conclusions are not always what we expect but, as our guest Professor Fanon Che Wilkins notes, we should continue to engage rappers and Hip-Hop as an arena of struggle.  

In this episode, we do just that.

Hosts Dr. Matsemela Odom and Muambi Tangu talk with:

Fanon Che Wilkins, PhD, a professor of American Studies at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan.  Named after Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara, Wilkins was born into black revolutionary struggle. He co-edited the 2009 anthology of essays, From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International Since the Age of Revolution and is the author of “A Line of Steel”: The Organization of the Sixth Pan-African Congress and the Struggle for International Black Power, 1969–1974.” 

Anthony Blacksher, sociology professor at San Bernardino Valley College, in San Bernardino, California, with a doctorate in cultural studies from Claremont Graduate University.  Known as Ant Black, he is a spoken word artist and a founding member of the spoken word group Collective Purpose and co-hosted “Elevated,” a nationally renowned open-mic that ran for over 10 years in San Diego.  Blacksher is the author of the doctoral dissertation, “A Matter of Life and Def: Poetic Knowledge and the Organic Intellectuals in Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry.”

Hosts Dr. Matsemela Odom and Muambi Tangu talk with Diop Olugbala, chair of the "Black Community Control of Police" working group of the Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations Coalition about:

Stop and Frisk racial profiling

Special "anti-gang" laws targeting the black community

The September 11-13, 2020 online Convention of the International People's Democratic Uhuru Movement

Last week, the National Basketball Association, the Women’s National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer and the National Hockey League were forced to cancel playoff and other games when athletes refused to play, in protest of the actions of the Kenosha, Wisconsin police, shooting an unarmed black man Jacob Blake, seven times in the back. 

The political fall-out from the police violence against the African community even hit the world of tennis when Naomi Osaka pulled out of the Western Southern Open.

This week's guest is Jason Jones, sportswriter for the Sacramento Bee for 16 years before joining the ranks of the Athletic, a popular sports journal.

Jason talks with host Dr. Matsemela Odom, childhood friend and rival football player, about the relationship of black professional athletes to the team owners and their growing public stance of opposition to police violence in the black community.

"The African community in St. Louis has a very rich and vibrant history of culture, music, resistance and strong family. That's still a fact in north St. Louis. We contrast that reality to the economic reality where 30% of the population is living on less than $5 a day. Until recently, there have been about 25,000 vacant and abandoned buildings in north St. Louis and much of it looks like a war zone. With the Black Power Blueprint, we want to bring the black community back - with grocery stores, healthy food, vibrant businesses, owned and controlled by the people", says Ticharwa Masimba. 

Masimba, along with Uhuru Movement President Kalambayi Andenet - both longtime residents of St. Louis - are this week's guests.

They discuss the progress of the Black Power Blueprint in revitalizing north St. Louis with the creation of a community center, outdoor event space, community garden, basketball court and workforce housing.

Andenet reflects on the unifying impact of the 50-foot high red, black and green flag that flies over the community garden. "St. Louis has been named the murder capital. The horizontal violence is a real issue. This flag has been the way we have able to say 'cease fire and save the bullets for the real war'.  We are engaged in getting the gang leaders to sign a peace treaty and say the red, black and green flag trumps all flags."

Masimba and Andenet explain role of the planned 1000-acre National Geospatial-Intelligence (spy) Agency in the gentrification of north St. Louis and the role of the St. Louis Land Reutilization Agency and Alderman John Collins-Muhammad in supporting white developers and blocking black community property acquisition.

Black and Latino people make up nearly 80 percent of the people in prison. Black and Latino people earn, on average, 60 percent the median income earned by whites. The COVID-19 rates for Africans, Latinos and Indigenous people in the US are three to four times those of whites.

Black and Brown people live together, work together, go to school together. But those sites have also been places of conflict stoked by the colonial contradictions of poverty, prison, and police brutality.  

As the 50th anniversary of the Chicano Moratorium approaches, we discuss the way forward with:

Harry Simon, lifelong educator, media producer and Central Committee member of Union del Barrio, dedicated to "promoting and defending the human rights and class interests of la raza within the current borders of the U.S.

Marco Amaral, graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, educator for children with special needs in the San Diego South Bay and a member of the South Bay Union School District Board of Trustees.

This episode is hosted by Dr. Matsemela Odom and Muambi Tangu. The weekly People’s War Radio Show features guests covering all aspects of the struggle against colonial violence, from COVID-19 to police occupation.

More than 1.5 million African people are locked up in prison or jail in the U.S.,  victims of a colonial system where they are the targets of profiling, discriminatory prosecutions and unfair sentencing. 

A number of them are political prisoners who have spent most of their adult lives behind bars after serving as heroes in the Black Power movement of the 1960s.

Today, African prisoners face an additional threat - COVID-19. Demands are growing for the immediate release of prisoners across the U.S.

In this episode we talk with:

Ralph Poynter, founder of the Teachers Freedom Party Caucus of the United Federation of Teachers, New York City. He is a co-founder of the New Abolitionist Movement and served as chair of the Lynne Stewart Defense Committee in which he fought for the release of political prisoner and his late wife Lynne Stewart, a lawyer who defended African and Arab activists and was incarcerated during the last years of her life, as part of the U.S. counterinsurgency program. 

Belinda Parker- Brown, founder of Louisiana United International, Inc., member of the Black is Back Coalition for Peace, Justice and Reparations, and through her affiliation with The Jericho Movement, works to free African political prisoners deemed to be prisoners of war.

Dr. Zena D. Crenshaw, Assistant Chief of Operations for Louisiana United International, Inc., legal scholar and human rights activist.

Dr. Matsemela Odom talks with Jalali, also known as Norman Otis Richmond about:

COVID-19 and colonial violence against Africans in Canada

History of the African liberation movement and the struggle for African unity in Canada

Revolutionary international African culture

Jalali was born in Louisiana and raised in Los Angeles, California.  He moved to Canada in the late-1960s where he became an early leader in the African Liberation Movement in Canada.  

He's dedicated his life to revolutionary cultural work. An accomplished musician himself and a musical historian, he has worked with a host of musicians such as Bob Marley, Abbey Lincoln, Hugh Masekela, and Fela Kuti. 

Jalali is the host and producer of the “Diasporic Music” show on Black Power 96 FM radio in St. Petersburg, Florida, which airs Sundays, 2pm to 4pm Eastern Time and can be heard on the Black Power 96 mobile app.

He is a prolific writer on African politics and culture, widely published including in the Pambazuka News, the San Francisco Bay View, the Black Agenda Report, CounterPunch and The Burning Spear newspaper, where he has a regular column.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, schools across the United States abruptly closed in March. Some school districts implemented distance learning plans, and others did not. African children without regular access to computers and the internet have been further alienated.

In the haste to reopen and jumpstart the economy, public school districts have reopened despite the fact that one out of three children tested for COVID-19 in places like Florida have received positive test results. 

In the schools, we have seen African children arrested for bringing play money.  We have seen the natural hairstyles and head wraps of African girls and boys criminalized, and African girls brutalized by campus police.

Africans are resisting colonial education. Homeschooling is on the rise, but African families that received cash aid from the government are not eligible for homeschooling. If they remove their children from the colonial education system, their children can be kidnapped by Child Protective Services.  

Single parents with jobs as well as African households where two parents work and barely survive, cannot afford homeschooling.  

What is the solution? The solution is Black Community Control of Schools.  We talk with:

Chimurenga Selembao, leader in the development of the Marcus Garvey Academy, a proposed charter school in St. Petersburg, Florida. He also ran for Pinellas County School Board on a platform of Black Community Control of Schools.

Maisha Kudumu, director of Uhuru Shule Virtual Freedom School, an initiative created by the Uhuru Movement in San Diego to assist African families following the shutdown of local schools in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Uhuru Shule also teaches self-determination to African parents and children.  Maisha is a mother of two children.  She holds a Bachelor’s degree in English literature and a Master’s degree in Counseling.  As a young activist, Maisha participated in the Center for Parent Involvement in Education, a grassroots initiative created by her parents--also lifelong education activists, to promote self-determination of African parents and children as the key to educational success.

This episode is hosted by Tiana Afrika. The weekly People’s War Radio Show features guests covering all aspects of the struggle against colonial violence, from COVID-19 to police occupation.

Brazil occupies nearly half of the South American continent and is home to approximately 214 million people, over half of whom are African.

With 83,000 deaths from COVID-19, Brazil is rapidly catching up with the U.S. where 145,000 have died. Africans in Brazil face extreme poverty, lack of health care and rampant violence and murder at the hands of police and the Brazilian military. 

We talk with:

Thalma de Freitas, Grammy-nominated musician, songwriter and actress, who was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Thalma performs a wide variety of African music such as hip hop, samba, jazz, and traditional African music in Brazil, representing African independence in culture and politics.

Abner Sotenos. Born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Abner is currently a doctoral student in history at the University of California San Diego. His recent public talk delivered at the University of California Los Angeles chronicled the history of colonial violence against African women in Brazil, including the recent assassination of Marielle Franco.