We spoke to Kali Akuno of Coorperation Jackson about  what the distribution of Covid in the USA tells us about the nature of  racism and white supremacy. Kali highlights the organising that is  happening across the USA towards May Day events and the building of a  movement that can give birth to a new world.

I spoke with Lyn Ossome, Senior Research Fellow at the Makerere  Institute of Social Research (MISR), Makerere University, in Uganda. She  received her PhD in Political Studies from Wits University. Her  specializations and taught courses are in the fields of feminist  political economy and feminist political theory, with particular  research interests in land and agrarian studies, gendered labour, queer  feminist histories and the political economy of gendered violence. She  is the author of Gender, Ethnicity and Violence in Kenya’s Transitions  to Democracy: States of Violence (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).

Nathan Banda heads the health and safety project of the Zimbabwe  Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU). The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions  is the primary trade union federation in Zimbabwe. Currently Mr Japhet  Moyo is the Sectratary General and Mr Peter Gift Mutasa is the  President.The former General Secretary was Morgan Tsvangirai. Nathan  discusses the challenges of developing a strategy for organising under  conditions of COVID-19

Ruth Nyambura is a feminist political ecologist and activist from  Kenya working on the intersections of gender, economy and ecological  justice. Ruth is a founding member and the convener of the African  Ecofeminists Collective and also works with several regional agrarian  and climate justice movements to track and challenge the privatization  of the agrarian commons. She describes her  work and activism that uses a  feminist political ecology lens to critically engage with the  continent’s and global food systems, challenging neoliberal models of  agrarian transformation and amplifying the revolutionary work of  small-holder farmers of Africa—the majority of whom are women—as well as  rural agrarian movements offering concrete anti-capitalist alternatives  to the ecological, economic and democratic crisis facing the continent.

She discusses Kenya with an eco-feminist analysis on the challenges  women are experiencing and on the lessons to be drawn from this period

Rob Wallace, is author of Big Farms Make Big Flu (Monthly Review  Press, 2016). He is an evolutionary biologist and a visiting scholar at  the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Minnesota. This  discussion will look into how viruses such as the new coronavirus get  generated. We also discuss the extent to which, despite the virus being  lethal, people are dying because of the failure / inadequacies / absence  of health care.

I spoke with Soffiyah Elijah, ED of Alliance for Families for  Justice, whose mission is to support, empower and mobilize those  impacted by the criminal justice system so they can marshal their  collective power to create a just world. We discuss organising on  incarceration in the time of Covid-19 in the USA and specifically in New  York.

You might be interested also in reading this: A Public Statement on Coronavirus and Mass Incarceration

I talk with Andries du Toit: Director: Institute for Poverty,  Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), University of Western Cape. Food in  the time of the Coronavirus: Why we should be very, very afraid. We talk  about why we should be “very, very afraid”.

Today  (Saturday April 4, 2020) I spoke with Alexssandro Robalo from Cabo Verde, an island country spanning an archipelago of 10  volcanic islands in the central Atlantic Ocean off the west coast of  Mauritania & Senegal. It was colonised by the Portuguese and became a  major source of wealth from The Atlantic slave trade. As a result of  the mass organising of the liberation movement PAIGC, led by Amilcar  Cabral, it achieved independence in 1975, precipitating the downfall of  the fascist regime in Portugal. Cabo Verde split with Guinea Bissau.

I spoke with Elimane Kane, Founder and Chairman of LEGS-Africa  (www.legs-africa.org), a pan African think tank based in Dakar. Elimane  is a Governance and Development analyst and contributor to the  Alternative report on Africa (AROA).

The Alternative Report on Africa is a structuring initiative for new  milestones towards the complete decolonization of our minds, our  economies and regaining our sovereignty. … Its purpose will be to  inform, generate and share knowledge, and to motivate those who want to  transform Africa. They recently issued a report Declaration for a sovereign African response to the Covid-19 pandemic criticizing the WHO and UN for their exaggeration of the scale of the problem faced in Africa.

We as the Women’s League of Abahlali baseMjondolo see the need to  express our pain and fear, and our deep disappointment and anger at the  eThekwini municipality. We need to issue a clear warning that we will  not continue to accept oppression.

Abahlali as a movement teaches respect. Men must respect women.  People of different generations must respect each other. People who are  born in different countries and people who speak different languages at  home must respect each other. We have struggled for years in our  movement to ensure that poor people are treated with respect. In this  crisis caused by the corona virus we have respected the President’s call  to stay indoors even though this is very difficult when there are many  people living in one shack, and even though this is very difficult when  we don’t get paid when we don’t work.