Africa World Now Project

Image: John Biggers, Band of Angels: Weaving the Seventh Word, 1992-93 According to the Dogon, “in the beginning before anything existed there was the Supreme Being, Amma. Amma existed in the form of an egg divided into four parts by four bones [the clavicles], which were joined together. Apart from the egg, nothing existed, for Amma rested on nothing. The four arts of the egg represented the four elements: water, air, fire, and Earth. So, the fundamental elements already existed in the egg in embryo form. In the egg Amma had designed the world before it was created” [51]. Ultimately, Amma created the world through the creation of the signs and likewise will destroy it through the destruction of the signs …” [53]. We share this creation story, in part, for a number of reasons, but primarily because it is aligned with the assertion in Chukwunyere Kamalu's, The Word at Face Value: An Abridged Account of Dogon cosmology, that “mainstream scholarship on the cosmological world of the Dogon of Mail in West Africa, has become a battleground over what an African people can and cannot know” [11]. Dr. Nubia Kia asserts that, “myths in Africa are similar to what Joseph Campbell calls “living myths.” He uses living myths to distinguish them from the connotative usage of myth meaning “a lie.” Living myths signifies the opposite of the connotative construct. J.J. Bacofen argues that the origins of history can only be revealed through myth since in myth “lies the beginning of all development.” Dr. Kia, quoting W.T. Stevenson, further explains the primacy of mythological discourse. According to Stevenson, “the essential character of our personal and social lives are shaped by myth, or it is by the power of particular myths which determine by way of determining our fundamental presuppositions, the way we shape our cultural, social, political, and economic lives. We do nothing of significance which is not informed by myth in a fundamental way, and the more significant our act, the more this is true. It is the symbols within the context of myth which give rise to all thought [Kia, A River of Prophecy: Constructing a Sacred History of African Americans].Mythic symbolism attempts to explain the spiritual nature of peoples and their inseparable connection to a universal order. Therefore, if someone wishes to pervert an idea, the most effective means is to reverse the sacred symbols or icons associated with the idea or ideas [Kia, A River of Prophecy: Constructing a Sacred History of African Americans]. Today, AWNP's Tasneem Siddiqui sits down with Dr. Nubia Kia, to explore the relationship between myth & its continuities in sacred + secret histories. Nubia Kai received a Ph.D. in African historical literature and film from Howard University, an MA degree in African Languages and Literature from the University of Wisconsin. Her work has been published in Black Scholar; Black World; Essence Magazine; Black American Literature Forum; Catalyst; Obsidian; Moving Out, Journal of Black Poetry; Left Curve; Journal of African Literature Association, Black Camera: International Film Journal; Journal of African American History, to name a few. Her book, Kuma Malinke Historiography: Sundiata Keita to Almamy Samori Toure, is an extensive study of the mythology, epics, poetry, and expository narratives of the Mali Empire. She has been an ardent researcher of comparative religion, anthropology, mythology, and Africana studies for over thirty years. Professor Kai is also a poet, novelist, and playwright who has received a number of awards, including two National Endowment for the Arts Awards, six DC Commission on the Arts Awards, and the Larry Neal Writers Competition. She has two collections of poetry, Peace of My Mind and Solos, a collection of fables, The Sweetest Berry on the Bush, and an historical novel, I Spread My Wings And I Fly.

Amadou Hampâté Bâ, quoting his teacher Tierno Bokar, suggest that “writing is one thing and knowledge is another. Writing is the photograph of knowledge but is not knowledge itself” [A. Hampâté Bâ, The Living Tradition, General History of Africa Vol. 1: 166]. According to Hampâté Bâ, “the world's earliest archives or libraires were the brains of men [and I must add women] … The written word is not without thought. The written word without being refined through action and interaction which is articulated through nommo is without power. Without nommo – the African conceptualization of the energy within the spoken word, the power that carries an energy that produces all life and influences everything is the principle upon which the world of meaning is built – power is debased [Nommo, Encyclopedia of African Religion, 2009]. According to Hampâté Bâ, “In African traditions … the spoken word had, beyond its fundamental moral value, a sacred character associated with its divine origin ... an exceptional conductor of magic, grand vector of 'ethereal' forces, it was not to be treated lightly. Contrary to what some may think, African oral tradition is not limited to stories and legends or even to mythological and historical tales, and the ‘griot' – what Bâ calls a wandering minstrel/poet as conceptualized by the French – is far from being its one and only qualified guardian and transmitter. What does all of this point to … for what purpose … and to what ends does this introductory exploration provide our current engagement that you will hear next … how does it connect? The simplicity of the answer is found in understanding its complexity. The simple answer is that it provides a frame within which we can identify and extract the multiple points where spirit and Black resistance converge, whether it is evident as the spark of the Haitian Revolution or found interwoven in the vibrations of John Coltrane's Love Supreme … deeper levels of spirit and Black resistance all always converging. While the complexity is found in our willingness to map its evolution and stand in its genealogy as it is sparked across space and time, evolving itself as it propels African/a peoples to intrinsically seek liberation … It is this space in between space, it is of spirit and Black liberation … one of the many places we can explore and utilize this ancient the praxis of nommo. AWNP's Tasneem Siddiqui recently sat down with Youssef Carter to discuss the interconnectedness of West African Sufi Islam and Black resistance … the embodiment of ancient ways of being articulated in forms of knowledge that 1st make sense of the conditions within which African/a peoples find themselves; and 2nd to struggle against the those conditions when moved out of balance. Dr. Youssef Carter is an Assistant Professor and Kenan Rifai Fellow in Islamic Studies at University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill. Dr. Youssef Carter holds BS from North Carolina A&T, an MA from North Carolina Central University and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California-Berkeley and is an expert in Sufism and Islam in West Africa and the United States. His book in progress, “The Vast Oceans: Remembering God and Self on the Mustafawi Sufi Path,” examines the discourses and practices of a transatlantic Sufi spiritual network through detailed ethnographic work. 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; Ghana; Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Listen Intently. Think deeply. Act accordingly. Enjoy the program. Image: M-Eating, Sufi - Artist: https://marianeibrahim.com/artists/36-maimouna-guerresi/biography/

The history of the geographical region now called, Eritrea is deep and rich. Eritrea has been occupied in turn by Ottoman Turks, Egyptians, Italians (from 1886 until 1941), the British until 1952 (who defeated Italy in Eritrea during the second world war) and the Ethiopians ever since [Pateman 1990:51]. In 1 952, the British and the United Nations determined on a federation of Eritrea and Ethiopia. In the first 10 years after the federation was formed Ethiopia's direct rule over Eritrea was imposed. Towards the end of 1952 La Voce de' Eritrea, a newspaper critical of the federation, was banned. In 1956, following the suppression of the opposition waged by workers and the peasantry, the Eritrean General Union of Labor Syndicates was banned. In 1960, the Eritrea flag was lowered, and separate courts were established. In 1962 Eritrea was forcibly annexed by Ethiopia [Worku Zerai, Organising Women within a National Liberation Struggle: Case of Eritrea, 1994; Pateman, 1990: 6]. The national struggle for national liberation began in 1961 with the formation of the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF). The ELF and the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF) which split from the ELF in 1970 gained control over many towns in the country, but as the Soviet Union intervened on the Ethiopian behalf, independence could not be achieved in the late 1970s. The Soviet intervention forced withdrawal from the towns that were controlled by the EPLF to the northern part of the country. The EPLF continued fighting against the Ethiopian occupation until it liberated the whole of Eritrea in May 1991. Eritrea became an independent country officially in May 1993. Many have highlighted that "although women in many countries have struggled together with men for national liberation, at the end of that revolutionary struggle their position in society as women improves little as the era dawns" (Worku Zerai, Organising Women within a National Liberation Struggle: Case of Eritrea, 1994). While this view is correct in one sense, it forgets the objective reality of the stages of the socio-economic and political development of formerly colonized nations. There are many contradictions embedded in the structures, systems and institutions between the people and the colonisers, between the different liberation movements that led the national liberation front, between the different classes in the society. As a consequence, national liberation does not mean that all contradictions are going to be solved at one go. It is here that Fanon and Cabral adds sharp clarity the pitfalls of national consciousness without the implantation of class suicide. Women's struggle for freedom cannot be seen in isolation from the larger struggle for liberation. Today, we will hear a talk that was given by Seble Tsehaye, Secretary of the National Union of Eritrean Women, USA, member of the Central Committee and member National Public Diplomacy Taskforce. 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; Ghana, Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Listen intently. Think deeply. Act accordingly. Sources: Worku Zerai, Organising Women within a National Liberation Struggle Case of Eritrea, 1994; Victoria Bernal, Equality to Die For?: Women Guerrilla Fighters and Eritrea's Cultural Revolution, 2000; National Union of Eritrean Women: http://www.nuew.org/ Image: EPLF freedom fighters. There is no independent Eritrea without Eritrean women. available here: http://www.madote.com/2017/03/nuew-national-union-of-eritrean-women.html

Saladin Muhammad argues in an article titled Black Workers for Justice, Twenty-year of Struggle, in Against the Current that: “The national oppression of African Americans in the U.S. South makes Black workers in the South the most exploited section of the U.S. industrial working class. Black Workers for Justice [BWFJ] thus bases its trade union and political perspectives on the principle of the centrality of the Black working class.” “The struggle against racism, for political power and self-determination for African descendant people are key aspects of this principle in forging the unity of the Southern and U.S. working class. BWFJ has tried to create an identity, confidence and political presence of the Black worker and trade union organization in the U.S. South.” BWFJ believes that the struggle against African American national oppression must take on sharper Black working-class and internationalist features. It must put forward a perspective for, and be active in building, a strong rank-and-file democratic and radical labor movement in the U.S. South” [Saladin Muhammad, Black Workers for Justice, Twenty-years of Struggle, Against the Current, No. 101, November/December 2002]. With this, Saladin Muhammad, firmly situates Black Workers for Justice in the continuity and long arc of Black liberation movements that center the Black working class/workers, such as, but not limited to: Ad Hoc. Committee of Concerned Black Steel Workers; the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement; League of Revolutionary Black Workers, to name a few. What you will hear next is Pt. II of our conversation with Baba Saladin Muhammad. Be sure to tap into Pt. I to pick up the flow of our conversation! Saladin Muhammad is an organizer, theoretician, writer. He published a number of articles that explore issues ranging from exposing the structural and systemic racism in labor to ways to understand the interdependence of human rights and Black internationalism. Saladin Muhammad is the co-founder and national chair of Black Workers for Justice and until his retirement, he was an international representative for the United Electrical Workers [UEW]. His praxis has been forged in Black freedom work for than three decades. The idea is not to replicate, but I understand there is a path. To see that there is a way. A way – a genealogy... 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; Ghana; and Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Listen intently. Think deeply. Act accordingly. Enjoy the program!

Abdul Alkalimat writes on a multimedia project that explores the work of Saladin Muhamad that “our movements for social transformation have often fallen victim to the tendency to oversimplify the struggle. Moreover, there is far too little self-criticism to learn from our “right” and “left” errors. This is particularly dangerous as we are at the beginning of a new generational awakening. We need to think about the past few decades of struggle by listening to those who have marched on and maintained a revolutionary perspective.” Labor, whether force or extracted through coercion has been a consistent cause of struggle for African/a peoples, globally. James Boggs, in a speech given at a Political Science Seminar in Atlanta University on February 17, 1974, argued that “we must be ready to recognize that as reality changes, our ideas have to change so that we can project new, more advanced aspirations worth striving for. This is the only way to avoid becoming prisoners of ideas which were once progressive but have become reactionary, i.e., have been turned into their opposite. The only struggles worth pursuing are those which advance the whole society and enable all human beings to evolve to a new and higher stage of their human potential”. Expanding this assertion, Boggs goes on to suggest that “knowledge must move from perception to conception; in other words, knowledge and struggle begin by perceiving your own reality. But it must have the aim of developing beyond what you yourself or your own group can perceive, to wider conceptions that are based upon the experiences of the whole history of Mankind. The only way that anyone can take this big step of moving beyond perception to conception is by recognizing and struggling against your own internal contradictions and weaknesses. Of these weaknesses, the most fundamental and most difficult to overcome, as a result of the specific history of United States society [and I will add the evolution of the global racial capitalist system], is the tendency not to think at all but simply to react in terms of individual or ethnic self-interest” [Boggs, 1974]. Reflecting more on the praxis of Saladin Muhammad, Abdul Alkalimat asserts that “there are many theoretical and practical issues involved in the experiences covered by the life of Saladin Muhammad and his experiences in struggle. Saladin is a proletarian cadre of the revolutionary movement. He served as chairperson of the Black Workers for Justice for over 20 years. While being retired from full time union organizing, he remains active on many battle fronts including the Southern Workers Assembly.” This is Part I of our recent conversation with Baba Saladin Muhammad. Saladin Muhammad is an organizer, theoretician, writer. He published a number of articles that explore issues ranging from exposing the structural and systemic racism in labor to ways to understand the interdependence of human rights and Black internationalism. Saladin Muhammad is the co-founder and national chair of Black Workers for Justice and until his retirement, he was an international representative for the United Electrical Workers [UEW]. His praxis has been forged in Black freedom work for than three decades. 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; Ghana; and Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Listen intently. Think deeply. Act accordingly. Black Liberation and Social Revolution: The Life and Legacy of Saladin Muhammadhttp://theblm.net/saladin/

The way we remember; the forces and institutions that nurture or place barriers on the processes of remembering are not without great contradictions and opportunity. All of which are directly related to the interdependence of legitimacy and consent…the terrain upon which a contestation of power is played out on a daily basis. Understanding what is at stake in this contestation, is a duty and responsibility. It is science as well as an art. It is real and imaginative. Mapping and following the continuities in genealogies of phenomenon, mapping the materiality of memory allows us to grasp an understanding of the interconnectedness of power, memory, & resistance. To be clear the system and structures that prohibit, discourages, and/or award us to move away from mapping memory, to move on, to forget, to leave it in the past…have plans. And those plans have nothing to do with freedom nor liberation. It is a strategy that uses concepts like race, class, gender citizenship, rights—all essential components to the maintenance of the myth of the nation-state, to distort and create memory. Nevertheless, in the web of human history, the most articulate expression of a people's humanity is found in the way they resist…the most vibrant platform that allow visions of the future to connect with now moments. Just as the complexity and vast scope of oppression finds an expansive terrain to evolve with the suppression and distortion of memory, so too is the complexity and vastness of a peoples resist to it. Accordingly, there are stories and necessary continuities that we must identify and once identified, we must map. We must create a platform to construct memory, not for the sake of remembering. But organized to understand where in the long processes of resisting sociopolitical and economic inequities inherent to the current global social order can we follow to their logical conclusions. Today, we will present a conversation that AWNP's Mwiza Munthali had with filmmaker Enver Samuel, director of Murder in Paris, which tells the story of Dulcie September. Image: https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/dulcie-evonne-september Film/Take Action: https://murderinparis.com/home The Erasure of Dulcie September - https://africasacountry.com/2019/08/the-erasure-of-dulcie-september

Labor has changed. Its production. Its definition. Its control. But one thing that has not changed are the parameters within which labor has been defined, value extracted and dehumanized – mechanized – automated – artificially intelligeized. What does "labor" mean in a settler imperial world fortified by racial capitalist sociopolitical structures that maintain a social order that places the African/a worker, beyond the periphery of benefiting from their labor? What about decolonizing labor and labor movements? What about a world without work----What are the ideological frameworks that ‘labor' is using to attempt to construct the material realities of our current world? What does (or will) this world look like in two-years…and what are its implications for the African/a world? What are the implications for the Earth and now more than ever, the heavens—space? Questions around black labor, usually pivot on the role of black education. However, most explorations are neither critical nor intellectually honest. Today, Dr. Kamau Rashid joins us in conversation where we meditate on black labor and 'the white architects of black education'. Our thoughts are centered on William H. Watkins work, the White Architects of Black Education: Ideology and Power, 1865-1954. In the White Architects of Black Education, Watkins “explores the body of ideas that undergird social, economic, racial, and educational beliefs about Black education in the U.S.: therefore, it is an ideological study. His stated objective is to "investigate the ideological construction of colonial Black education by examining the views, politics, and practices of the white architects that funded, created, and refined it” [1-2]. Therefore, “colonial education in the South must never be confused with the educational agenda of blacks in the south. In fact, these agenda conflicted” [2]. The central question asks: How far have we moved away from these foundational ideas and their ideological grounding? Dr. Kamau Rashid is currently Professor and Founding Director of the Urban Education, Ed.D. program at Northeastern Illinois University. Dr. Rashid earned his Ph.D. and BA from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Master of Arts degree from Northeastern Illinois University. Dr. Rashid work focuses on African American history and culture, particularly on the inter-generational dynamics of African/a social critique, which includes an exploration and theorizing of W.E.B. Du Bois as well as contemporary African-Centered scholars and critical race theorists. He is co-developing an oral history and archival project focused on African American social movements in the Chicago area from the 1960s to1980s with Dr. Richard Benson of Spelman College. And is currently working on Finding our way through the desert: Jacob H. Carruthers and the restoration of an African worldview as well as the critical theory of W.E.B. Du Bois: The Struggle for Humanity. He has published a number of peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and received various grant awards to support his work. Lastly, likely most importantly, Dr. Rashid is active in a number of community organizations in the Chicago-area including the Kemetic Institute of Chicago, a research and educational organization focused on mapping, exploring and applying the ancient and contemporary contributions of ancient Nile Valley civilizations. 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; Ghana; Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Image: Romare Bearden - Factory Workers - 1942

The range and scope of manifestations in the Black freedom struggle are varied yet connected by a common thread…it does not matter where you look, pick a point on the map of human geography, pick a geographical landmass or region -- the continent of Africa, the Caribbean or somewhere in Northern part of the Americas, you will find a common thread. And that thread is the radical imagination of young people. You will find a historical path that reaches into the present. You will find the beginnings of a road built with vibrancy of young folk who envisioned a world beyond struggle. SNYC We can see the materiality of this fact in the continuum of African/a resistance. In 1937, the Southern Negro Youth Congress [SNYC] was created [We demand Our Rights: Southern Negro Youth Congress, 1937-1949]. Assembled in Richmond, VA, for the first Southern Negro Youth Congress were some 534 delegates representing 250,000 young people in 23 states, and an estimated crowd of 2,000 observers. They represented "sharecroppers from Alabama and Mississippi; domestic workers from Georgia…and every other representative of Southern Negro life." [We demand Our Rights: Southern Negro Youth Congress, 1937-1949]. SNYC lasted for 12 years, 1937 to 1949. SNCC On February 1, 1960, Black students in Greensboro, North Carolina launched sit-ins challenging segregation in restaurants and other public accommodations. SNCC was founded just two and a half months later on the campus of Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. Ella Baker was the gathering's organizer. [SNCC Digital Gateway]. On SNCC's international dimensions, highlighted by Fanon Che Wilkins, in his article The Making of Black Internationalists: SNCC and Africa Before the Launching of Black Power, 1960-1965, were embryonic as “the founding conference of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, the delegates declared unequivocally: "We identify ourselves with the African struggle as a concern for all mankind" [468]. To add more clarity, Miss. Baker organized the conference which led to the formation of SNCC “just three weeks after the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa” [Wilkins, 2007: 471]. I present this snapshot, paying attention to historical continuity in African/a student resistance to provide an impetus to engage in more intentionally and consciously mapping of the range and scope of the Black freedom movement. Today, we present a conversation with SNCC activist: Courtland Cox.While a Howard University student, Courtland Cox became a member of Nonviolent Action Group [NAG] and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He worked with SNCC in Mississippi and Lowndes County, Alabama, was the Program Secretary for SNCC in 1962, as well as the SNCC representative to the War Crimes Tribunal organized by Bertram Russell. In 1963 he served as the SNCC representative on the Steering Committee for the March on Washington. In 1973 he served as the Secretary General of the Sixth Pan-African Congress in Tanzania. Additionally, he co-owned and managed the Drum and Spear Bookstore and Drum and Spear Press in Washington DC. In our conversation we explored: Freedom Schools; CLR James; Jamil Al-Amin; Black internationalism; Sterling A. Brown; scholars w/o portfolio; independent political parties; Sékou Touré; Tanzania; Marion Berry; and the Sixth Pan African Congress. 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; Ghana; Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Image: Courtland Cox (second from right), Marion Barry, and others sitting-in at Atlanta Toddle House, December 1963, [https://snccdigital.org/people/courtland-cox/]

[produced & aired, 2017] This past weekend over a 150, 000 people were in Washington, DC to protest and call attention to the ever-increasing violent reality of climate change. The devastating effects are already being felt across the planet and can no longer be denied, despite the best efforts of those who choose to ignore the facts. And the continent of Africa is feeling every bit its violent effects. The 2011 drought-induced famine in the Horn of Africa affected more than 10 million people, claimed 257,000 lives and cost over $1 billion in damages. The Africa Adaptation Gap Report by the UN Environment Programme warns that climate change could reduce total crop yields in sub-Saharan Africa by as much as 20% by 2070. Additionally, a projected sea-level rise in Tanzania of 70 centimeters by 2070 could devastate the port city of Dar es Salaam, its largest and richest city and a major player in East Africa trade, and cost the country about $10 billion in property damages and related losses. Environmentalists warn that rising sea levels could cause severe flooding, submerge land and destroy African coastal ecosystems. Africa World Now Project's executive producer; international journalist and human rights advocate recently sat with activist Matheca Mawinda, Executive Director at Pan African Climate Justice Alliance and Cecile Ndjebet Coordinating African Network of Community Management of Forrest, to discuss this crisis in greater detail. Next, you will hear a presentation on the Africa-China question from a symposium titled Africa and World in the 21st Century. Howard French in his work, China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa estimates that there are currently at least a million Chinese living in sub-Saharan Africa and says that may be a conservative figure. Several countries alone (Zambia, Tanzania, and Mozambique) have a hundred thousand each. Others have fairly decent sized enclaves or Chinese towns, often of ten thousand people. Africans have said for years that the Chinese isolate themselves, that they don't integrate, though French shows that there are numerous exceptions to that, especially when Chinese males have married African women and started families. There is little question, however, that often these enclaves have sprung up because in many places Chinese companies have brought their own workers to complete a specific project. What is the role of China in Africa? How do we understand the implications of this role in the context of a 21st century global economy? What are the new social, economic, and potential political formations that are being produced from China in Africa? What about Africa in China? Africa has a long historical record of interacting with China…what are the contemporary possibilities of Africa reversing the influence? After all, W. E. B. Du Bios writing in his 1947 work: The World and Africa suggests that Chinese ships traded directly with Africa from the 8th to the 12th centuries. These and a myriad of other important questions come to mind when exploring the China-Africa question. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, Palestine, South Africa, and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

[produced and aired, 2016...note...our production is getting better...: )] In a 1968 in the March edition of Negro Digest titled, the Nature and Needs of the Black University, Gerald McWorter [Abdul Alkalimat] writes…and I must quote in its entirety here: “Revolutionary change for the liberation of a people from oppressive social structures is not the special function of one course of action, but, more likely, the result of several. And while education is generally hoped to be a liberating force on our minds and bodies, often it has been used as a debilitating tool in the interests of an oppressive society." Quoting Kwame Nkrumah, from his work Consciencism, McWorter, compares the colonial student who is educated for "the art of forming not a concrete environmental view of social political problems, but an abstract `liberal' outlook," with the revolutionary student who is "animated by a lively national consciousness, (who) seeks knowledge as an instrument of national emancipation and integrity." The university is alive for people in the world (including all of the socioeconomic and political contradictions involved), and so must meet the challenge of responding creatively to whatever needs exist now for those people… I wanted to highlight this one article of a series articles that was printed in the Negro Digest from 1968 to 1969, primarily to show the continuities and salience of the questions that were overtly presented then. To be clear, the center of this historically-bound, contemporary discussion with a long genealogy in attempts to solidly build responses to expanding notions of justice and equality in a highly racialized society still asks: What is the role, in this present moment, of Diasporic institutions in African world resistance? In part 1 of this series, we explored the intellectual praxis of Diasporic thinkers… Today, in part 2…We will explore, more deeply, the ideas presented those historical conversations about nature, function, and role of the Black University with Josh Myers. Dr. Josh Myers is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. In addition to serving on the board of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations and the editorial board of The Compass: Journal of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations, he works with a numbers of community-based social justice and cultural restoration organization. His research interests include Africana intellectual histories and traditions, Africana philosophy, and critical university studies. His work has been published in The Journal of African American Studies, The Journal of Pan African Studies, The African Journal of Rhetoric, The Globalization and Human Rights Law Review, Liberator Magazine, and Pambazuka, among other literary spaces. His current book project is a history of the Howard University student protest of 1989. Enjoy the program!

We are living in a time of great challenge and opportunity. Across the African world people are challenging their historically rooted contemporary conditions. The practical work of the long tradition of African and Diasporic freedom fighters has provided the frame work for these various manifestations of Africana resistance to find a way forward---to think, reason, and see that another world is not only possible, but absolutely necessary. The current sociopolitical, economic, and cultural organization of global society is truly not sustainable. Amie Cesaire writing in 1950—in Discourse on Colonialism brings this notion to sharp clarity when he asserts that “A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it created is decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization…” (Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism: 31) Thinkers and fighters such as Amilcar Cabral, in a 1972 speech during one of his visits to the US argued that: “An objective analysis of imperialism insofar as it is a fact or a “natural” historical phenomenon, indeed “necessary” in the context of the type of economic political evolution of an important part humanity, reveals that imperialist rule, with all its train of wretchedness, of pillage, of crime and of destruction of human and cultural values, was not just a negative reality. The vast accumulation of capital in half a dozen countries of the northern hemisphere which was a result of piracy, of the confiscation of the property of other peoples and of the ruthless exploitation of the work of these peoples will not only lead to the monopolization of colonies, but to the division of the world…” (Cabral, 1972: 57 in Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral). How are we to understand this long tradition…that is finding material expression in the various movements around the African world? What is the role of Diasporic institutions, such as the HBCU? More importantly, as Vincent Harding once asked what is the vocation of the Black scholar and their praxis? I would expand this question to include what is the vocation of the Black and their praxis in relation to the entire African world? I recently sat down with Corey Walker, Dean of The College and the John W. and Anna Hodgin Hanes Professor of the Humanities at Winston Salem State University for a wide-ranging discussion of the role and responsibility of the Black scholar in this current phase of global African resistance. Enjoy the program…. Audio credit: Africa is a Country - mini-documentary - Shutting Down the Rainbow Nation - available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksgrJyOrd7AImage credit: Rob Siebörger. The Rhodes Statue at the UCT-ground. Photo taken 28 March 2015.

Originally produced and aired in 2016...: The great political theorist, cultural philosopher, revolutionary, C. L. R. James once said that he is black, number one, because he is against what they have done and are still doing to us; and number two, he has something to say about the new society to be built because he has a tremendous part in that which they have sought to discredit.— C. L. R. James, C. L. R. James: His Life and Work. In the article The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses (The—sees), Fred Moten and Stefano Harney start their analysis with this powerful quote: “To the university I steal, and there I steal.” They go on to write that this is the only possible relationship to the university (American) today. In fact, this may be true of universities everywhere. It cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. Their analysis is centered on a sharp critique of how we produce and reproduce a certain forms of knowledge. And the role and responsibility of those who step into this dialectical process of who has the right to know and what they should do with what they know. Moten and Harney go on to suggest that in the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what we can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in, but not of—this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university. The authors are attempting to peel back the cover of knowledge for knowledge sake. They suggest that in this present moment, we must begin to take the path of heretical thinkers. The "maroons knew something about possibility. They are the condition of possibility of production of knowledge in the university—the singularities against the writers of singularity, the writers who write, publish, travel, and speak. It is not merely a matter of the secret labor upon which such space is lifted, though of course such space is lifted from collective labor and by it. It is rather that to be a critical academic in the university is to be against the university, and to be against the university is always to recognize it and be recognized by it, and to institute the negligence of that internal outside, that unassimilated underground, a negligence of it that is precisely, we must insist, the basis of the professions. And this act of against…always excludes the unrecognized modes of politics, the beyond of politics already in motion, the discredited criminal para-organization, what Robin Kelley might refer to as the infrapolitical field (and its music). It is not just the labor of the maroons but their prophetic organization that is negated by the idea of intellectual space in an organization called the university" [31]. Next we will hear an further elaboration of the ideas set out by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney with Dr. Claudrena Harold, author of New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South from University of Virginia, Dr. Will Boone, Dr. Corey Walker, and myself of Winston Salem State University. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, 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…! Image: Toward a Black University Conference 13-17 November 1968. Hilltop, 8 November 1968...available here: https://www.dc1968project.com/blog/2018/12/27/12-november-1968-amp-toward-a-black-university-conf-hu-begins-tomorrow

Image: Female literacy volunteers return to Havana at the end of the literacy campaign in December 1961 On June 23, 2021, a total of 184 countries on voted in favor of a resolution to demand the end of the US economic blockade on Cuba, for the 29th year in a row, with the United States and Israel, being the only countries voting against resolution. Three countries - Colombia, Ukraine, and Brazil - abstained. Wednesday, July 7, of last week, the world received news of the assassination of then Haitian president in the midst of already tension conditions on the ground. On this same day, a historic press conference with the Cuban Permanent Representative to the UN, H.E. Ambassador Pedro Luis Pedroso Cuesta presented a review and response of the recent vote against the blockade as well as the challenges and promises of the recent development of the Cuban COVID vaccines. On Saturday, July 10, reports via mainstream media outlets began proliferating images and a narrative that suggested that the Cuban people were protesting against the ineffectiveness of the government. However, more detailed and clear journalism shows this was not the case, as the mass majority of the protestors were clear in their disdain for the embargo which in turn has caused deleterious impact on the population. According to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, “the economic sanctions on Cuba were imposed by the United States of America in 1960 and were subsequently amended by the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992 and the Helms-Burton Act of 1996. These acts essentially ban all commercial ties between the United States and Cuba and severely impair the right of United States citizens to travel, to communicate with or carry out cultural exchanges with Cuba. Every year since 1992, the General Assembly has passed a resolution calling for an end to the embargo. The most recent resolution on this issue (A/67/4) was adopted on November 13 2012 by 188 votes against 3, with 2 abstentions. Since the United States is the major regional economic power and the main source of new medicines and technologies, Cuba is subject to deprivations that impinge on its citizens' human rights. Moreover, the US makes its own foreign trade policy extraterritorial, through a system of secondary sanctions which force third-party countries also into imposing an embargo on Cuba.” For your benefit, and in accordance to the central mission of Africa World Now Project which is to provide a platform that allows you to intentionally organize information toward understanding the root causes of issues that impact historically and ethnically marginalized peoples, paying specific attention to the African/a world, today we will play the recording of the historical press conference organized, in part, by yours truly having nominal input, under the leadership of Obi Egbuna, Jr and a collection of other concern communities and organizations. Next, you will hear the Cuban Permanent Representative to the UN, His Excellency Ambassador Pedro Luis Pedroso Cuesta present a review and response of the recent vote against the blockade as well as the challenges and promises of the recent development of the Cuban COVID vaccines. 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; Ghana and Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.

The clear and intentionality in the processes of violence carried out upon African/a peoples as they are constituted around the world and its symmetry in form and function upon people who are categorized as native in the Americas is not without precedent. European modernity is responding to its disintegration and has been for over the past 500 years. A process that has its origins in the formation of the entity known as Europe, as it began to organize the loosely tied collection of tribes into nations all built upon continuities in a worldview that propel the interdependent logics that animates its systems, structures, and institutions: separation, intolerance, imperialism, colonialism, racialism, materialization, objectification, othering…dehumanizing, redefining human. But what must not be lost in this fact, its disintegration—the disintegration of a limited and flawed view of what it means to be human as promoted through the praxis of European modernity—is that at various times-specifically when people are most organized, this disintegration has been sped up by the forms of resistance that develop not simply as a reaction to the forces of violence that are used to maintain positions of authority [or limited notions of power], but are in fact responses birthed from deep ancestral duties and historical responsibilities toward humanity, nature and universe, that African/a people have demonstrated in thought and action across time and space. Of all the places we can look in the African/a world to see the conflict between the continued exertion and last gasps of legitimacy of a particularly limited understanding of what it means to be human and the ancestral and historical duty and responsibility to resist it, we look to Colombia. A battlefront, in all manifestations of the theoretical and practical application of the concept, between an imperial worldview and the continued resistance to the logics of this worldview. What we will hear next is a wide-ranging conversation that expands on the premise above, paying attention to the current state of Afro Colombian resistance. AWNP's Mwiza Munthali recently caught up with Charo Mina-Rojas and Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli where they explored the continuation of violence through the militarization of the police; the continued attacks on and killings of human rights defenders in indigenous and Afro-descendant communities; the historic role of the U.S. in arming the Colombian army; and much more. Charo Mina-Rojas is an Afro-Colombian human rights defender with more than two decades of experience in activism in national and international arenas. As the National Coordinator of Advocacy and Outreach for the Black Communities Process (PCN - Proceso de Communidades Negras) and a member of the Afro-Colombian Solidarity Network, she works to empower Afro-Colombian women by educating them on their rights, increasing their access to justice and collecting accurate data on violence against Afro-Colombian women. Charo participated in Colombia's peace negotiations and has delivered talks and lectures across the world. Charo has addressed the United Nations Security Council on behalf of the NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security and is a member of the Black Alliance for Peace. Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli is the leading Colombia human rights advocate at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA). Ms. Sánchez is an expert on peace and illegal armed groups, internally displaced persons, human rights and ethnic minority rights. 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; Ghana; Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Listen intently. Think critically. Act accordingly.

According to 'Trane himself, as written in the liner notes to A Love Supreme, “The music herein is presented in four parts. The first is entitled "ACKNOWLEDGEMENT", the second, "RESOLUTION", the third, "PURSUANCE", and the fourth and last part is a musical narration of the theme, "A LOVE SUPREME" which is written in the context; it is entitled "PSALM".” It is also this Psalm, this meditation, part of which I read at the outset, that Coltrane would place on a stand and play as he performed, producing/reproducing what he said is a musical narration of the – Love Supreme. Alice Coltrane, a multi-instrumental genius and enlightened spiritual leader is not just Coltrane's wife. She started her journey before meeting Coltrane. And because of this set her path to cultivate rhythms that can heal the world just as John Coltrane discovered he could do. It could be surmised that her presence in John Coltrane life was divine. It was guided by universal law - a law that states everything is in rhythm, everything is in constant motion. Everything is vibrational. And as we move through life this constant hum, this vibrational hum is sure to attract its tonal partners. In the November 1967 issue of Ebony in an article titled: Requiem for ‘Trane, Archie Shepp suggests that “he [‘Trane] was a bridge…the most accomplished and comprehensive of the so-called post-bop musicians to make an extension into what is called the avant-garde…” (Shepp, 1967). Something else to consider, specifically in relation to John Coltrane being a bridge, standing in a deeper tradition, according to Youngquist in A Pure Solar World Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism, “in the mid-fifties Sun Ra gave a broadsheet entitled “Solaristic Precepts” to John Coltrane. On the broadsheets Sun Ra wrote “Warning this treatise is only for Thinking Beings..." (238). A thinking Being, indeed… In an interview years later, Coltrane would state that, “I think music can make the world better and if I'm qualified, I want to do it. I'd like to point out to people the divine in a musical language that transcend words. I want to speak to their souls”. And it was with Alice Coltrane who not only accentuated and amplified Coltrane's ability to synthesis the rhythmic patterns he put together, as he listened to vibrations most of us are unable to, they both became eternal beings, thinking beings who were able to conceive of the Negative reminiscences of Space-Time, as is expressed in Is, Are, Be and reconcepted “AM”. Today...: uninterrupted conversations with our eégún: thinking about the Coltranes [John and Alice] w/ Dr. Anyabwile Love A Philadelphia native, Anyabwile Love completed his graduate studies in Africana Studies at Temple University, receiving his PhD in May 2014. Currently he serves as Associate Editor for the literary journal A Gathering Together and is an Assistant Professor of History + Black Studies at Community College of Philadelphia. Anyabwile is the founder of The John Coltrane Symposium-a community centered annual celebration of Coltrane's life and his musical legacy, its second annual iteration will be in session, September 22-25, 2021 with a possible extended day until the 26th. For more, follow the symposium's Instagram page and/or visit the website - https://www.thecoltranesymposium.com/ 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; Ghana, Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.

Image: Original artwork by @ultravivre There are many attempts to explore and examine who Malcolm X, El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, was and is. there are books, documentaries [focused on his life and his assassination], movies, songs, poems, etc. They all explore and examine various aspects of El Shabazz, dissecting his very being. But no matter the complexity of or simplicity in the treatment of El Shabazz's life, mind, or work…they all lead back to one answer: El Hajj Malik El Shabazz is all of us. Many of us adhere to the idea that nothing ever dies, it only transforms. This is based on what many may call a universal principle, which says that: energy can neither be created nor destroyed. If the idea articulated by this universal principle can be tested…made knowable, then it requires a deeper look into various phenomena. The evolution of the human, its totality, is based on a few factors, which are related to geographical location, the groups understanding of their place, role and responsibilities in this geographical location and the range and scope of the group's ability to evolve its philosophical and cultural foundations. Important to note this is all based on the response to systemic implications caused by a balance/imbalance dialectic in the midst of this evolution. Ok, ok…what does all of this mean?…the conditions within which a people develop is based on their understanding of their relationship to each other, the environment and the universe. An interdependent process that directly impacts who they are in relationship to more than themselves. What is important to note about this process of becoming is, its ability to imagine. To create ways of being...ways of knowing that transcend the structures of the current or immediate conditions one finds themselves, whether voluntarily, through coercion, or by force. Key to any way of knowing is the ability to develop one's imagination. It was [and still is] the platform, upon which a people can adequately deal with the balance/imbalance dialectic. It is the most attacked part of the African ways of being. Why? Because we find that the Black imagination is the place best suited to find the most articulate expression of basic human capacities to create, maintain, evolve…to negate the negation. I present this all to say, this is what is meant when we say El Hajj Malik El Shabazz is us. He is the measuring scale upon which we deal with the balance/imbalance dialectic. He is the archetype and most articulate expression of a Black radical imagination. The most articulate expression Black possibilities. What you will hear next is a recent discussion centered around an exploration of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz as critical Africana human rights consciousness with Tasneem Siddiqui, Josh Myers, with reflections from: Dr. Kamau Rashid and Dr. Iyelli Ichile. 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; Ghana and Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Listen intently. Thinking deeply. Act accordingly. Link to article: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12111-020-09486-3

Image: Malcolm X in 1964, w/ leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Dr. Ahmad Shukeiri. What we are witnessing, in this global moment, is not unprecedented, it is European modernity coming apart at its seams. The loosely tied myths that has kept it together are unraveling, delinking…but it intends to not go easily. The reverberating effect of it fits and fissures are being articulated in its violence. The contradictions are materialized through its human vessels, like a virus seeing its inevitable demise. It is with the unity of struggle, that we can inoculate the praxis of liberation, to ensure this time, as with times we struggled and continue to struggle collectively against imperialism and its attendant colonialism/s, chattel slavery, Apartheid, to follow in the tradition of resistance set before us. Today we look at a component of this unity of struggle…we pay attention to Black and Palestinian intersectional experiences with the violence of the colonial. When thinking about Black and Palestinian liberatory continuities we have plenty to explore, but a good place that we can find its most articulate expression is with Brother Malcolm [El Hajj Malik Shabazz]. As far back as the late 1950s Malcolm had been speaking out in international support of Palestinian liberation. According to Michael Fischbach, “several factors accounted for this. As a member of the Nation of Islam (NOI), Brother Malcolm felt a natural inclination to cultivate a kinship with other Muslims, including Arabs. Arabs had long been involved or in contact with the NOI, among them Jamil Shakir Diab, a Palestinian who immigrated to the United States in 1948 and taught Arabic at the NOI's University of Islam in Chicago. Of particular note in Malcolm's pro-Palestinian leanings were two visits he made to the Palestinians' homeland...He returned to Cairo and attended a press conference given by, Ahmad Shuqayri, the chair of the newly created Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), after which he published a scathing critique of Zionism titled “Zionist Logic” in Cairo's English language newspaper, the Egyptian Gazette” (Michael Fischbach, The New Left and the Arab-Israeli Conflict in the United States; Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color. Today, we explore Black and Palestine...its history, challenges, and opportunities with Ajamu Dillahunt and Dr. Tasneem Siddiqui. Dr. Tasneem Siddiqui is an assistant professor in the Department of History, Politics, and Social Justice at Winston-Salem State University. She has a PhD in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California (USC). She is currently working on her manuscript; Freedom is a Place: Black Self-Determination and Land-Based Struggles in the Lowcountry and Sea Islands. Dr. Siddiqui is also a valued member of the Africa World Now Project collective where she is a senior researcher and associate producer. Ajamu Amiri Dillahunt is a Ph.D. Student in the Department of History at Michigan State University. He is a member of Black Workers for Justice (BWFJ) and a board member with the Interreligious Foundation of Community Organizations (IFCO). He is also a former intern with the SNCC Digital Gateway Project at Duke University. In May of 2019, Ajamu graduated from North Carolina Central University with a B.A. in History and a B.A. in Political Science. Ajamu also participated in the historic Demilitarize! Durham2Palestine Coalition. 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; Ghana and Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Listen intently. Think deeply. Act accordingly.

Ayiti, in the Black radical imagination, is more than an idea. It is the material representation of African/a freedom. It is the exemplar of the promises, failures & potentialities of African/a liberation. It is the colonial knot that the African/a world must untied. Just as Ayiti represented freedom in the past, it also represents the potentiality of collective freedom today. The question of Ayiti is intricately linked to the global African/a movement against oppression, as fortified by the colonial, in all of its forms. I assert, that it is with Haiti, then and now, along with Afro communities in Colombia, burgeoning movements across the continent of Africa; Afro Brazilian communities, Afro and African descendant communities in Europe; critical thinking African descendants here in the U.S., along with our historically and ethnically oppressed allies who stand in the long tradition of collective resistance to the dehumanizing nature of racial capitalism to create another future. Maurice Jackson in his article, “Friends of the Negro! Fly with me, the path is open to the sea”: remembering the Haitian Revolution in the History, Music, and Culture of the African American People, writes: “As early as 1797, Prince Hall, an African American who had fought in the war against Great Britain, applauded events in Haiti and reflected on their implications for the United States. In a speech to the Boston African Masonic Lodge he declared, ‘‘My brethren, let us not be cast down under these and many other abuses we at present labour under: for the darkest is before the break of day…Let us remember what a dark day it was with our African brethren, six years ago, in the French West Indies. Nothing but the snap of the whip was heard, from morning to evening (60).'' Sixty years later and a few years before the first battles of the Civil War, in 1857, the Reverend James Theodore Holly, the missionary, emigrationist, and first African American bishop in the Protestant Episcopal Church, preached that the Haitian Revolution ‘‘is one of the noblest, grandest, and most justifiable outbursts against tyrannical oppression that is recorded on the pages of the world's history (60).'' Taking note of Ayiti's interdependent impact on the sociopolitical conditions in the African/a world, specifically, Gabriel Prosser's revolutionary program, Douglas Egerton has written: “Saint Domingue served as an inspiration to Gabriel and completed his development…The distant figure of Toussaint…seemed to clarify the domestic situation and told him that if he dared, success might be within his reach.” At the trial of Rolla Bennett, one of Vesey closest friends and an enslaved African of Governor Thomas Bennett, another black identified as Witness No. 1 swore that Rolla had told him that white men ‘‘say that, Santo Domingo and Africa will assist us to get our liberty, if we will only make the motion first.” Indeed, the ideas and material reality of freedom represented through the series of resistance filtered through Ayiti is important to contextualize for many reasons, reasons I will let you determine. But a clear historical consciousness is a prerequisite for addressing the inequities that pass, unabated, through time and space. Where are we now? Today, Africa Now World Project's Mwiza Munthali recently caught up with our partners in Port-au-Prince, Ayiti to discuss what is happening on the ground. Today, we look at the People's Movement in Ayiti with Vélina Elysée Charlier, member of Nou Pap Domí movement in Port-au-Prince, Ayiti. 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; Ghana and Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.

[originally produced & aired May 2018] What is meant by the term “Pan-Africanism?” What do we – can we - make of “pan Africanism”? There have been various attempts by scholars, activist, artist, musicians, to develop a clear definition of Pan Africanism. While a clear and solidified definition of Pan Africanism has been the preoccupation of these thinkers, others have hesitated due to the vast diversity of thought and activity found among self-identified Pan-Africanists across time and space. According to Hakim Adi in his work Pan Africanism: A History, Pan-Africanism is considered a composed of ideas and movements “concerned with the social, economic, cultural and political emancipation of the peoples of Africa and the African diaspora.” Broadly speaking, it stems from “belief in the unity, common history and common purpose of the people of Africa and the African diaspora” and their interwoven futures. Finally, historically Pan-African “thought and action” emerges within efforts to connect and reconnect those in the African diaspora created, in particularly, through the forced dispersal of enslaved people from continental Africa simultaneously with the solidification and emergence of global racial capitalism, “European colonial rule and anti-African racism” (2). While containing a multitude of diverse ideological, political, cultural, and organizational expression, Pan-African thought and action share a commitment to resist “the exploitation and oppression of all those of African heritage,” rejecting anti-African and African-descent racism and celebrating “African achievement, history, and the very notion of being human through a positive construction of an “African” identity (3). Today, AWNP's Josh Myers is in discussion with Dr. Hakim Adi on his new book, Pan Africanism: A History Professor Hakim Adi is Professor of History at the University of Chichester, focusing on the history of Africa and her diaspora. Author of a number of works, including West Africans in Britain (1998), Pan-African History: Political Figures from African and the Diaspora from 1787 (with Marika Sherwood) (2003), and Pan Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919-1939, Adi's scholarship is grounded in understanding the historiography of various struggles for African liberation. We interviewed him about his latest effort to engage with the histories of that struggle, in his recent book, Pan-Africanism: A History. 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; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

The 17th edition of the New African Film Festival takes place online April 1–18, 2021 presenting a lineup of outstanding contemporary African cinema for audiences in the Washington, DC, area and beyond. the festival is co-presented by Africa World Now Project, afrikafé and AFI. The New African Film Festival showcases the vibrancy of African filmmaking from all corners of the continent and across the diaspora, featuring 33 films from 26 countries, including six submissions for the Academy Award® for Best International Feature. Opening with Mosotho filmmaker Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese's multi-award-winning drama THIS IS NOT A BURIAL, IT'S A RESURRECTION, winner of the World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and the first film from Lesotho to be submitted to Academy Awards®. The festival closes with a new 2K restoration of Tunisian director Férid Boughedir's landmark survey of African cinema, CAMÉRA D'AFRIQUE, which was originally selected to close the 2020 edition of the New African Film Festival. Almost all films in the lineup will be available to view online across the entire United States. Link: https://naff.eventive.org/welcome Audio: The Last Poets & Metropole Orkest; 50th Poetry International Festival Rotterdam, De Doelen, 13th June 2019

The question of land as a fundamental aspect of African/a liberation movements is an often-neglected point of inquiry. Nevertheless, it is indeed, ever-present. Promisingly, there has been an uptick of more folk who are paying attention to the demands of Black radical thought and behavior that sought and seek to engage in understanding its role in material and nonmaterial ways. One such important treatment is Edward Onaci's, Free the Land: The Republic of New Afrika and the Pursuit of a Black Nation-State. In dominant discourse, however, the question around land as fundamental to liberation is often couched in a warped sense of capitalist ownership, which highlights the fundamental contradictions engrained in an imposition of a European modernism, and its attendant political philosophy of liberalism. All of which has produced, limited discourses around the idea and practice of rights, a discourse rooted fundamentally in what does it mean to be human as the development and maintenance of private property; all contradictions that radicals must, also, seriously engage when exploring questions around land and freedom. It cannot be lost nor taken for granted the totalizing nature of colonialism as a product of imperialist logics, as the neglect of internal critique often leads to the reinscription the very power dynamics that movements say they intend to disrupt. Ultimately, land, in the epistemic and ontological purview of African/a peoples is understood not in the limited capitalist sense of ownership but the transmission of communal practices of human stewardship as being primary caretakers of the planet. And when land as a fundamental component of Black liberation is centered, ideas around national identity, critical consciousness formation, human rights, citizenship…what it means to be human can be better mapped to understand the interconnectedness of the various manifestations of the global Africana (Black) struggle for freedom. a black internationalism becomes clearly defined. Today, we will hear a recent roundtable discussion, exploring the questions that Kurt Oderson presents in his documentary, We Rise for Our Land. Kurt Otabenga Orderson is an award-winning filmmaker from Cape Town, South Africa, whose work has been featured on Al Jazeera, SABC, ESPN, ZDF, and HULU. He has worked on six continents and has directed and produced over ten feature documentaries screened at international film festivals, universities, and colleges. Kurt Orderson is the founder of Azania Rizing Productions, a company that aims to inspire young people through creative storytelling about Africa and African Diasporas and is a member of the Africa World Now Project Collective. Others you will hear are: Savi Horne, Esq. Executive Director of the North Carolina Association of Black Lawyers Land Loss Prevention Project; Dr. Tasneem Siddiqui, member of the Africana World Now Project Collective and Assistant Professor of History in the Department of History, Political Science and Social Justice at WSSU; Dr. Yousef Al-Bulushi, Assistant Professor of Global & International Studies at the University of California, Irvine; Dr. Kamau Rashid, Associate Professor of Educational Foundations and Inquiry at National-Louis University in Chicago. And yours truly…James Pope. 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; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! Enjoy the program!

I normally provide a textured, multi-leveled, quite frankly intentionally thick introduction to our programs. But today, we present a conversation I recently had with Amir Mohamed el Khalifa [aka Oddisee], as the conversation is textured, multi-leveled and thick itself… The son of Sudanese and African descendant American parents, Oddisee was born and raised in Washington DC, spending summers in Khartoum learning Arabic and swimming in the Nile. Growing up amidst the sounds of New York hip hop, his father playing Oud, Go-Go, and gospel, Amir took his first steps as an MC producer in the analog basement studio of his legendary neighbor, Garry Shider (of Parliament Funkadelic). Known for his independence, Oddisee consistently debunks myths, stereotypes, and limited ideas of what an artist, creative, curator is, or can become. 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! Linkshttps://oddisee.bandcamp.com/http://oddisee.co/https://www.mellomusicgroup.com/pages/oddisee-1

[Originally produced and aired in 2019] Vodun, Voodoo, racialization into Black Magic as currently understood is a distorted figment of a Western imagination. Voodoo is narrated as a sensationalized ‘pop-culture' caricature of voudon, which is an Afro-Caribbean spiritual system that was brought with enslaved Africans forced onto the plantations in Haiti, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, the United States and elsewhere. The fictitious associations with drinking blood sacrifices, voodoo dolls or zombies are directly a result of the same dehumanization processes innate in a system of chattel slavery, the lifeblood of racial capitalism. To be clear at the onset, Voudon is "an assortment of cultural elements: personal creeds and practices, including an elaborate system of folk medical practices; a system of ethics transmitted across generations [including] proverbs, stories, songs, and folklore... voudon is more than belief; it is a way of life," wrote Leslie Desmangles, a Haitian professor at Hartford's Trinity College in "The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal" (Prometheus Books, 1996). Voudon teaches belief in a supreme being called Bondye, an unknowable and uninvolved creator god. Voudon practitioners recognize many ancestral spirits (called loa), each one of whom is responsible for a specific domain or part of life. Followers of voudon see a universal energy and a soul that can leave the body during dreams and spirit possession. In Western Christian theology, spiritual possession is usually considered to be an act of evil, either Satan or some demonic entity trying to enter an unwilling human vessel, unless of course you go to black worship services. This is in contrast to the fact that in voudon, possession by loa is desired. In a ceremony guided by a priest or priestess, this possession is considered a valuable, first-hand spiritual experience and connection with the spirit world. In 1685, variations of a practice to forbid the practice of African religions and required all masters to Christianize their slaves within eight days of their arrival—which codified into various laws. Slavery was condoned by the Catholic Church as a tool for converting Africans to morally upright Christians. Furthermore, one Haitian scholar notes, "Many of the African spirits were adapted to their new environment in the New World. Ogun, for instance, the Nigerian spirit of iron-smiths, hunting and warfare took on a new persona... He became Ogou, the military leader who has led phalanxes into battle against oppression. In Haiti today, Ogou inspires many political revolutions that oust undesirable oppressive regimes." The practices of dehumanization and hiding Africans histories (it is a misunderstanding to say African histories are lost)…has contributed much to the survival of racist logics that promotes false notions and ideas of racial white supremacy. These practices were applied to Africana total existence. Nevertheless, the spiritual practices of the various peoples who were forced across the oceans have ancient origins. In fact, we can see ancient links between the Yoruba peoples and ancient Egypt…. Today, we are pleased to have filmmaker Onuora Anthony Abuah back with us to talk about another one his films, a two-part documentary that explores the Danhomé Kingdom. Part 1 is titled, Danhomé & Vodun and Part 2 is titled, Voodoo in Togo. As a filmmaker and under the banner of AEA Films UK, his projects include MONA, Catching a Thief, Woodfalls, Woolwhich Boys. 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; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! Film[s]: https://www.youtube.com/c/TalesFromtheMotherlandProductions/videos

The notion, assumption, and/or idea that the various peoples who were enslaved during the periods and processes of the solidification of the racial global economy that claims our ancestors were deprived of culture, strips of all associations with historical and ancestral groundings is a product of centering European historicity as the dominant expression of social, historical, political and epistemic knowledge systems. This argument is rooted in the fact that one of the most vibrant places to find the most articulate expressions of African/a humanity is in the way we resist injustice—inequity—violence. The way we conceptualize and engage in struggle against systems of oppression, the foundation of which is an advanced understanding of the praxis of being human. See everything Sylvia Wynter. African/a struggles operate on multiple and simultaneous levels of human existence. It always was, always will be a struggle to realize a world beyond. The material and nonmaterial praxis to balance forces seen and unseen. The science of African/a fighting arts…a commitment, conscious or unconscious, to embody resistance. Of becoming rebel. Building on the work of Dr. Kamu Rashid, I assert that of becoming rebel can be understood in the Swahili tradition as, “Harakati za Waasi”, translated as “Movement of Rebels”. For Dr. Rashid, it represents the tradition of radical resistance that is embedded in the history of Capoeira and other African Diasporic combat arts. These arts were used in the people's resistance to state oppression throughout the Americas. Harakati za Waasi seeks to honor these traditions by seeking to engage in the rigorous study and practice of the theoretical and technical applications of African combat systems. Additionally, Dr. Rashid and the collective seek to broadly disseminate these arts within the African community for the sake facilitating cultural transformation. Today, embodied resistance: the science of African/a fighting arts with Kamau Rashid. Dr. Kamau Rashid is an Associate Professor of Educational Foundations and Inquiry at National-Louis University in Chicago. Kamau earned his Phd and BA from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Master of Arts degree from Northeastern Illinois University. Dr. Rashid work focuses on African American history and culture, particularly on the inter-generational dynamics of African/a social critique, which includes an exploration and theorizing of W.E.B. Du Bois as well as contemporary African-Centered scholars and critical race theorists. Undergirding this, he studies art (Hip Hop and comics) as a radical public pedagogy. He is co-developing an oral history and archival project focused on African American social movements in the Chicago area from the 1960s to1980s with Dr. Richard Benson of Spelman College. And is currently working on Finding our way through the desert: Jacob H. Carruthers and the restoration of an African worldview as well as The critical theory of W.E.B. Du Bois: The Struggle for Humanity. He has published a number peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and received various grant awards to support his work. Lastly, likely most importantly, Dr. Rashid is active in a number of community organizations in the Chicago-area including the Kemetic Institute of Chicago, a research and educational organization focused on mapping, exploring and applying the ancient and contemporary contributions of ancient Nile Valley civilizations. 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! Image: Statue of Zumbi

Today, we will listen to a thinking session I had with students last year, where we engaged ideas around an argument I presented, that suggested Afrofuturism is an ancient idea that expresses itself as an African/a freedom principle. It is an articulation of a constellation of deep African/a ideas and practices of what I called Africa's Ancient Future [a nod to Wayne Chandler's Ancient Future]. Through historical and ancestral memories of magic; use of spiritual technologies; intentional philosophies of life; heretical temporality; creative nonlinear knowledge production; and a symbiotic connection with nature and the universe, Africa's Ancient Future is articulated through a freedom principle, which implies a constant struggle to delink one's collective self from now moments, reconciling past moments, in order to create future moments that allow the full expression of one's humanity. What was of specific importance to our interrogation of the time concept, was its arrested expression as a Western European construct. The temporal ticks used to mark the flow of human phenomenon/a are mapped from distorted perceptions of a limited reality, perceptions that were born from a historical and ancestrally specific cultural worldview…then forced upon the world through enslavement, colonialism, imperialism, language, and religious violence. Therefore, to clearly outline the argument I am making, I do so now in order for you to follow the conversation you are about to hear, all while provoking and inviting you to think with me. Think beyond me. Think around me. Think over me. Think through me. But think, nonetheless. The argument as presented, then and today, suggests that in order to understand Afrofuturism/African Futures as an intellectual/theoretical frame or lens through which to understand the place of Africa in a future as a very ancient idea. I argued that we must map its provocations at various moments to be extracted from the deep cultural fabric of African/a people, an interdependent relationship between the material and spiritual, a way of life to its development as an epistemic frame through which we can see all African/a ways of knowing reassert itself on a global stage as the progenitor of all human knowledge. Communities, the peoples that inhabit the geographical spaces referred to as continental Africa have always been acutely aware of the future…the cultural practices in current religious forms and functions are rooted in a deep African spiritual understanding/worldview. This is not a profound acknowledgement. However, the future, the concept of the unseen, a moment that is to come, is prevalent and vital to highlight. The relationship to land, the universe, and ancestors are centered around an understanding of the seamless interconnectedness of past, present and future…and we have a duty and responsibility to maintain it in balance…which is and can be important to apply as a sociopolitical organizing principle [this is another point and foundation for another program altogether]. But important to highlight, nonetheless. Especially if we situate this argument in discourse around sociopolitical and economic relations will then highlight the limits of rights discourse, which are currently rooted in individualist notions where duty and responsibility can be negated by the rule of law birthed in the [re]conceptualization of the human as a justification for the maintenance of private property. 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. Image: Madonna - by MANZEL BOWMAN (@artxman; support here: https://manzel.biz/ & https://society6.com/manzelbowman)

Analyzing the conditions which dictate the systems and institutions which also perpetuate inequities require the ability to identify and map. It requires the science and art of identifying genealogy. It requires the necessity to map memory-to [re]member. But not simply for remembrance. African/a peoples oscillate between variations of a peculiar aversion to history or wanting to know everything about history, specific African/a history. But few understand the purpose of history or its use as a tool for organizing. Today, we will listen to a conversation I recently had with Obi Egbuna Jr., where we explore the question [in phase one of a series of conversations] which asks: How can history be a tool for organizing? It is one thing to know bits and pieces of historical content, but a historical consciousness not being cultivated into a critical consciousness is without purpose. The notion of a tree without roots is often given as axiom to grounding African/a peoples on the path to learning history. But what is important to engage is the question for what? To what ends? For what purpose? Knowing your roots [i.e. history] does not necessitate purpose [unorganized information is not knowledge. Knowledge is only power when organized, intentionally organized]. To move to the next level of historical consciousness, is to evolve it into a critical Africana consciousness. Association is not enough to be considered a functional component of a movement and proximity does not guarantee contribution. One has to struggle with ideas through practice, crafting this into a praxis for expressed objective[s] in order to find continuity with the past, to understanding the present, ultimately leading to creating a future. Obi Egbuna Jr., was born in London, England, and raised in Washington, DC, spending time in Nigeria. Obi is a founding member of the Pan-African Liberation Organization (PALO), established in Washington, D.C., from 1990-2007. In addition to organizing and speaking engagements, Obi is a journalist, African/a history teacher and playwright. Obi is correspondent to The Herald, Zimbabwe's national newspaper, and the first US correspondent in the country's 32 years as an independent nation. Obi has taught African History at Roots Public Charter School since 1990 and has also taught at Ujamaa Shule and Northwestern High School in Prince George's County. He is the current African History teacher for the Sankofa Homeschool Collective as well as holds community-based African History Classes. Obi is a founding member and executive director of Mass Emphasis Children's History and Theater Company (2012). He has written several resolutions and appeals to the United Nations, World Health Organization, and Southern African Development Community covering a wide range of issues, ranging from HIV/AIDS in Zimbabwe to police brutality in the United. Obi has also organized around calling for the unconditional and immediate lifting of US-EU sanctions on Zimbabwe that went to the White House, U.S. Senate and Congress. Lastly, in addition to forging his own path, Obi worked directly with Kwame Ture the last 8 years of his life and is the son of Obi Egbuna Sr, who was a Nigerian-born novelist, playwright and political activist, leading member of the Universal Coloured People's Association (UCPA) and the British Black Power/Black Panther Movement. 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 more: https://battlecubazim.wordpress.com/word-from-the-producers/obi-egbuna-jr/

Image: Pauulu Kamarakafego As we have explored in previous programs, in fact, as we have attempted to unpack in every program, Black internationalism is an intentional disruption; a radical intervention in the global terms of order [nod to Cedric Robinson]. In order to understand Black internationalism as a critical disruption, a radical intervention, we must unpack it. The concept, international, as understood in dominant discourse [opposed to discourse on the periphery, discourses from below] is related to the creation and forced imposition of the nation-state, birthed from a European historiography/historicity as the dominant mechanism that organizes human life. The imposition of mechanisms, such as colonialism and chattel slavery, for instance, rooted in a specific epistemology was necessary to structure institutions and forms of knowledge that [re]conceptualized what it means to be human as the justification for and maintenance of the idea private property. Being so, international indicates a relationship at various levels of communities of people across [artificial] boundaries. It is from here, Black international/ism, then, is understood as a radical disruption of these systems and institutions. What must not be lost in this praxis, is the fact that this radical disruption is simultaneously a clear articulation and theorization of Black Power. Cedric Robinson asserts that “[Physically and ideologically, and for rather unique historical reasons, African peoples bridge the decline of one world order and the eruption (we may surmise) of another. It is a frightful and uncertain space of being.] If we are to survive, we must take nothing which is dead and choose wisely among the dying. [The industrial nations are self-destructing. Others, too, of course, will be affected]” [Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition [1983]), 316]. This assertion is certainly true on many levels but requires a simultaneously developed alternative foundation to build upon, as the wise choices must be planted into something. Today, we explore the ideas and argument in, Pauulu's Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice as presented by Quito Swan. Properly situated, we can see Pauulu's Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice presents a framework for that alternative. The possibilities of inventing the future. Pauulu's Diaspora is a mapping of Black internationalism across the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Ocean worlds, through the life and work of twentieth-century radical Pauulu [Powlu] Kamara-kafego. In this work, Dr. Quito Swan is disrupting and challenging limited conceptualizations and understandings of Black Power by situating it, properly, in an international context. Dr. Swan offers us a map on how Pauulu was following in the long tradition of those who came before. A genealogy of Black internationalism's praxis of resistance. Quito Swan is Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he directs the William Monroe Trotter Institute for the Study of Black Culture. He is a historian of Black internationalism, global Black Power and the Black Pacific. Dr. Swan is the author of many articles as well as, The Struggle for Decolonization: Black Power in Bermuda. 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!

Image: Jacob Lawrence Migration Series - Panel 4 Dominant discourses that explore and examine African/a phenomenon/a usually follow a trajectory set by colonialist, imperialist projects that seek to categorically define Africa through a racial capitalist epistemology. Rarely do these discourses allow African/a peoples to speak for themselves or intentionally provide the platform for African/a peoples voices to be amplified. This perspective is even applicable to the U.S. Black left. Many of these Black “radicals” are not conscious of their epistemic colonization. Decolonization is after all a holistic process that involves intentional internal [self] critique as well as external [social] critique. All of this has led to distorted and convoluted analysis and definitions of African/a itself. To understand the contradictory narratives that attempt to speak for Africa and offer analysis on the various phenomenon/a, the structural processes of extraction guided by philosophical and epistemic systems that justify the racial global economy must include the role of labor and labor institutions. Labor institutions and movements must deal with its [re]inscription of inequitable power relations created by its often-limited perspective on or ignorance of the implications of racial capitalism's ability to structure and guide its strategies. Processes that drive a real, substantive, internal critique of its marginalization of Black women in its institutions are case in point. How can any organization, which claim to fight for workers' rights, in turn marginalize and oppress Black women who give their energy to its lofty mission sustain its façade? The answer is simple it cannot, it must then be concluded that these institutions are agents of the very system that it pretends to be resisting. This is why African/a women who are expanding, [quite frankly] exploding limited notions that structure labor movement practices are important to center in any conversation around rights, labor or otherwise. Labor, the forces of production, all production, material and non-material, as an essential part of social organization, does not, and cannot escape being examined as being apart or divorced the processes of European ‘othering'. Therefore, organizing labor on continental Africa, the African/a world for that matter, must continually be situated into the long processes of decolonization. This is vital now more than ever, particularly in a global economy where the definition and processes of work has shifted, if one were not pay attention, seemingly overnight? All while, the means of production are guided by artificial intelligence. Labor organizations and movements are not beyond critique and must be measured at fundamental levels of thought and practice. Today, we will listen to a conversation w/ Emily Williams and myself [James Pope]. Emily Williams is a human rights activist and social justice advocate, who's work intentionally addresses gender, race, and other inequalities and advance equity and inclusion through sustainable program design throughout the African/a world. She has designed leadership programs for youth and women on continental Africa and has been actively involved in developing networks & programs that combine practice w/ intellectual inquiry; specifically, exploring the interconnectedness of race, gender, class, and other systems or oppression/marginalization as a critical foundation for work and action which advances justice, social and otherwise. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the 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!

[Program produced and aired 2016] Image: Frontispiece to Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble….1829 Maroon derives from Spanish cimarrón. Cimarrón originally referred to domestic cattle that had taken to the hills in Hispaniola. It was gradually expanded to be applied to enslaved Indigenous peoples who escaped from the Spaniards as they colonized South and Central America as well as the Caribbean. By the end of the 1530s, the concept had taken on strong connotations of being "fierce," "wild" and "unbroken," and was transferred to be primarily applied to Africans and people of African descent---or the runaways as they were referred to. For more than four centuries, the communities formed by escaped enslaved peoples dotted the fringes of plantations throughout the Americas, from Brazil to southeastern United States, from Peru to the American Southwest. Known variously as quilombos, mocambos, or mambeses, these new societies ranged from tiny bands that survived less than a year to powerful states the numbered thousands of members who survived for generations and even centuries. Maroon communities consisted of escaped African/a peoples with origins from a wide range of societies in West and Central Africa...Their collective task was to create new communities and institutions, through various processes of integrating cultural elements drawn largely from a variety of African societies [never forget, home was their destination]. Kwame Gyekye work on the deep continuities of cultural elements that link African societies is important to note here. For generations, historians believed that even the most remarkable of maroon settlements in the North America did not rival the achievements of maroon communities in South and Central America as well as the Caribbean. However, according to a number of scholars such as Cedric Robinson; Gerald Mullin, as well as Hebert Aptheker, and most recently Sylviane A. Diouf, evidence of the existence of at least fifty such communities in various places and at various times, from 1672 to 1864, has been documented. Herbert Aptheker's points out that the 1st maroon communities pre-dated Jamestown settlements by 82 years. They were African insurrectionists who secured gained their freedom from abortive Spanish colonizing efforts in North and South Carolina. Maroon communities were a real presence in the U.S…as Aptheker documented their 19th century presence in VA; Georgia; Alabama; Louisiana; South Carolina as well as in Wake, Gates, Onslow, Bladen, Sampson, Jones, New Hanover, Dublin, Wilmington, Robeson, Nash counties, North Carolina. Today, will listen to a conversation I had with Dr. Nubia Kia where we discussed her recent historical novel, titled I spread my Wings and I Fly. Dr. Kia is a cultural worker, artist, activist, scholar, retired professor from Howard University. Her work has been published in Black Scholar, Black American Literature Forum, and Journal of the African Literature Association. As historian and poet, Dr. Kai has also won numerous honors, which include the Michigan Council Arts Awards, D.C. Commission of the Arts Awards, and National Endowment for the Arts Awards, just to name a few. Her work is an important meditation and contribution on previous and current work that is being done to explore the connections between culture, resistance, the science of metaphysics [spiritwork] as a source liberatory practice as a historical and cultural product of the Maroons. All of which were cultivated within conditions that African peoples were thrust into. This process and its elements are found within every corner of African Diasporic sociopolitical thought and cultural practices from Brazil, to Colombia, to the Black Church to hip hop. Africa as more than a geographical landmass, lives. It lives in the mind, bodies, spirits, intelligence of African/a peoples. Enjoy the program

[Program produced & aired in 2017] While there have been many explorations of the histories and figures in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, little attention is paid to the role that Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe played as a leading thinker and activist in resisting its deeply entrenched racist structures. While Nelson Mandela is normally given highest status in the discourse around the movement, often presented as the primary symbolic representation of South African anti-apartheid resistance. What is often lost is the deep influence and standard set by Robert Sobukwe not only on Nelson Mandela, but more importantly the youth movements within the struggle that coalesced into what we know as the Black Consciousness Movement. It is lost, in this dominant discourse, that Robert Sobukwe was a mentor to Steve Bantu Biko. His inspiration, ideological leadership, and example to seeking an advanced framework toward liberation in South Africa was captured in the praxis of Steve Bantu Biko and his comrades. The framework as it was articulated by Biko and many young South Africans was the Black Consciousness Movement. For Biko, Black Consciousness and the defeat of the inferiority complex instilled by apartheid institutions is a necessary precondition for progress in South Africa (for the African world for that matter). For Biko and those young folk resisting, the fact that apartheid was interdependent with white supremacy; capitalist exploitation and deliberate oppression made the problem much more complex. Black Consciousness both inspired and parallels decolonization in the African/a world; a decolonization process that is very much still in process. 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; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

The current national political climate, as we have been highlighting, at least for the past 4 years, on AWNP is rooted in the cultural practices inherent in the global imposition of structures and systems born out of specific experiences and communities of peoples on the geographical land mass called Europe. These historical and contemporary experiences have evolved across time and space, all while these various groups attempted to grapple with their particular and collective inefficiencies through the violent spread of its worldview—the creation of a European modernity—and the proliferation of it institutions that extract the legitimacy and consent of its viability from the peoples and communities it deemed its God-given right to conquer. In short, we are witnessing the entity called Europe, its philosophical, and nation-state children, attempt to discover a state that it cannot possibly understand on its own—that is a state of peace & equality. This is because of the 1000-year process to restructure what it means to be human as a justification for the creation and maintenance of private property. The U.S. is a settler state, still trying to reconcile its birth, flirting with arrested notions and an limited imagination that can only understand ideas such as, democracy [even its own mythic creation], justice, and citizenship as exclusionary processes. There is no debate about this. We, certainly, will not debate anyone about this fact. One will either take courage to see the materialization of injustice, inequities and invest their talents into addressing them, radically. Or continue to be cowardice and turn a blind eye to the deep structural implications of these injustices and inequities. Because it takes a weak and cowardice person or group of persons to derive their sense of superiority to the determinant of creating the ‘Other'. It is a false and porous position at best. The contradictions, its ethos, its worldview, rooted in anti-blackness, anti-indigeneity, anti-nature, anti-human, anti-communal was and is this nation's Achilles heel [this Achilles-heel reference is with layered inference and intended critique]. But it must be made clear that no nation is an abstract entity, no institution exists in suspended animation. It is made up of people, who carry out its purpose. The institutions of a settler state require sacrifices. It requires the sacrifice of mind, body and spirit. It requires the non-living. But once those non-living, become living again, the survivability of such institutions and systems as birthed from the settler state, will ultimately turn on its keepers. In an article titled, Among the Ruins of Victory, the argument presented suggests that “Donald Trump [a representation of a way of being] was a test run. Worse than him is coming down the road within the decade. Get busy building. Movement activists who supported Biden emphasized that his presidency would give the movement breathing room. Okay. We have maybe two years, tops, to prepare for an even more vicious, popular wave of reaction.” Today's program will explore the implications as just set out… Next, you will hear, AWNP's Mwiza Munthali contextualize today's program, a recent discussion hosted by Transnational Institute [TNI] and the Institute for Policy Studies where scholars and activists analyze the global consequences of the recent U.S. elections. 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!

Image: Fannie Lou Hamer & Ella Baker, Aug. 6, 1964 [https://snccdigital.org/events/mfdp-holds-state-convention/] Knowledge is the intentional organization of information to meet an expressed objective and/or objectives. If this is, indeed, a viable conceptualization of knowledge, then the ability to correctly analysis the conditions within which a people find themselves must operate as praxis, consistently and constantly. As stated before, European modernity rooted in the intellectual and material construction of a global order as founded in the creation of whiteness, supported by the culture of racial capitalism is rupturing. In reaction, this whiteness, as an organizing construct is attempting to hold its position of authority. While the U.S. is currently in the middle of what to some is a peculiar national election cycle, to others, that critical thinking and radical vibrating other, this period is only peculiar in that we are once again in a cyclical discourse around voting in a settler nation that was organized on genocide; forced labor; systemic and institutionalized race/ism; and continuous imperial engagement with the world. In order to maintain one's sanity living in such contradiction, one can only think with those who provide sharp and penetrating clarity when analyzing the discourses of the moment. “It isn't revolutionary or materialist to disconnect things. To disconnect revolutionary consciousness from revolutionizing activity, to build consciousness with political agitation and educational issue-making alone is idealistic rather than materialist....” (George Jackson, Blood in My Eye, 1972: 26-27). Thinking through the binary, the either/or category of thought that limits our capacities for strategic praxis in Western capitalist democracies, we see how the dialectical processes operate throughout the Africana world to create contradictions [and opportunity]. For example, Senegalese political economist Ndongo Samba Sylla (2013), echoing the scholarship of Samir Amin (2004) in The Liberal Virus, demystifies the celebratory language of ‘free and transparent' elections for ‘liberal democracies' in Africa as fictitious systems that benefit the economic elite in-so-much as they create an impression (rather than a reality) of an emancipated collective.” (A Certain Amount of Madness: The Life, Politics, and Legacies of Thomas Sankara, 2018: 130-131; Sylla, 2013). Said all this to say, we are at a juncture. An unavoidable fracture that is weaved into the sociopolitical and cultural fabric of the nation-state. The conflicts inherent in political discourse, that is the competing narratives between the political activity of the collective and the political act of the individual are a manufactured reality in a capitalist democracy. Cedric Robinson provides more clarity for us on this arguing: “capitalist democracy” is one of the most powerful and enduring metanarratives of modern Western historiography. As an ideological formation it has inscribed discursive domains as distinctive as politics and science…As icon, its aura hovers over our institutions of knowledge and power, permeating inquiry and decision making with the counterfeit certainties of predestination” (Cedric Robinson, Oliver Cromwell Cox and the Historiography of the West: 7). So, what is to be done? How do we make sense of all this? Today…: of elections and beyond, thinking through the Crisis in Western Hegemony. I recently sat down with Corey Walker, Professor of the Humanities at Wake Forest University. 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; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

[Note: Produced and aired in 2016] Image: Wise Two https://www.wisetwo.org/ Over the past week and a half…unless one has been locked away in a cave…with absolutely no access to technology of any sort…the world has been attempting to understand and rationalize the US election of Donald Trump. To be more clear, Donald Trump—the person—and his election is a euphemism for and declaration of…the existence and prevalence of racism, sexism, colonialism, imperialism as the modus operandi of the US. Articles have been published with titles such as: Seven These on Trump; How Trump Won; welcome to the Fight; Donald Trump won on White-Male Resentment—but don't confuse that with the working class; Abolish the Electoral College; Panic in America: People in Revolt; It's Class, Stupid, Not Race; and lastly, The GOPs Attack on Voting Rights was the most under-covered story of 2016. What does this have to do with the African world? What makes this moment different from periods of protracted struggle to dismantle the institution of slavery; the fight against Jim Crow; the call for a fundamental restructuring of society during the Black Power Era; efforts to find Pan African solidarity and action during African and other nations of color struggle for independence? To people of the African world, what is different in this moment than any other moment of struggle against some of the highest forms of human bondage—materially and spiritually? What is to be done? What steps need to be taken? In an article published November 11, 2016 on the multimedia news commentary platform, Africa is A Country, titled, Trump's America, Paul Zeleza asserts that: “The world and many Americans are reeling in shock and anxiety at the election of Donald Trump as the next president of this mighty, but deeply disunited and disoriented country. All but a handful of opinion polls pointed to the victory of the incomparably experienced Hillary Clinton. But they were utterly, unforgivably, embarrassingly wrong. They couldn't pick up Trump's ‘silent majority' of ordinary white voters, not just the unapologetic alt-right that quietly cheered on the boisterous candidate, who openly said in public what Republicans and racist whites say in private." The postmortems will be brutal on the other failures of America's collective imagination that resulted in this stunning election result...In this popular American political sport of endless punditry and second guessing, few will take real responsibility for having enabled Trump, few in polite circles will own up to having voted for Trump, much as many whites in South Africa denied ever having been ardent supporters of Apartheid...” Zeleza goes on to ask: What does it say about a country that could elect such an unsavory character? Zeleza answers: Countries get the leaders they deserve. I would add that the myths that create false historical narrative of the United States maintain a false sense of belonging which simultaneously bolster the legitimacy of the rulers through the coerced consent from those they seek to rule …produce the necessity to demand that the nation—and its components—re-evaluate its functionality whether it wants to or not. This program: discourse & explanations seeks to highlight new types of praxis in light of this current manifestation of a long process of global white domination. I sat down with Corey Walker, [former] Dean of The College and the John W. and Anna Hodgin Hanes Professor of the Humanities at Winston Salem State University [now Wake Forest Professor of the Humanities] Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous African and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, 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!!

Religion or one's spiritual practice are the center of one's understanding of themselves in relation to the world within which they live. It is indeed the essence of who are. And for better or worse contextualizes and informs our identity. The development of practices and/or rituals that seek to help us understand the relationship between humanity, nature, and the universe are both a science and an art. When exploring the contours and continuities of Africana radical traditions, religion and/or spirituality or spiritual practices are often explored in relation to Western European traditions, in many ways, intentionally. The project to situate mainstream denominational formations at the center of the Africana religious experience began as a retort to those who claimed that Africa had no religion—only fetishism (Pietz 1988, 105–123). More than this, it has operated to silence traditions that have fallen outside regnant post-Enlightenment understandings of religion as “faith”. This has meant that, for the better part of a century, religion has been deemed synonymous with Christianity, and the institutional Black Church, in the U.S, in particular (Pérez, 2014: 82). Yet, Africa, still flashes through. There have been calls to reevaluate the grand narratives of Eurocentric religious thought and entertain the viability of de-centering the Black Church (Pérez, 2014: 93). I mean, was it not Cécile Fatiman, a mambo, and Dutty Boukman, a houngan, presiding over a Vodoun ceremony that gave direction and energy to Africans to free themselves in Haiti? What about our maroon ancestors? In Working Roots and Conjuring Traditions: Relocating Black ‘Cults and Sects' in African-American Religious History, Pérez argues that it is imperative to de-center the Black church in order to approach the heterogeneity and richness of lived religion…” (73). In relation to the Black radical tradition and Islam, specifically what's considered its unorthodox formations, little attention is given. Accordingly, narrow conceptualizations of Islam, or any spiritual practices of Africana peoples for that matter, marginalizes the impact of unorthodox communities. We miss the fact that Clarence 13X, Father Allah, a dissident follower of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, use the “Black God trope that 13X learned from El Shabazz to articulate their humanist worldview” (Collins, A Disciple of Malcolm X: Clarence 13X Smith's Embodied Black God Rhetoric, 2020). In the final analysis, a historical consciousness that does not inform a radical imagination that invents paths to an African future is counterproductive to liberation. Today, we will explore, contextually, Islam and the Black radical tradition. AWNP's, Dr. Tasneem Siddiqui is in conversation with Dr. Bilal Ware. Dr. Rudolph (Bilal) Ware is a historian of Africa and Islam. He is currently an associate professor at the UC-Santa Barbara, and the founding director of the Initiative for the Study of Race, Religion, and Revolution (ISRRAR). His first book, The Walking Qur'an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa, explores the history of a thousand years of Quran schooling in the region. His research and teaching examines Muslim anti-slavery movements in Africa and the Atlantic World. His most recent book, Jihad of the Pen: Sufi Thought in West Africa, with co-authors Zakary Wright and Amir Syed, explores Sufi thought in West Africa. Dr. Ware is currently working on: Visionaries: Second Sight and Social Change in Islamic West Africa; and The First Atlantic Revolution: Islam, Abolition, & Republic in West Africa c. 1776. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

[Note: This program was produced and aired in 2016] Image: Acclaimed Kenyan street artist & muralist, Wise 2 [https://www.singulart.com/en/artist/wise-two-5599] Today, we will listen to Pt. 2 of a two-part series titled: Hip Hop as Critical (Pan African) Consciousness. In this series, we engage a range of artists, activist, & thinkers in deeply exploring the essence of and finding the continuities in African and Diasporic sociopolitical thought and behavior—focusing specifically on hip hop as a form of cultural expression and creative resistance. The series engages in a substantive discourse on the viability of hip hop being a platform for developing a critical consciousness. A platform based in Pan African activity that has implications for the entire African world as well as other oppressed people. Today's conversation, in particular, is intent on sparking a shift in our approaches to cultural production, resistance, and art as emancipation practice—it seeks to interrogate what we know?—And how we have come to know what we know?—knowledge production not simply for the sake of knowing…but for the purpose of guiding our doing—framing our activity. We are working to move conversations beyond "mainstream" discourse about hip hop and situate it in a proper context…addressing real-time problems faced by Africans and African descendant across the globe… It does this…by first, examining the origins and continuities in African and Diasporic dimensions of hip hop…and secondly, look @ its ability to transmit complex messages that have collective sensibilities in inform the formation of a critical consciousness… With this, several fundamental questions arise, which asks, but are but are not limited to: 1. Why is culture such an important place for contestation?2. How can hip hop be used as a force for creative resistance? 3. Can hip hop serve as a platform for developing a critical consciousness? If, so, in what must it be rooted?4. What is the role of the artist?...Or More importantly what is the role and responsibility of the listeners? Today, in Part 2 of this series…we will listen to a recent wide-ranging conversation with scholar, activist, and artist Will Boone. Dr. Boone is an Associate Professor and chair of English at Winston Salem State University where he teaches courses on African and Diasporic Studies. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, 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!

Image: Ella Baker at the November 1974 Puerto Rican Independence Solidarity Rally Attempts to distort, rewrite, dilute, misdirect, and misguide the impact of our radical scholars, radical thinkers, activist, artist, and advocates are carefully planned practices by those who hold perceived positions of authority. The exclusion of important Africana thinkers and activist is not a matter of simple exclusion, but a matter of intentional attempts to disrupt the continuity of radicalization.Ella Baker words from a speech titled, “The Black Woman in the Civil Rights Struggle” delivered at the Institute of the Black World in 1969, are still sharply true today. Ms. Baker reasoned that: “In order for us as poor and oppressed people to become a part of a society that is meaningful, the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed. This means that we are going to have to learn to think in radical terms.” Barbara Ransby, one of the world's preeminent thinkers and activist, writes in Ella Taught Me: Shattering the Myth of the Leaderless Movement that “those who romanticize the concept of leaderless movements often misleadingly deploy Ella Baker's words, “Strong people don't need [a] strong leader.” Baker delivered this message in various iterations over her 50-year career working in the trenches of struggle, but what she meant was specific and contextual." Professor Ransby, who also wrote the important, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision, suggests that “Ella Baker spent her entire adult life trying to “change this system as rooted in exploitation, oppression, and the idea that Whiteness equals supremacy.” Somewhere along the way she recognized that her goal was not a single “end” but rather an ongoing “means,” that is, a process. Radical change for Ella Baker was about a persistent and protracted process of discourse, debate, consensus, reflection, and struggle.” Employing an Africana critical human rights consciousness if you will. In addition to Professor Ransby work, it is vital and essential that I highlight and call attention to the work of Joanne Grant who provided us with: Black Protest: History, Documents, and Analysis 1619 to Present, 1968; Ella Baker: Freedom Bound, 1998; Confrontation on Campus: The Columbia Pattern for the New Protest, 1969; but she produced an important documentary film titled: Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker. Joanne Grant, a radical journalist and activist of African descent who served as an assistant to W.E.B Du Bois; she was a member of the Communist Party, which made her a target of the House Un-American Activities Committee; was an author; documentary filmmaker is yet another important link in the genealogy of Black radical praxis that have continuities with not only Diaspora exemplars such as but not limited to, Ella Baker, Septima Clark, Fannie Lou Hammer, Madie Hall Xuma but continental Africa as well, Winnie Mandela, Miriam Makeba, Mariama Ba to name a few. Today, in response to screening of Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker AWNP co-sponsored this past August, we will listen to a conversation I had with Zach Norris where we explore the continuities of the praxis of Ella Baker. Zach Norris is the Executive Director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, author of We Keep Us Safe: Building Secure, Just, and Inclusive Communities, and co-founder of Restore Oakland. Zach is also a co-founder of Justice for Families, a national alliance of family-driven organizations working to end our nation's youth incarceration epidemic. 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; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! Enjoy the program!

Note: This program was produced and aired in 2017. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first prime minister and president after declaring their independence on March 6, 1957…founding member of the Organization of African Unity, wrote in the preface of the 1969 second edition of his work titled Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonization that: “Since the publication of the 1st edition of Consciencism in 1964, the African revolution has decisively entered a new phase, the phase of armed struggle. In every part of our continent, African revolutionaries are either preparing for armed struggle, or actively engaged in military operations against the forces of reaction and counter-revolution. The issues are now clearer than they have ever been. The succession of military...” [https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/consciencism-philosophy-and-ideology-de-colonization-kwame-nkrumah]. According to historian John Henrik Clarke in his 1974 article titled Kwame Nkrumah: His Years in America, "the influence of the ten years that he spent in the United States would have a lingering effect on the rest of his life." Key to the maturation of his sociopolitical thought, it is during these 10 years, Kwame Nkrumah, along with Nnamdi Azikiwe the first president of Nigeria attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Dr. Clarke goes on to suggest that “there is no way to understand the late Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, or any other man, without also understanding the country in which he was born and to what extent that country and the circumstances of his birth did influence the total of his life...” Today, Africa World Now Project Radio will bring you a recent exploration into the Social and Political Philosophy of Kwame Nkrumah with Dr. Kofi Kissi Dompere. Dr. Dompere is professor of economics at Howard University. He is author of many scientific and scholarly works in economics, philosophy, and decision theory. Some of this work includes his 2006, Polyrhythmicity; his 2017, The Theory of Philosophical Consciencism: Practice Foundations of Nkrumaism in Social Systemicity; 2006, African Union: Pan African Analytical Foundations; 2017, The Theory of Categorial Conversion: Rational Foundations of Nkrumaism in Socio-natural Systemicity and Complexity; 1995, Epistemics of Development Economics: Toward a Methodological Critique and Unity. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, 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…!

Image: Painting by Najma Ahmed, founder of Nujuum Arts. Based in Mogadishu and Hargaisa. Somalia/ somaliland. More information available here: https://web.marcelforart.com/nujuum_hashi/about The geopolitical conditions within which Somalia was born cannot be divorced from the conditions that institutionalized themselves in 1884/85 at what has come to be called the Scramble for Africa at the conference convened in Berlin, the Congo Conference. During the Conference where European white supremacist decided it was their right to divide the lands to which they had no affinity other than economic motives, the geographical region of Somalia was divided into three parts: British & Italian Somalia [gaining independence 1960—immediately untied, forming greater Somalia], and French Somalia [gaining independence in 1977, becoming Djibouti]. Other historical influences that produced current Somalia, are located in the conditions that surround the periods when the Ethiopian Empire took over [Ogaden] and Kenya took over [Northern Frontier District] regions. These historical conditions bolstered by exacerbating and fomenting divisions among the various groups of people who live in the region are important to understand as they directly impact the environments within which the people live today. To erroneously label Somalia as a fail state, instead of a collapsed state, distorts the how and why the region is in a state of intentional conflict accelerated at the behest of Western foreign capitalist interest that have historical roots in the many attempts to control the region; that is the wars between European cultural groups and the sociopolitical, cultural ‘Others' they created as their ‘enemies'. To be clear, upon closer analysis the real threat of the region is the fact that the people of Somalia are really showing that the nation state is not the only system upon which peoples can organize themselves. What do I mean, the people in the region have been functioning against the imposition of foreign structures that have cause internal conflict for over 30+ years. If left to organize themselves on the trajectory they were ancestrally on before the intentional and aggressive efforts of Western nations to destabilize the region for its own economic and geopolitical ends, Somalia as we know it would be what it once was erroneously labelled, the Switzerland of Africa. The reason I say erroneously labeled [but still useful to highlight the point]; the model of peaceful sociopolitical organization should not be limited to a European nation. This label, also, dismisses the deep logics and sociopolitical histories of African peoples who organized themselves into civilizations before the creation of the nation state. These histories and logics are in the ancestral membrane of the people. And the peoples of Somalia, despite the distorted narrative and images are exemplar to this fact [https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/aljazeeraworld/2016/10/somalia-forgotten-story-161027115655140.html]. Today, AWNP's, Mwiza Munthali is in conversation with, Mr. Abukar Arman. Abukar Arman is a former diplomat, once serving as Somalia's Special Envoy to the US. As a Somali political analyst, he is widely published on issues related to foreign policy, Islam, the Horn of Africa, and extremism among other topics. 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; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

Photo: Col. John Charles Robinson of Chicago In Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Robin DG Kelley writes that “most black people believed there was an order higher than the Constitution. Throughout the Africana experience in the Americas, Psalm 68, verse 31 of the Bible promised redemption for the black world. It reads: “Princes shall come out of Egypt. Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hands unto God.” Kelley goes on to suggest that this passage was as important to Pan-Africanist and emigrationist sentiment as the book of Exodus, even becoming the theological and ideological basis for what became known in the nineteenth century as Ethiopianism. One of the earliest published examples of this doctrine was Robert Alexander Young's Ethiopian Manifesto: Issued in Defense of the Blackman's Rights in the Scale of Universal Freedom (1829), which predicted the coming of a new Hannibal who would lead a violent uprising to liberate the race. Just like Haiti, Ethiopia's reputation as a beacon of hope and strength for the Africana world was solidified in 1896, after the defeat of Italy at the Battle of Adwa. The histories of Afro America and Ethiopia interacting are both deep and complex. But what is clear, Ethiopia held its own space in the sociopolitical thought of the Africana world. In his New World A-Coming, Roi Ottley wrote that "Negroes first became aware of the black nation [of Ethiopia] back in 1919, when Ethiopian dignitaries arrived in the United States on a diplomatic mission. During their stay in New York, this group received a delegation of Black folk from Harlem. During a ceremonial reception for this diplomatic mission, held at the Metropolitan Baptist Church in Harlem, the Mayor of Addis Ababa, delivered a speech expressing Ethiopian and Afro-American unity. Throughout the 1900s, African responded to various official invitations and appeals recruiting technically skilled Black Americans to settle in the country. Universal sympathy expressed by Afro-Americans for the Ethiopian-Italian war was shaped into concrete reality through the activities of several war relief committees. Actual participation in the war was expressed through the military activities of two Afro American airmen. "Colonel" John Charles Robinson, of Chicago and Trinidadian-born "Colonel" Hubert Fauntleroy Julian, who arrived in Ethiopia in late 1934 (as volunteer pilots for the only two Ethiopian planes that were airworthy during the war). After the war, Robinson remained in Ethiopia to establish commercial air service into East Africa and the Sudan. With the purchase of an old World War II surplus DC-3 aircraft, Robinson became service crew and pilot for the forerunner of the present Ethiopian Air Lines [Shack, 1974]. I wanted to contextual this deep historical context of U.S. African descendant connections and continuities with Ethiopia in effort to prime your historical memory of the importance of Ethiopia in the context of Africana internationalism and its place in the radical black imagination as a platform to understanding the current conditions in nation. More importantly why Africa, its nations, and the conditions within which communities face there are directly related to the conditions within which Africana people's faces across the world. Today, AWNP's Mwiza Munthali speaks with Ayantu Ayana, doctoral student and a member of the Oromo Advocacy Alliance, where she contextualizes the current conditions in Ethiopia. Aynatu Ayana addresses the underlying historical-rooted issues that manifest today in the country. 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; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! Enjoy the program!

Wangũi wa Kamonji in her article, Women in Kenya rebuild resilience amidst an eco-cultural crisis, published in February of this year, a few weeks before the current global pandemic takes its cripplingly hold, writes that: “in the global North, it has become more common to declare that indigenous peoples hold the solutions to the climate crisis. Such rhetoric risks being only lip-service if solutions do not recognize and resource indigenous-led work to repair damage to indigenous cultures, commitment to an indigenous resurgence and the full integration of wisdom of these indigenous values in projects that seek solutions. After decades of shame, [violent] suppression and devaluation, much indigenous knowledge held by groups like the Tharaka [in Kenya] has been forgotten, hidden or impaired. Tharaka women [have] often commented that it seemed like “everything was going to disappear.” Facing this eco-cultural crisis, remembering, and restoring indigenous women's knowledge and practices, grounded in a paradigm of respect and collaboration with the Earth, emerges as the most salient pathway to recovery and restoration. Professor Gloria Emeagwali adds sharp clarity to this notion when she argues that, I must quote in its totality: “Throughout Africa, in spite of ongoing colonization and the continuing effects of globalization, there are people, particularly in rural communities, who still associate their existence to, and with, the land, and with their immediate socio-physical environments and surroundings. Land has been a source of Indigenous identity for Africans, in that through associations with the land, local cultures, spiritualities, politics, economics, and the relations of society to Nature are defined. There are knowledges associated with the land that continue to guide everyday existence. People continue to negotiate identities, cultures, and spiritualities with particular understandings of the place of the human in their environments. These phenomena constitute important dimensions of the knowledgebase, and such knowledge also informs everyday existence. African indigeneity must be read as both a process and a form of identity. It is an identity that defines who a people are at a particular point in time. But it is also a recognition that such identities are in a continual process of existence. The lesson here is that a peoples' indigeneity and indigenousness is not simply taken away from them simply because they encounter others on their homeland [or beyond]. The Eurocentric constructions of the Indigenous as primitive, culture-based, and static is a ploy to privilege European identity, and should be distinguished from what the people claim and assert of their own indigeneity and indigenousness. The latter is about the affirmation of self, community, history, culture, tradition, heritage, and ancestry. Eurocentric constructions are about establishing cultures of hierarchies as a way to accord privilege and power. This is how racism worked and continues to work. Today, AWNP's Tasneem Siddiqui [@DrT_Siddiqui] is in conversation with activist and thinker, Wangũi wa Kamonji [@_fromtheroots]. They explore the contours and practice of indigenous knowledge and ancient technologies as that inform a decolonization that is simultaneously in resistance & restoration. Through research, dance, storytelling and facilitating diverse public spaces for critical consciousness and transformation, Wangũi wa Kamonji is retrieving and restoring indigenous Afrikan lifeways and practices. [Also see: @afrikahai_] 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; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

[Image: Claudia Jones Paul Robeson Amy A Garvey with friends in London England, Source: Source Pan African News Wire] W.E.B. Du Bois (1933) in, Pan-Africa and new racial philosophy, presents his early articulations of Pan Africanism as “the industrial and spiritual emancipation of the Negro people” wherever they are in the world. George Padmore (1955) in, Pan Africanism or Communism, asserts that “the idea of Pan Africanism first arose as a manifestation of fraternal solidarity among Africans and peoples of African descent" (95). I have explored in, Pan-Africanism in the United States: Identity and Belonging, why Pan-African discourse is not a dominant expression in African diasporic resistance in the U.S. today. This is not to say a Pan-African discourse is not present at all, but when situated in the historical and intellectual genealogy of African decedent experiences in the U.S., it is marginal at best. Even with this contextualization, the marginalization of Africana women in the formation and evolution of Pan African thought and practice is important to center. This disarticulation has distorted the historical narrative of radical and Pan African thought of the fact that in “early coverage of the 1900 Pan-African Congress reveals delegates, “all eminent in their sphere” who represented the United States, Canada, Ethiopia, Haiti, Liberia, Sierra Leone, the then Gold Coast, most of the islands of the then British West Indies included Miss Anna Jones (Kansas), and Mrs. Annie Cooper (i.e. Anna Julia Cooper) (Washington, D.C.) among others (see Adi & Sherwood 2003, for listings). Mabel Dove Danquah attended the 2nd Pan African Congress. Her husband Joseph Boakye Danquah, himself a major pan-Africanist was one of the African students that Amy Ashwood Garvey nurtured in the West African Students Union in London (Davies, 2014: 80). Adelaide Casely Hayford, who married the pan-Africanist J.E. Casely Hayford in 1903 and as a pan-Africanist herself, briefly held the position of lady president of the UNIA branch in Freetown, Sierra Leone. She spent two years in the U.S. studying girls schools, became an associate of U.S. women like Nannie Burroughs, and would later develop her own school for girls. In 1927 she attended the fourth Pan-African Congress in New York (Davies, 2014: 80). Today, we explore the current rebellion through a Pan African lens with Africans Rising for Justice, Peace and Dignity. Africans Rising is a Pan-African movement of people and organizations. Next, you will hear, in order, of speaking: Coumba Toure, co-coordinator of Africans Rising for Justice, Peace and Dignity; Hakima Abbas, executive co-director of the Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID); M. Adams, community organizer and co-executive director of Freedom Inc; Taalib Saber, Pan Africanist, filmmaker and principal attorney at The Saber Firm, LLC, where he practices Education and Special Education Law, Civil Rights, and Personal Injury Law; Dimah Mahmoud, co founder of the Nubia Initiative, a humanist, activist, and passionate change-maker; Gacheke Gachihi, Coordinator, Mathare Social Justice Center and member, Social Justice Centres Working Group in Nairobi, Kenya; and Yoel Haile, Criminal Justice Program Manager with the ACLU of Northern California. 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; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! Enjoy the program!

[Note: Produced and aired in 2017] For more than four centuries, the communities formed by such escaped enslaved peoples dotted the fringes of plantations in the Americas, from Brazil to southeastern United States, from Peru to the American Southwest. Known variously as quilombos, mocambos, or mambeses, these new societies ranged from tiny bands that survived less than a year to powerful states encompassing thousands of members that survived for generations and even centuries. Their descendants still form semi-independent enclaves in several parts of the hemisphere -for example, in Suriname, French Guiana, Jamaica, Colombia and Belize. For generations, historians believed that even the most remarkable of maroon settlements in the North America did not rival the achievements of maroon communities in South and Central America as well as the Caribbean. Nevertheless, according to a number of scholars such as Cedric Robinson, Gerald Mullin as well as Herbert Aptheker evidence of the existence of at least fifty such communities in various places and at various times, from 1672 to 1864, has been found. Taken further back, Herbert Aptheker's work shows us that the 1st maroon communities pre-dated Jamestown settlements by 82 years. They were slave insurrectionists from abortive Spanish colonizing efforts in North and South Carolina. With this……We will listen to part of a discussion between famed independent filmmaker, activist, scholar Haile Gerima and Dr. Akinyele Umjoa where they discussed maroons and Dr. Umjoa's book, We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement… Haile Gerima is an independent filmmaker and professor of film at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Born and raised in Ethiopia, Gerima immigrated to the United States in 1967. After the award-winning Ashes & Embers (1982) and the documentaries Wilmington 10—U.S.A 10,000 (1978) and After Winter: Sterling Brown (1985), Gerima filmed his epic, Sankofa (1993). Gerima continues to distribute and promote his own films, including his most recent, Teza, which won the Jury and Best Screenplay awards at the Venice Film Festival in 2008. He also lectures and conducts workshops in alternative screenwriting and directing both within the U.S. and internationally. Dr. Akinyele Umjoa is a scholar-activist, who currently serves as the Chair of the Department of African-American Studies at Georgia State University (GSU). Dr. Umoja's writing has been featured in scholarly publications such as The Journal of Black Studies, Black Scholar, Radical History Review and Socialism and Democracy. And a number of edited volumes. He is also author of We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement. We then turn our attention to the theory and practice of the Black church. I sat down with Dr. Torin Alexander, where we explored the deep epistemological and ontological underpinnings of the black church. Paying attention to the differentiation of the Black church as an institutional-physical space and incubator of liberatory practice. Dr. Alexander is a scholar of African American religion and religious experience. His interdisciplinary research and teaching are influenced by phenomenology, critical theories on race and gender, and post-colonial/post-structuralist studies. 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; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! Enjoy the program….

We are currently living in an age where poverty and disease are big business. In a world where race and class produce and reproduce ways of interacting. This process has found ways to attach itself to our very construction of individual and group realities, therefore entrenching conscious and unconscious acts of racism as being natural and/or universal occurrences. We live in a world where racial diversity is misunderstood as ideological diversity…a constructed reality where the ascription of power is imposed on old ideas of identity and re-incorporated in new forms of marginalization. This holds true, despite any claim of post-this-or-post-that…that is made by dominant discourses. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1903 in Souls of Black Folk that: “THE PROBLEM of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line, —the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea” Today, in the 21st Century, we are still confronted with this color line, which is exacerbated by a symbiotic relationship with the drive to secure material wealth at rates that often rival the height of the age of imperialism, where the total control of Africa as well as other resource rich lands were dominant behavioral expressions in geopolitics. Prophetically, in his later writings, as W.E.B Du Bois is known to do, expands or situates his conceptualization of the color line into being intimately linked with class formations. In the Preface of the 1953 Edition of the Souls of Black Du Bois argues that: “I still think today as yesterday that the color line is a great problem of this century. But today I see more clearly than yesterday that back of the problem of race and color, lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it: and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance, and disease of the majority of their fellowmen; that to maintain this privilege men have waged war until today war tends to become universal and continuous, and the excuse for this war continues largely to be color and race.” Often ignored by the sympathetic democratic rhetoric of liberals, are the racialized consequences of massive poverty and cultural displacement integral to the globalizing project of democratization (a euphemism for the unbridled proliferation of capitalism). Within this environment, the meanings of race are constantly re-configuring itself as various forms of exclusion built upon the consequences of enslavement, colonialism, and imperialism are perpetuated and refined. Today: We will dive deeper into understanding race. What we will hear next is Charles W. Mills describe how race was materialized with the advent of modernity. He argues that capitalism is racialized, and white supremacy was interwoven within it from its origins. Charles W. Mills is a Caribbean philosopher from Jamaica. He is known for his work in social and political philosophy, particularly in oppositional political theory as centered on class, gender, and race. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York's Graduate Center. He is the author of numerous books on race and political theory, including The Racial Contract (1997), Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (1998), and the forthcoming Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (2017). Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, 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

[Note: Produced and aired in 2017] In the Wretched of the Earth, Fanon writes: “Decolonization never goes unnoticed […] it infuses a new rhythm, specific to a new generation of men, with a new language and a new humanity...” (Fanon 1961:2) However, the process of decolonization has yet to reach full expression. The praxis of decolonization, the promise of a radical humanism, a new relation of being in the world, remains severely arrested. If decolonization was an intentional and direct response to colonialism, decolonization failed in uprooting the colonial repressive systems…on mass scale. For Fanon, “the colonial world is a compartmentialized world […] a world divided in two. The dividing line, the border…” An idea Du Bois names as the color line, the poverty line…a siphoning of the world's resources into the hands of a few, safeguarded and securitized by barracks, the police station, drones, the banks, multinational corporations, private interests and capital. In the past twenty years, throughout the Africana world as well as the global south, burgeoning social movements constituting what Sylvia Wynter describes as “the vast majority of peoples who inhabit the favela/shanty town' of the globe and their jobless archipelagos…at the national level, Baldwin's ‘captive population' in the urban inner cities, (and on the Native Reservations of the United States),” have reinvigorated and expanded the arena and language of grassroots politics and political action (Wynter, No Humans Involved: 60). We see this, in particular with the youth movements across Africa and more clearly with the “Black First, Land First” which invokes the Fanon postulation that: “For a colonized people the most essential value, because it's the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity” (Fanon 1961: 44). Today, we will deeply engage with the language and praxis of decolonization through one of the most important land and dignity movements in South Africa… Abahlali baseMjondolo, also known as Durban Shack Dwellers' Movement with Dr. Yousuf Al-Bulushi, an assistant of Professor of Peace Studies at Goucher College. After this, we look at the the community of Buenaventura (along with communities in the Chocó region of Colombia) where a general strike was launched (May 16th)) demanding that the Colombian government meet the basic human rights to water, education, health, culture, land and freedom from racism and violence. The strike caused businesses to closed, road blocks were set up at several points along the main road and peaceful protestors chanted, sang, danced and banged cooking pots to call attention to the desperate situation. According to a recent report from the Black Alliance for Peace, released on June 12, after many hours of dialogues and negotiations an agreement was reached in the early hours of Tuesday 6th June, bringing an end to a 22-day strike in Buenaventura, Colombia. The strike, in the mainly Afro-descendant and Indigenous city on Colombia's Pacific Coast was an inspirational reminder of how collective, local level and “people-centered” human rights processes can challenge economic powers and neoliberal politics (Baraka, 2013)[1]. We will hear a report on what happened and prospects of this agreement from Afro Colombian human rights activist Charo Mina Rojas of Black Communities Process in Colombia-International Working Group (PCN); and Afro Colombian Solidarity Network. Enjoy the rest of program. 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.

[Note: This program was produced and aired in 2017] The question of land as a fundamental aspect of Africana liberation movements is an often-neglected point of inquiry when exploring the long genealogy of Africana thought and behavior—radical or otherwise. Nevertheless, it is indeed, ever-present. A reading of the large cache of demands, treaties, and platforms of various communities of Africana people and organizations provide the historical reality of this fact. With this, a place that one can start, and move forward or backward is with, of course, Brother Malcolm. As his revolutionary praxis evolved, he once exclaimed that: “Of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research. And when you see that you've got problems, all you have to do is examine the historic method used all over the world by others who have problems similar to yours. Once you see how they got theirs straight, then you know how you can get yours straight. There's been a revolution, a black revolution, going on in Africa. In Kenya, the Mau Mau were revolutionary; they were the ones who brought the word "Uhuru" to the fore. The Mau Mau, they were revolutionary, they believed in scorched earth, they knocked everything aside that got in their way, and their revolution was also based on land, a desire for land. In Algeria, the northern part of Africa, a revolution took place. The Algerians were revolutionists, they wanted land. France offered to let them be integrated into France. They told France, to hell with France, they wanted some land, not some France. And they engaged in a bloody battle. So, I cite these various revolutions, brothers and sisters, to show you that you don't have a peaceful revolution. You don't have a turn-the-other-cheek revolution. There's no such thing as a nonviolent revolution. The only kind of revolution that is nonviolent is the Negro revolution. The only revolution in which the goal is loving your enemy is the Negro revolution. It is the only revolution in which the goal is a desegregated lunch counter, a desegregated theater, a desegregated park, and a desegregated public toilet; you can sit down next to the white folks -- on the toilet. That's no revolution. Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis for all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality...” Brother Malcolm's ideas are firmly situated in the long tradition of early radical activist and thinkers such as Detroit attorney Milton Henry, the 19th century movements of Benjamin Pap Singleton. And, of course, the Communist Party's Black Belt Nation Thesis, lest we forget the efforts of the Republic of New Afrika. Together, these, and the many other efforts across the African world all center the question of land as being the fundamental component in black liberation movements. We see this reality in communities in South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, Colombia, Brazil…etc Land is understood not in the limited capitalist sense of ownership but the transmission of communal practices of human stewardship as being primary care-takers of the planet. Today, we will explore the question of land and African world liberation with Dr. Tasneem Siddiqui and Dr. Willie Jamaal Wright. Dr. Siddiqui is Assistant Professor of History at Winston Salem State University and Dr. Wright is Assistant Professor of geography at Florida State University. 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; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! Enjoy the program!

We are witnessing a period that is trending towards unprecedented, but it is not without genealogy or tradition. Those who seek to counter this rebellion promote narratives with increased use of violence that tries to narrow the righteous rage to suggest that folk are responding to one instance of violence. They think that folk are rebelling against a video. They think folks must protest peacefully. The ‘they' are those in positions of perceived power where thought and action are built upon racial capitalist logics that maintain and reinforce systems of dehumanization. Folk are not responding to an instance of violence. People are instinctively responding to the structural and historical realties of violence… It is essential in this moment where European modernity is fracturing, for every critical thinking African and person of African descendant, globally, to grab hold of the fracture and pull with all your might. Even more important, it is essential to gain clarity of objective and practice a sharpness of means. George Jackson wrote: “We find ourselves today forced into a reexamination of the whole nature of black revolutionary consciousness and its relative standing within a class society…” Political education then becomes the call of the day. In this regard Fred Hampton provides a clear analysis of the role of political education in this reexamination [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ffmg6i0lv_k]. Education—political education must be evident. And allow me to quickly point out that to be educated is to—read. The revolutionary importance of reading is key. Therefore, our rebellious, ungovernable discourse must be rooted in a critical Human Rights consciousness, specifically a critical Africana human rights consciousness It is here, the platform that guides the question, what next? can be built. From this CAHRC, we must engage in five activities: 1) seek to institutionalize this moment; 2) develop ideological refinement for clarity towards objective; 3) all efforts must be linked with internationalism—PanAfrican being organizational goals; 4) consolidate written & nonwritten projects of black critique into a sustained counter discourse, that provides response and self-critique; and 5) root all of this in a critical Africana human rights consciousness, which is, in fact, a critique and expansion of human rights theory and practice, currently organized. As we begin to move further into next phases, we must move, in the words of Kwame Ture, our unconscious to conscious organized response. Above all, we must also keep in mind the tactics offered by Amilcar Cabral: 1) those engaged in struggle, should unflinchingly practice class suicide; & 2) in spite of all fought for and gained: “Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies…Claim no easy victories.” It is in this historical genealogy we walk. It is in this ancestral tradition we live. It is here, George Jackson provides more clarity: “We must prove our predictions about the future with action.” And I will add within all expediency of black critique, as the future of our humanity rests on getting this right. Next, you will hear a recent conversation I had with Dr. Daryl B Harris. Daryl B. Harris is an associate professor and former chair of political science at Howard University. He is author of The Logic of Black Rebellions; Postmodernist Diversions in African American Thought; as various other chapters and articles. 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; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! Enjoy the program!

Note: This conversation with Brother Ah was the first program produced for AWNP Radio. It aired as the inaugural program in 2016. Brother has joined the ancestors today (May 31 2020). We will need to hear him speak with us on a higher frequency. He was, is and will continue to be. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------I recently had the pleasure to sit down with one of our scribes…Bro. Ah…to Reflect upon Africa's Deep Influence on Diasporic Cultural Production. Robert Northern (aka Brother Ah) is the musical director of the World Music Ensemble and The Sounds of Awareness Ensemble. He specializes in Wind Instruments, African Drums, and Percussions. Brother Ah constantly seeks to celebrate the emergence of a world culture, while retaining the distinct expressions of each cultural style in it, paying particular attention to African inflections. Brother Ah extensive experience spans the musical field. He was the musical director of “Sounds of Awareness”. A musical collective that utilizes music, dance, poetry and the sounds of nature to inspire and raise individual levels of consciousness. The group also produces music for meditation, relaxation and healing. He also founded The World Community School of Music in 1992 and offers instrumental and vocal music classes to students of all ages from. As a lecturer and educator, he has taught at public and private schools in New York and Washington, DC, as well as Brown University in Rhode Island (9 years), Dartmouth College in New Hampshire (3 years), Talladega College (Alabama). Brother Ah is a performer, educator, lecturer, composer and arranger both in Western and non-Western traditions. He has composed and directed numerous extended works including “Ode to Creation”, The Forces of Nature” and “Tribute to the Ancestors”. Brother Ah, as a French horniest, has played and recorded with musical greats including, but not limited to, Thelonius Monk, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, McCoy Tyner, Freddie Hubbard, Sun Ra, Dizzy Gillespie, Eric Dolphy, Max Roach, John Lewis, to name a few. His classical performances include the New York Metropolitan Opera (stage band), Radio City Music Hall Orchestra; symphony orchestras in Vienna, Austria, West Germany and Broadway Theatre orchestras. He studied at the Manhattan School of Music in New York City, the Vienna State Academy in Vienna, Austria, and he is a graduate of Howard University in Washington, DC. This is Africa World Now Project…I am James Pope. [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; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!] Enjoy the program…

Image: Monument to the Maroon, Alberto Lescay, in El Cobre, Santiago de Cuba, taken June 2019; https://albertolescay.com/ It must be said, we have entered the most aggressive phase of European modernity's disintegration. One that has been built upon decades of exploitation—human and natural. This may seem to be a very strong statement. Some may even suggest that it is an overstatement. It is neither. It is not based on speculation or opinion. The map of human history, the warnings of anti-racist, anti-racial capitalist, environmentalists, antiwar thinkers, advocates, activists have predicted this moment. Octavia Butler, Martin Delany, Ngugi, write and wrote about this. Fanon, Cabral, Biko, Armah, Gyekye, Du Bois, the Boggs, the Jacksons, Baraka theorized this moment. Coltrane, Coleman attempted to play us toward another direction. Simone, Lincoln, Holiday, provided a way to understand and see beyond this moment. It is our collective responsibility to ensure that we utilize this space, this moment of fracturing to create something new. We have been given the tools; our ancestors gave us the map. Let us read it together. To reformulate a black studies within the epistemic and philosophical architecture that is inadequate to properly engage its trajectory and call it new, is a contradiction of the highest order. Today, we will explore the contradictory musings of this new black studies...with Dr. Corey Walker. Corey D. B. Walker is the Wake Forest Professor of the Humanities at Wake Forest University. He is the author of A Noble Fight: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America (University of Illinois Press), editor of Community Wealth Building and the Reconstruction of American Democracy: Can We Make American Democracy Work? (Edward Elgar Publishing), editor of the special issue of the journal Political Theology on “Theology and Democratic Futures,” and associate editor of the award-winning SAGE Encyclopedia of Identity. He has also published over sixty articles, essays, book chapters and reviews appearing in a wide range of scholarly journals and co-directed and co-produced the documentary film fifeville with acclaimed artist and filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson. He has held faculty and academic leadership positions at Brown University, University of Virginia, Virginia Union University, and Winston-Salem State University and visiting faculty appointments at Friedrich-Schiller Universität Jena, Union Presbyterian Seminary, and University of Richmond. 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; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

Image: ODO NNYEW FIE KWAN, "Love never loses its way home" Kahlil Gibran, writing in the 1921, The Prophet presents us with a serious meditation on love: Gibran writes: “Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself. Love possesses not nor would it be possessed; For love is sufficient unto love” (The Prophet, 1921). Our great ancestor, Toni Morrison writing Beloved in 1977, provides an even more clear meditation on love… Morrison writes: “Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all” (Beloved, 1977). Love, as a praxis, a concept and practice, requires serious deliberation, specifically, in the context of relationships, interactions, and black family stability. As love is often the platform, or base, upon which family units are built. It is also the platform upon which knowledge systems rooted in generative human progress and spirituality are built. When broaching a conversation such as this, it spurs great, and varying debate on the fundamental meanings of love, relationships, and family. Understandably so because they impact every aspect of our being. Yet, a cursory study suggests that every philosophy of life, religion and/or spiritual system understand that love is defined as unconditional, as it is rooted in things seen and unseen. It is the root of all life—biological, spiritual, the life of the mind…and is essential to its proliferation and evolution. The most important experiences we will have in our journey through this material reality are directly related to the relationships and interactions we create, nurture, and evolve. Thus, the primary task in our efforts to create, nurture and evolve, is rooted in balancing our individual and collective philosophies of life. [a task that is really the fulcrum upon which relationship and/or interactions survive the various stressors within which they form]. This brings us to today's conversation. I would like to be clear; it is not an attempt to provide definitive answers. It is not a claim of right or wrong, promoting one perspective over another. It is an attempt to disrupt normative assumptions about one of the most important aspects of our human existence: love, relationships, interactions, and marital stability, in our case the Black family. Our program is not an attempt to intellectualize and disregard the emotional, psychological, spiritual, physical components of love, relationships, interactions, and stability. It attempts to provide a platform that can provide help in understanding and balancing these, at times, destabilizing factors, molding them into lasting connections…in this world and beyond… It is an attempt to help us find forever! In this regard, we bring you a recent conversation I had with Dr. Antonius Skipper. Antonius Skipper, PhD [LSU] is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at Winston-Salem State University. Dr. Skipper maintains an active research agenda that explores the social, medical, and familial experiences of African Americans. He qualitatively explores factors that contribute to the stability and resilience in African American families. He is widely published on issues such as, religion as a source of coping and resilience for older African Americans, religiosity and health, marital stability in strong African American couples, and generative fathering for Black men. 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; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! Enjoy the program!

[Originally produced in 2017] William Patterson, a leader of the Communist Party USA, was an eminent civil rights attorney who spearheaded defense of the Scottsboro Nine, Black youth in Alabama framed on phony rape charges in 1932. Patterson was a radical visionary who understood that African world struggle for freedom has in essence a struggle for human rights. Not human rights as practiced and theorized from a racialized, elitist Westernized perspective, but from a holistic, communal position. In this regard, Patterson, much like Sylvia Wynter, seeks to restore to our conception of human life the framework of a direction, a telos. In the mid 1930's Patterson went to Cuba to set up the Cuban International Labor Defense and to organize support for those fighting the dictatorship of Batista. In 1951, We Charge Genocide: the Crime of Government, a petition on behalf of African descended persons in the United States charging the U.S. government with the crime of genocide was published by the Civil Rights Congress and was presented to the United Nations General Assembly in Paris by Patterson and to the United Nations Secretariat in New York by Paul Robeson. For this act, Patterson was charged with contempt of Congress because he refused to divulge the names of contributors to the Civil Rights Congress and its bail fund as well as the names of the organizations to which he belonged. Patterson served ninety days in the Federal House of Detention in New York and in the Federal Penitentiary at Danbury, Connecticut on contempt charges in 1954-55. In May of 1969, he joined the defense team of attorneys for Huey P. Newton of the Black Panther Party. He served as a trustee of the Angela Davis Legal Defense Fund and of the National Legal Defense fund. Taking a moment to impress upon you the deep visionary perspective and impact of the We Charge Genocide petition, on preparing and submitting, Patterson stated: “To me, it seemed clear that the Charter and Conventions of the UN had to be made the property of Black America…It could be made the instrumentality through which the ‘Negro Question' could be lifted to its highest dimension.” Today, we will listen to Gerald Horne reflect on the life and work of William Patterson, through a discuss of his book, which was published by University of Illinois Press and released Oct 2013, titled Black Revolutionary: William Patterson and the Globalization of the African American Freedom Struggle. Gerald Horne is the John and Rebecca Moores Professor of History at the University of Houston. After Dr. Horne, we turn our attention to the situation and conditions of African Migrants in Libya. Joining us for this discussion is Mwiza Munthali, executive producer, human rights activist, and international journalist who recently caught up with Nunu Kidane. Ms. Nunu Kidane is the Director of Priority Africa Network and editor of AfricaMoves: A Pan African Migration Platform which hosts regular consultations on migration policy around Africa and the diaspora. Ms. Kidane is founder and current steering committee member of the Pan African Network in Defense of Migrants' Rights (PANiDMR) and the Black Immigration Network (BIN). In 2012, Nunu Kidane received award from the White House as "Champion of Change" for work with African diaspora communities. 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.

I would like to be clear at the outset: the question of the survival of black colleges and universities is actually a very problematic inquiry… It highlights the internalization of racialized ideological propensities, as this question is debated primarily by folk within the black community. The colonized ideological impulses that drive the philosophy of education as it relates to Africana peoples filter into and arrest the imagination of communities who attach to survivalist projects that suggest the only way out is to be cogs in a machine designed to overwork, underpay, and discard its human remains… The ancient practices rooted in Africana peoples congregating in common space [whether forced or voluntarily] has produced much of the world most innovative thought and practices, that range across all disciplines. In short, #HBCUsWork... This is despite working within constrains that if one simply scratches the surface of explanations, are due to manufactured budget and other non-monetary constraints. This is all wrapped within another layer of insidious structures run by, quite frankly, a comprador class of managerial black elite [and want to be elite] who have been trained in the best traditions of plantation philosophical practices that arrest the radical imagination if its students and faculty who are invested in nurturing a critical consciousness... If allowed the unfettered freedom to develop its most potent substance, the intellectual capital of some of the world's most brilliant minds, that are fed by the river of genealogies that run through the ancestral and historical memories of its students—fragments of memories of Library of Alexandria, the temple complexes throughout Kemet and Nubia… The questions posed by Du Bois that challenges black institutions delivered in various speeches from 1906, The Hampton Idea to his 1960, Whither Now and Why should serve as the frame through which we look, through which we will look today… Black institutions must deal with questions around radical imagination, intellectual capital moving away from the fallacy of attainting access to the plantation capital that PWIs are built upon, HBCUs will never be players in this game... HBCUs must substantively align with African institutions, rooting a praxis in constant decolonization and advancement of knowledge systems. We must move the intellectual boundaries of HBCU knowledge production beyond limited and arrested expectations… The danger and delusion of black [brown and poor] folk as Du Bois warned is the substance upon which institutions have inculcated in the structures that educate generations of students is summed up in one question parents ask, but reality perpetuate the colonizing ideological impulses that drive the philosophy of education as it relates to Africana peoples around the world: what are you going to do what that degree in Africana Studies? Art? History? Literature? Or they demand that you go to school and get a job… We no longer live in that space. The global racial capitalist system does not have enough room to accommodate all peoples clamoring for jobs… The question still stands, to which we are ancestrally and historically bond to answer: Whither Now and Why? Today, Dr. Josh Myers will explore these themes and more in a talk he gave at Winston Salem University centered around the recent publication of his: We Are Worth Fighting ForA History of the Howard University Student Protest of 1989. He engaged this history in relationship to the form and function of HBCUs. 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; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!