Shows
Africa World Now ProjectKamau Rashid on Jacob H. Carruthers & an restoration of an african worldviewIn the introduction of his recently published, Jacob H Carruthers and the Restoration of An African Worldview: Finding Our Way through the Desert, Kamau Rashid [2024] posits that: “One of the central concerns evident in the scholarship of Jacob H. Carruthers was the intellectual foundations of the modern world. Although he acknowledged the importance of studying systems of oppression, he argued that such structures rested upon the foundation of Western thought, forms of knowledge that facilitated the formation of our most current systems of domination. In addition, these forms of knowledge also serve the primary function to maintain a particular world or...
2024-11-201h 33
Africa World Now Projectland food & freedom w/ Georie BryantThe collectively generative nature inherent in the interdependent relationship between technology, the communal means of production and distribution and innovative physical and creative intellectual work is distracted and co/opted by the need to extract the value of this relationship as structured from the capitalist logic of labor. The sole purpose of this is to maintain an aggressive and exclusionary accumulation of capital in the hands of a few. The creative and inquisitive nature of human social and cultural capacities feed the extractive forces of capitalism. The necessity to disembody knowledge production and sever the symbiotic relationship between all sentient...
2024-09-181h 34
Africa World Now ProjectADIFF DC Aug. 2, 2024 on Latino Media Collective @ WPFWADIFF DC Aug. 2, 2024 on Latino Media Collective @ WPFW ADIFF DC 2024 film NEGRITA is featured on WPFW'S Latino Media Collective. Guests include Magdalena Albizu the director and producer of NEGRITA and Eddie Bailey producer and editor of NEGRITA and CEO of the Savoy Media Group. NEGRITA is a documentary about the Afro-Latina identity and experience in the United States. In their own words, empowered, self-affirming educated Afro-Latinas, located around the United States, share their experiences of living with a changing, often contested identity in a racialized society and how it affects their personal and professional lives. Originally broadcast on WPFW 89.3FM...
2024-08-2649 min
Africa World Now ProjectADIFF DC Aug. 1, 2024 on #UMustLearn @ WPFWADIFF DC Aug. 1, 2024 on #UMustLearn @ WPFW ADIFF DC 2024 film ONE PERSON, ONE VOTE? is featured on WPFW'S We The People guest Maximina Juson the director of ONE PERSON, ONE VOTE? ONE PERSON, ONE VOTE?--Throughout American history, the Electoral College has dramatically impacted American politics and society, particularly with respect to vote erasure of the minority party vote. Featuring commentary by scholars Dr. Jelani Cobb, Dr. Carol Anderson, and Dr. Paul Finkelman, cameo performances by Kelly McCreary, Boise Holmes, Tyee Tilghman, Veralyn Jones, Peter Jerrod Macon and stunning animation by Pierre Bennu. Originally broadcast on WPFW 89.3FM, Washington, DC. Tune...
2024-08-2620 min
Africa World Now ProjectADIFF DC Jul. 31, 2024 on We The People @ WPFWADIFF DC Jul. 31, 2024 on We The People @ WPFW ADIFF DC 2024 film THE WALL STREET BOY, KIPKEMBOI is featured on WPFW'S We The People. Guests include Charles Uwagbai the director of THE WALL STREET BOY, KIPKEMBOI and Diarah N'Dow Spech Co-Founder and Co-Director of African Diaspora International Film Festival. THE WALL STREET BOY, KIPKEMBOI--With his life in jeopardy and jail almost a certainty, one question remains, how could a farm boy bring down the global financial system and how far is the international world order willing to go to silence his story? The Wall Street Boy, Kipkemboi tells the story of...
2024-08-2648 min
Africa World Now ProjectADIFF DC Jul. 30, 2024 on Voices with Vision @ WPFWADIFF DC Jul. 30, 2024 on Voices with Vision @ WPFW ADIFF DC 2024 film CLAUDE MCKAY: HARLEM TO MARSEILLE is featured on WPFW'S Voices with Vision. Guests include Matthieu Verdeil the director of CLAUDE MCKAY: HARLEM TO MARSEILLE and Diarah N'Dow Spech Co-Founder and Co-Director of African Diaspora International Film Festival. CLAUDE MCKAY: HARLEM TO MARSEILLE--Rebellious figure of the Harlem Renaissance, precursor of literature and of the black cause, this unclassifiable author wandered for more than 10 years in Europe, frequenting the artistic and political avant-gardes. Originally broadcast on WPFW 89.3FM, Washington, DC. Tune into Voices with Vision live on WPFW 89.3 FM in the...
2024-08-2634 min
Africa World Now Projectechoes of FESTAC '77 w/ Bro Abdul AlkalimatThe use of forum, colloquium, and festivals to center African/a intellectual creative cultural production flows rhythmically alongside the long tradition of Pan-African tendencies. This historical continuity and our duty to move within its legacy is a project that the International Colloquium at the International Black Theatre Festival, that we [AWNP collective] have the pleasure to coordinate, is the explicit dictum that guides it creation. Furthering our work in this Pan-African genealogy is intentional. Our theme this year was titled: ‘Echoes of FESTAC ’77’. The primary objectives of FESTAC ’77 was to “provide a forum for the focusing of attention on the enormous r...
2024-08-081h 04
Africa World Now Projectthe political praxis of Jamil Abdullah al-AminOn August 31, 1967, several thousand delegates gathered at the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago for the opening rally of the National Conference for New Politics (NCNP) convention. This event was an ambitious attempt to develop a broad coalition of over 200 different organizations, that included the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Students for a Democratic Society, the Socialist Workers Party, and the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. According to Arun Kundnani [2023] in ‘The New Malcolm X’: Who was Jamil Al-Amin – The Forgotten Radical of the Civil Rights Movement?, “On the opening night, Dr. King outlined an anti-capitalist politics that had become e...
2024-07-241h 48
Africa World Now Projectthe sociopolitical thought of General Baker, DRUM & The League Of Revolutionary Black WorkersToday, we will listen to General Baker from a 2010 talk he gave at the U.S. Social Forum held in Detroit where he maps the history of struggle in Detroit, the formation of radical workers movements, and the legacies of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Born in Detroit, Michigan, on September 6, 1941, right after his family had moved north from Augusta, Georgia. General Baker’s father worked for Midland Steel in the 1940s, and later in a job with Chrysler. The Baker family settled in a home in Southwest Detroit. Gen Baker grew up in a union household, and often at...
2024-07-061h 12
Africa World Now Projectthe time of the Black radical traditionre/posting from our archive ... from 7+ years ago. a lot to grasp here!
2024-06-1857 min
Africa World Now Projectthe role of historical consciousness + global student movements w/ Mukasa Dada & Obi Egbuna JrThis discussion features Mukasa Dada and Obi Egbuna Jr. We focus on contemporary struggles of youth and student movements, globally. With a focus on the ongoing fight for Black liberation and the need for solidarity across different oppressed groups. In order to accurately understand the potentialities of the moment, the development and maintenance of a historical consciousness alongside organizing efforts that challenge imperialism, neo-colonialism, and police brutality through direct action and community engagement are presented for discussion.
2024-06-061h 19
Africa World Now Projectrace & revolution in Cuba: an Afro Cuban working class perspective w/ Pedro Pérez SarduyBlack working-class contributions to the Cuban revolution are immense, yet somehow often neglected in discourses around revolutionary Cuba. The long history of African resistance and cultural contributions to Cuban society, which has been intricately connected to global Black freedom movements has been in rhythmic continuity til present day. The continuities are clear and important on many levels – that is on the level of internal, as confronting internal contradictions specifically the necessity to fight the colonially structured vestiges of racism in Cuban society is an added terrain of struggle. As well as external, the constant assault on the Cuban peoples by U...
2024-04-201h 26
Africa World Now Projectthinking through CLR James w/ Matthew Quest Pt. IIIMatthew Quest in CLR James and George Padmore: Hidden Disputes in The Black Radical Tradition, examines the collaboration between James and George Padmore since their partnership within the International African Service Bureau in the 1930s. Despite their joint activism in Pan-African affairs, political rifts emerged on democracy, socialism, and revolutionary strategy. Quest specifically explores James’ portrayal of Padmore to highlight the political tensions underlying their friendship. James’ and Padmore’s different perspectives on anti-imperialism reveal hidden disputes in the Black radical tradition, disputes that promoted evolution in thought and practice that must be taken up today. CLR, the elder, was not al...
2024-03-121h 18
Africa World Now Projectthinking through CLR James w/ Matthew Quest Pt. IIAccording to Renault in Toward a Counter-Genealogy of Race: On CLR James, it is argued that James always stressed the fundamental importance of the notion of class struggle, and closely followed developments in revolutionary working-class struggles in Europe and the United States. “This did not prevent him, however, from analyzing and taking part in movements for decolonization: In 1938, he authored the famous history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins; in the 1940s, he was seen as a specialist on the “Negro Question” within North American Trotskyist movements; he also had ties to African independence leaders – Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, and late...
2024-03-1250 min
Africa World Now Projectthinking through CLR James w/ Matthew Quest Pt. IIn an article for Insurgent Notes, Matthew Quest asks, What Type of Historian Was CLR James? CLR James, native of Trinidad, was a historian with a speculative philosophy of history. He brought these methods to his narrative of Haiti in The Black Jacobins (1938), and later in his Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (1977). James was influenced by historians of the French Revolution, while his approach was shaped by Leon Trotsky’s A History of the Russian Revolution, Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, and the Edwardian radicals GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, both literary men who wrote polemical histories sympathetic to t...
2024-03-0855 min
Africa World Now ProjectPt III - applying Malcolm XImage: Fran Beal Thank you for tapping into Reflections on Malcolm X through the … 1990 Malcolm X: Radical Tradition and a Legacy of Struggle conference … this is the final installment, Pt. III – Applying Malcolm In this series, Africa World Now Project is sharing some of the sessions from this conference in an effort to engender serious engagement, in this very moment, a moment where it is essential to be intentional with one’s political practice with Malcolm. Not in the narrow confines of him as an individual or pigeonhole him to moments and soundbites, but to identify the tradition that produced Malcolm...
2024-01-041h 36
Africa World Now ProjectPt II - Black workers & el Hajj Malik el ShabazzThank you for tapping into Reflections on Malcolm X through the … 1990 Malcolm X: Radical Tradition and a Legacy of Struggle conference … this is Pt. II - Black Workers & Malcolm X In this series, Africa World Now Project is sharing some of the sessions from this conference in an effort to engender serious engagement, in this very moment, a moment where it is essential to be intentional with one’s political practice with Malcolm. Not in the narrow confines of him as an individual or pigeonhole him to moments and soundbites, but to identify the tradition that produced Malcolm as a nexus...
2024-01-0456 min
Africa World Now ProjectPt I – contextualizing el Hajj Malik el ShabazzIn November 1990 [1-4], more than 3,000 people from 25 countries attended the Malcolm X: Radical Tradition and a Legacy of Struggle conference held in New York City. More than 100 speakers led 24 sessions that deeply explored, contextualized, and situated El Hajj Malik El Shabazz in the genealogy of Black radical internationalism as a Pan Africanist. There is an argument that can be made that El Haj Mailk El Shabazz is an archetype of what I have argued elsewhere as a critical Africana human rights consciousness. This praxis [the intellectual production and the Black radical and revolutionary practice that it produces, is in fact...
2024-01-031h 52
Africa World Now ProjectAWNP Tribute - Dr. John Henrik Clarke & Cornel West - the politics of assimilation v. nationalismForm the archives [2017]! Enjoy.
2024-01-0154 min
Africa World Now ProjectPt III - Terrains Of Struggle Continuities In Freedom Dreams [a Radio Documentary]Pt. III - Poetics of Revolution: Autonomy, Land, Visions of Freedom & the Kurdish Freedom struggle [a discussion of 1979 struggle] Thank you for listening to Terrains of Struggle: continuities in freedom dreams [a mini radio documentary] that was designed to explore possibilities; radical possibilities and how they become material. How they become alive [brought to life] through resistance – rooted in the assertion of a people’s collective humanity. And how this process is transmitted in time [history] and across space [geographies]. More importantly, we were interested in what can they tell us about ourselves, each other and our relationship with land as a...
2023-12-181h 06Africa World Now ProjectPt II - Terrains Of Struggle Continuities In Freedom Dreams [a Radio Documentary]Pt. II - A luta continua, vitória é certa: Conceptions of Autonomy, the Black Panthers & Zapatista Check out Pt. III. Thank you for listening to Terrains of Struggle: continuities in freedom dreams [a mini radio documentary] that was designed to explore possibilities; radical possibilities and how they become material. How they become alive [brought to life] through resistance – rooted in the assertion of a people’s collective humanity. And how this process is transmitted in time [history] and across space [geographies]. More importantly, we were interested in what can they tell us about ourselves, each other and our relationship with land a...
2023-12-182h 00Africa World Now ProjectPt I - Terrains Of Struggle Continuities In Freedom Dreams [a Radio Documentary]Part I - Radical Considerations & Revolutionary Possibilities: Towards a Black University in the 21st century Check out Pt. II. Thank you for listening to Terrains of Struggle: continuities in freedom dreams [a mini radio documentary] that was designed to explore possibilities; radical possibilities and how they become material. How they become alive [brought to life] through resistance – rooted in the assertion of a people’s collective humanity. And how this process is transmitted in time [history] and across space [geographies]. More importantly, we were interested in what can they tell us about ourselves, each other and our relationship with land as a...
2023-12-1859 min
Africa World Now ProjectBlack Study, as a critique of knowledge & power w/ Josh MyersKamau Rashid writing in Jacob H. Carruthers and the African-Centered Discourse on Knowledge, Worldview, and Power posits that “whether we are interrogating the conceptual imperatives of the state or capital, the mandates of school curriculum, or even the policy directives of white supremacy and the worldview orientations that it seeks to impose, we are still speaking of knowledge, its social construction, and the broader social milieu in which it occurs.” Accordingly, “when considered from the state's perspective education must inevitably entail notions of legitimate knowledge. However, what is hidden within the language of legitimacy is the political-economy of hegemony. The notion...
2023-12-061h 53
Africa World Now Projectmeditations on struggle & organizing w/ Frank ChapmanWe are in conversation with Frank Chapman, organizer & movement architect. The anchoring poles in this conversation revolve around the formation of National Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression, movement intellectuals and their development and the importance of struggle. What you will hear over the next hour are the words, ideas, reflections, and meditations by one of our important freedom fighters! Frank Chapman is a former political prisoner, long-time organizer, radical movement architect and former member of the Communist Party. He is the educational director and field secretary at the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (CAARPR) and a leader in...
2023-11-011h 35
Africa World Now ProjectFrank Chapman on PalestineClip from recent conversation .... full conversation coming soon!
2023-10-2612 min
Africa World Now Projectthe Black worker, the strike, & the UAWIn, The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the U.S., James posit that it is Black workers and the Black working-class that was central and unique in the fight against capitalism. Specifically, James outlined the following: We say, number 1, that the Negro struggle, the independent Negro struggle, has a vitality and a validity of its own; that it has deep historic roots in the past of America and in present struggles; it has an organic political perspective, along which it is traveling, to one degree or another, and everything shows that at the present time it is traveling...
2023-09-291h 15
Africa World Now ProjectProfessor Hakim Adi on the attacks on Black history in the U.K. [& Globally]Support Now ...: ****https://www.historymatters.online/save-mres-campaign**** Walter Rodney once wrote in African History in the Service of the Black Liberation, that “African history must be seen as very intimately linked to the contemporary struggle of black people. One must not set up any false distinctions between reflection and action. We are just another facet of the ongoing revolution. This is not theory. It is a fact that black people everywhere, in Africa and in the Western world, are already on the march. So nobody who wants to be relevant to that situation can afford to withdraw and decide that he...
2023-09-141h 26
Africa World Now Projectthe life of Madie Hall Xuma w/ Professor Wanda A HendricksDr. Hendricks writes in The Life of Madie Hall Xuma: Black Women’s Global Activism During Jim Crow & Apartheid that “when the Society for the Study of Afro-American History in Winston Salem, Forsyth County, North Carolina, issued a call in June 1994 for community assistance with research and memorabilia for a 1995 historical calendar on Black women “who made distinctive contributions to the community between the early 1900s through 1959.” Madie Beatrice Hall Xuma made the list of an impressive group of women. Nearly a decade later, her name also appeared in the Wilson (NC) Daily Times as an educational tool for kindergarten through...
2023-08-021h 31
Africa World Now ProjectBen Fletcher + the IWW w/ Peter ColeThe IWW was born in 1905. On January 2, 1905, several dozen people identifying as “industrial unionists” met in Chicago and issued a call to form a new labor union. That June several hundred people belonging to more than 40 unions and radical organizations returned to Chicago, where they founded the Industrial Workers of the World [Wobblies of the World: A Global History, 3]. On July 8, attendees adopted the now-legendary Preamble to the IWW’s Constitution, which boldly and famously declared: The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. Clearly, the IWW believed in class struggle and the need for a proletarian revolu...
2023-07-261h 07
Africa World Now ProjectOf Hesitance - W.E.B Du Bois [Josh Myers - Of Black Study] w/ Nathalie Frédéric Pierre"“We are surrounded. We who are in the academy, looking for community, like June Jordan and her students in 1969, are still surrounded. We have also made it inside the gate, but we are now cornered. This place, the university, is the destination, they said. We were told that we had to be inside or else. And now that we are here, they lie to us. Just as they lied to Jordan’s students. Just as they lied to the Black professors they hired when they demanded teachers less likely to lie. Just as they lied to the Black teachers who went...
2023-07-061h 05
Africa World Now Projecton SudanToday we will hear from Sudanese diasporan activists who are maintaining vital attention on the conflict which has been taking place in Sudan since April 15. The human cost of this current iteration of conflict is immeasurable from those observing from a far, but very measurable to those impacted directly, whether in Sudan or in the Diaspora. It is vital we direct our empathy into action. Our compassion into measured and intentional activities that are led by those impacted, in country as well as in the Sudanese diaspora. The interconnectedness of this conflict impacts the entire African world, not just segments...
2023-06-211h 00
Africa World Now Projectthe continuities of African liberation day w/ Obi Egbuna JrDelegates at the First Conference of Independent African States, hosted by Dr. Kwame Nkrumah in Accra, in 1958, called for an “African Freedom Day” to be held on April 15 to honor those who had contributed to the anti-colonial struggle. Later in 1963, with the founding of the Organization of African Unity in Addis Ababa, African Freedom Day became African Liberation Day. At the founding of the OAU, Kwame Nkrumah stood before 31 heads of African states and declared: “[T]he struggle against colonialism does not end with the attainment of national independence. Independence is only the prelude to a new and more involved strugg...
2023-06-0157 min
Africa World Now Projectrespond/reactthis #thinkingblackoutloud session is from 2017 ... it was a meditation on the necessity of thinking through the dialectical processes inherent in the react/respond relationship [shout out to The Fifth Dynasty] . it is our consistent call to think beyond struggle, as we know what we are struggling against. we must simultaneously understand what we are struggling for. it's a prompt to find guidance in the world we see in art. we hear in music. we taste in our favorite foods. to see the beauty in struggle. and the beauty that comes out of struggle. the world in spaces between spaces. the...
2023-04-1616 min
Africa World Now Projectmilitant memory & the walking archive w/ Sónia Vaz BorgesImage: Amélia Araújo recording the works of the First National Popular Assembly of Guinea-Bissau for Rádio Libertação, in the liberated region of Madina de Boé [available: http://casacomum.org/cc/visualizador?pasta=05247.000.152] In this program, militant memory & the walking archive w/ Sónia Vaz Borges, we move through her work on the PAIGC’s struggle for liberation and militant education, paying attention to the contours of thought, the edges where questions were formed that guide us to push beyond. Sónia Vaz Borges [https://www.soniavazborges.com/] is a militant interdisciplinary historian and long-time social and political...
2023-03-291h 11
Africa World Now Projectsouthern Africa liberation movements w/ Prexy Nesbitt - Pt. 1 & Samora MachelImage: “Apartheid No.”, Faustino Pérez, 1977 [Organisation in Solidarity with the People of Africa, Asia and Latin America (OSPAAAL)] Reflecting on the THE IDEOLOGICAL TENDENCIES AND POLITICAL PRE-DISPOSITIONS OF THE BLACK 'LEFT' IN AND AROUND THE ANTI-APARTHEID AND AFRICAN SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT IN THE 1970'S AND 8O'S: SOME THOUGHTS & NOTES, Prexy Nesbitt suggests that: “There were certain political moments and certain African liberation movements “that highlighted the tendencies and orientations more than the normal ups and downs of African solidarity work. Three of those moments were: 1) the 1974 Sixth Pan Africanist Congress and decisions taken as to who would be invited to it and wh...
2023-03-0957 min
Africa World Now ProjectBlack radicalism, mutual comradeship & Black Scare/Red Scare w/ Charisse Burden-StellyIn Modern U.S. Racial Capitalism: Some Theoretical Insights, Burden-Stelly [https://www.charisseburdenstelly.com/] asserts that modern U.S. racial capitalism is a racially hierarchical political economy constituting war and militarism, imperialist accumulation, expropriation by domination, and labor superexploitation.” For Dr. CBS, “The racial specifically refers to Blackness, defined as African descendants’ relationship to the capitalist mode of production—their structural location—and the condition, status, and material realities emanating therefrom. It is out of this structural location that the irresolvable contradiction of value minus worth arises. Dr. CBS further unpacks Blackness and its relational value to capital by arguing that it is...
2022-12-211h 00
Africa World Now Projectthinking through & beyond the limit/s of catastrophe w/ Bedour AlagraaBedour Alagraa [https://www.bedouralagraa.com/] argues that “the word ‘catastrophe’ as an anchor for understanding our earth’s ecology has yet to account for the manner in which the catastrophic is ongoing, yet still tied to an ‘original’ detonation of sorts. A prompt given to us by Kamau Brathwaite. And so, the “enigma of catastrophe as a word, as a concept, lies in this tension—that is, between a desire to evade the originary Event in favor of the repetition, while also recognizing the Event as it were.” It is in following Brathwaite’s insistence on both the ongoing presence of an origi...
2022-12-141h 13
Africa World Now ProjectMaurice Jackson On Esther Cooper JacksonIt is without hyperbole to suggest that Esther Cooper Jackson was one of the most important organizers, thinkers, writers in the history of world broadly, the Africana world specifically for over eight (8) decades [if start with SYNC]. Her intellectual contributions, her insight/foresight, her writing, her ability to organize organizers, her kindness, her love for and hope in Black people, her modeling of radical care for intentionally extended community and her family, her vision to see beyond the parameters of now - the moment - all are foundational to what Robin DG Kelley calls ‘freedom dreams’. As well as the clea...
2022-11-121h 20
Africa World Now ProjectCedric Robinson & the precepts of Black StudiesBlack life, that is, the range of thought and behavior of African/a peoples has been the foundation upon which the modern world was built; it, too, has been the foundation upon which the modern world centers its systems and institutions of distain … often collapsing anything that is seen to be other … into its limited definitions of Blackness. For many of us, Black life can primarily be understood as an articulation of marronage; a resistance to the dialectical processes of existing and not existing in the warped imagination of whiteness. To understand the complexities and simplicities of Black life, to see...
2022-11-101h 02
Africa World Now Project| terrains of struggle | poetics of revolution: visions of freedom & the Kurdish freedom struggle**Note: this is a segment of a [4-hr] mini-radio documentary [titled: terrains of struggle: continuities in freedom dreams] we put together, September 2022 ... full program available via link in bio]** Land is an essential component of liberation. And “The value of culture as an element of resistance to foreign domination lies in the fact that culture is the vigorous manifestation on the ideological or idealist plane of the physical and historical reality of the society that is dominated or to be dominated. Culture is simultaneously the fruit of a people’s history and a determinant of history, by the positive or nega...
2022-10-051h 44
Africa World Now Projectevolutions in the Black freedom movement w/ Ashanti Omowali AlstonWriting in ‘Beyond Nationalism, But Not Without it’, Ashanti Alston frames his thoughts in the following epigraph by Audre Lorde: “…we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.” Moving through Ashanti’s intentional and critical engagement with anarchism, he situates the sociopolitical worldview in an African c...
2022-09-221h 24
Africa World Now ProjectKumina Queen w/ Nyasha LaingAccording to Kamau Brathwaite, ‘Kumina is the most African of the [cultural expressions] to be found in Jamaica, with negligible European or Christian influence. Linguistics evidence cites the Kongo as a specific ethnic source for the ‘language’ and possibly the music of kumina. Recounting a personal experience with Imogene Kennedy, known as Queenie, who was a queen and tradition bearer of Kumina, James Early in his article, The ‘Re-communalization’ of a Jamaican Kumina Drum, highlights Queenie’s entrance into the world of the Kumina religion, as documented in Olive Lewin’s book, Rock It Come Over: The Folk Music of Jamaica, Queen...
2022-09-1555 min
Africa World Now ProjectThe Future Of Black Studies w/ Abdul AlkalimatAs Professor Alkalimat provides a few opening thoughts to his recently published, The Future of Black Studies, he writes “The future we need is the opposite of dystopia. We need a positive future. To understand the struggles of Black people, and how Black people have been able to celebrate life even under harsh conditions, we have to seek and evaluate the positive influence of Black Studies. Specifically, Black Studies prepares a diagnosis of the present-past, while seeking a perspective and policies to improve the quality of life in the present-future. This is a recognition that the past and the future ar...
2022-09-081h 43
Africa World Now ProjectAfrica & food security/insecurity in an age of planetary crisisIn a 2015 article titled, Decolonizing Our minds and Our Lands: Reviving Seeds, Culture and African Strength, Gathuru Mburu writes that: “Recolonization is happening. There is a second scramble, not just in Africa, but across the global South. Corporations started it. We need to name and shame these corporations - Monsanto, Syngenta, Cargill, and the program promoting them, AGRA [A Green Revolution for Africa] - to take this battle to the next level. The wars [of conquest of Africa] have not actually ended - the artillery has just transformed into a different type against us farmers today. All of us are fi...
2022-09-011h 19
Africa World Now ProjectCAUSE & the Black radical traditionThe histories of Black working-class struggle, specifically in the South are rooted in radical methodologies that are grounded in the material conditions that are structured by the realities set in racial capitalist logic. Radical Black labor movements are an essential manifestation of the Black liberation struggle. Joe William Trotter, Jr in 𝘞𝘰𝘳𝘬𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘰𝘯 𝘈𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘷𝘢𝘭: 𝘉𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘬 𝘓𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘳 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘔𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘧 𝘈𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘢, argues that black workers are critical to any discussion of the nation’s productivity, politics, and the future of work in today’s global economy. Yet, too often, popular, journalistic, public policy, and academic analysis treat the black poor and working class as consumers rather than producers, as takers rather than givers, and as liabilities rather than assets” [xv]. Dominant narratives that play out in mainstream media on questions around d...
2022-08-2459 min
Africa World Now ProjectAfrica, the university & the politics of knowledge production w/ Paul ZelezaGloria Emeagwali writes in Africa and the Academy: Challenging Hegemonic Discourses on Africa, that “colonialism was a system of administration and a process of exploitation geared towards creating capitalist relations and the economic and sociological aggrandizement of the colonizer through covert and overt psychological, economic, and social mechanisms. Accordingly, this necessitated the subordination of knowledge systems and distorted the epistemologies of the colonized African to the logic and dynamics of colonial production systems and hierarchies” [12]. The institution that this process of exploitation finds fertile ground to proliferate in its most articulate expression of contradictions, is in the academy, the university. Glor...
2022-06-231h 11
Africa World Now Projecta conversation w/ Ọnuọra AbụahNormally, we provide an introduction that attempts to situate or appropriately orient our conversations … however, there are those instances where the conversations have their way of orienting themselves … creating paths to push us to seek more information or expand and further strengthen paths that we have started … What we will present today, is one of those conversations that take on a life of its own … the paths pushing us to think beyond the limits of now form organically. Today, we are pleased to have filmmaker Ọnuọra Abụah of AEA films back with us to talk about their recent work. We situa...
2022-06-091h 26
Africa World Now Projectreflections on IRR50 w/ Colin PrescodThis year, 2022, marks the 50th anniversary of the radical transformation of the Institute of Race Relations [IRR]. On April 18, 1972, the direction and relevance of the IRR was transformed from a policy-oriented, establishment, academic institution to an anti-racist ‘thinktank’ under the leadership of A. Sivanandan. This momentous change shifted the Institute’s focus, responding to the needs of Black people and all those affected by racism, and making direct analyses of institutionalised racism in Britain and the rest of Europe. In this program, we will explore, more deeply, the significance, meaning, and legacy of the 50th anniversary of the radical transformation of the...
2022-06-011h 47
Africa World Now Projectthe battle for the horn of Africa & the targeting of SomaliaCultivating a historical consciousness requires effort. Purpose. A desire to organize information in order to develop projects that intend to directly confront and heighten the contradictions that inform structural inequities, which have direct and indirect implications on the lived realities of every person, every community around the world. There is no debate that imperialism is a product of a by-gone era. As long as racial capitalism is the modus operandi of global interaction, the desire to exploit and extract natural resources and create narratives of a distinct other will live on. And there is no amount of educating on diversity...
2022-05-2559 min
Africa World Now Projectrhythms of freedom: Africa & Black internationalism w/ Tom Porter [revised & extended]From a program held earlier this year ... We invite you to tap into this program that we had earlier this year which featured a public lecture-conversation with Professor Tom Porter, where we explore the rhythms of movement through a robust conversation that examined manifestations of the global dimensions of the Black Freedom Struggle. We paid specific attention to the impact of Black classical music as an amplifying influence of the ideas and trajectory of those engaged in struggle; particularly as they organized programs of freedom rooted in a specific conceptualization of human rights; which were/are directly related to the...
2022-04-192h 01
Africa World Now Projectdialectics of liberation w/ Abdul AlkalimatAbdul Alkalimat opens, Dialectics of Liberation: The African Liberation Support Movement with this first-hand observation of the events that led up to and after the African Liberation Movement, he writes: “in just five years, ALSC [African Liberation Support Committee], which began as part of the anti-imperialist movement in support of the national liberation struggles in Africa, became the preeminent context for debates about the development of revolutionary vanguard cadre organization.” Integral to these debates were national discourses that explored the ideological parameters of theories of radical social transformation. Discourses that were part of global discourses, articulating themselves at local levels, as t...
2022-04-131h 28
Africa World Now Projectradical histories + liberation in Kenya w/ Waringa WahomeImage: Field Marshal Muthoni wa Kirima In Mau Mau & Nationhood, the editors write: “New states are often declared in the name of peoples not yet aware of their own collective existence. Their heroically unified past and manifest joint destiny have yet to be imagined for them. National imagination follows the state." The myths. The origin stories. The narratives of a real and imagined collective identity are pieced together as a product of the historical experiences of a people, who came to dominant the structures of the newly formed state. Its implementation. Its functions are guiding by a philosophical structure developed an...
2022-04-061h 01
Africa World Now ProjectSaul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman on their film Neptune Frost & other thingsArt — in all manifestations — has purpose. And that purpose is defined by those who are able to pick it up and use it. The spiritual, intellectual, and physical energies that are put into the creation of art are a reflection of the worldview of the artist — of the artist not in an individualistic sense but of the collective energies that culminate into the being that is producing the art — their ancestors, the environment, the community … the material and non-material realities. Amiri Baraka (1987) in his article, Black Art, published in the Black Scholar, suggests that “art … is an expression of life … there would be a...
2022-03-1659 min
Africa World Now ProjectRacing The Nation: towards a theory of reproductive racism w/ Sophia Siddiqui**This program is part of a collaboration between Africa World Now Project and the Institute of Race Relations and its journal of Race & Class, based in London, where we engage in transnational dialogue that intentionally disrupts dominant discourses around racial oppression. **These programs are designed to inform the ways we think about the persistent and evolutionary nature of global racial oppression in order to develop an analysis to radically and systematically address it. Sophia Siddiqui in Racing the nation: towards a theory of reproductive racism, examines the “notion of reproduction, both biological and social, in relation to new forms of po...
2022-03-0948 min
Africa World Now Projectof Black studies & Black study: the function of futurity in Africana studies w/ Josh MyersImage: IG @artxman / Manzelb@gmail.com /#artxman African/a peoples have engaged in a particular form and function of knowledge production — active knowledge production — in, around, outside and in spite of … academia for centuries. Always together. Always in community. In commons; often and always creating, intentionally and unintentionally a maroon space, an undercommons ... for more: https://medium.com/@africaworldnowproject/of-black-studies-black-study-the-function-of-futurity-in-africana-studies-514b7f1b2977 In addition to being a member of the Africa World Now Project collective, Josh Myers is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. He is the author of We Are Wo...
2022-02-091h 01
Africa World Now Projectthe role of myth & the continuities in sacred + secret histories w/ Dr. Nubia Kai & Tasneem SiddiquiImage: 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 crea...
2021-12-301h 51
Africa World Now Projectof spirit & Black liberation w/ Youssef Carter & Tasneem SiddiquiAmadou 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...
2021-11-251h 25
Africa World Now Projectthe role & continued struggle of the National Union of Eritrean WomenThe 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...
2021-10-271h 08
Africa World Now Projectmovement & memory: reflections on labor and the genealogy of resistance w/ Saladin Muhammad Pt. IISaladin 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. workin...
2021-10-131h 07
Africa World Now Projectmovement & memory: reflections on labor and the genealogy of resistance w/ Saladin Muhammad Pt. IAbdul 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 pe...
2021-10-0759 min
Africa World Now Projectmeditations on - black labor & ‘the white architects of black education’ w/ Kamau RashidLabor 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 w...
2021-09-092h 05
Africa World Now ProjectSNCC, Africa & Black Radical ImaginationThe 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 wo...
2021-09-011h 22
Africa World Now ProjectPt. 2: the role Of Black university in African/a resistance w/ Josh Myers[produced and aired, 2016...note...our production gets better post 2017... : )] 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 soci...
2021-07-2655 min
Africa World Now ProjectPt. 1: Rhodes/Fees Must Fall Movement(s) & The Role And Responsibility of Diasporic Institutions[produced and aired, 2016] 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 as...
2021-07-2655 min
Africa World Now ProjectBlack University & Black StudiesOriginally 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, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney start their analysis with this powerful qu...
2021-07-261h 00
Africa World Now Projectagainst the blockade on CubaImage: 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 tense conditions on the ground. On this same day, a...
2021-07-151h 25
Africa World Now Projectuninterrupted conversations with our eégún: thinking about the Coltranes w/ Anyabwile LoveAccording 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 – Love Supreme. Alice Coltrane, a mult...
2021-06-021h 34
Africa World Now ProjectEl Hajj Malik El Shabazz: the continuity & legacy of a critical Africana HRs consciousnessImage: 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...
2021-05-201h 31
Africa World Now ProjectBlack & Palestine w/ Ajamu Amiri Dillahunt Jr & Tasneem SiddiquiImage: 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 ti...
2021-05-171h 51
Africa World Now ProjectAyiti & the peoples movement w/ Vélina Elysée CharlierAyiti, 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 untie. 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...
2021-05-171h 00
Africa World Now ProjectHakim Adi w/ Josh Myers on Pan Africanism: A History[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...
2021-04-2859 min
Africa World Now ProjectWe Rise For Our Land & Kurt Otabenga OrdersonThe 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...
2021-04-101h 45
Africa World Now Projectrhythms, vibrations & African/a cultural production w/ OddiseeI 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 le...
2021-03-251h 18
Africa World Now ProjectDanhomé [Dahomey] & Vodun w/ filmmaker Onuora Anthony Abuah[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 a...
2021-03-241h 00
Africa World Now Projectembodied resistance: the science & continuities of African/a fighting arts w/ Kamau RashidThe 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 enga...
2021-02-251h 25
Africa World Now ProjectAfrofuturism & the Freedom PrincipleToday, we will listen to a thinking session I had with students 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...
2021-02-161h 13
Africa World Now Projectthinking about Black internationalism through Pauulu’s diaspora w/ Quito SwanImage: 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...
2021-01-071h 23
Africa World Now Projecta deep exploration of maroons w/ Dr. Nubia Kai[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 runawa...
2020-12-2154 min
Africa World Now ProjectRobert Sobukwe, Steve Biko & the Formation of the Black Consciousness Movement[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...
2020-12-0558 min
Africa World Now Projectthe Form And Function Of Islam & the Black Radical Tradition Rudolph (Bilal) Ware & Tasneem SiddiquiReligion 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. More...
2020-09-241h 51
Africa World Now ProjectHip Hop as Critical (Pan African) Consciousness Pt. 2[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 de...
2020-09-2156 min
Africa World Now ProjectThinking w/ Ella Baker w/ Zach Norris [Executive Director, Ella Baker Center for Human Rights]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. Bake...
2020-09-031h 18
Africa World Now ProjectThe Sociopolitical Philosophy of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah w/ Dr. Kofi Kissi DompereNote: 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 counte...
2020-08-301h 00
Africa World Now ProjectCurrent Conditions in Ethiopia w/ Ayantu AyanaPhoto: 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 ninete...
2020-08-011h 02
Africa World Now ProjectAfrican indigenous knowledge for restoration & resilience w/ Wangũi wa Kamonji & Tasneem SiddiquiWangũi 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...
2020-07-171h 21
Africa World Now ProjectPan-Africanism & Black Lives Matter[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 domina...
2020-07-021h 14
Africa World Now ProjectMaroons w/ Haile Gerima & Akinyele Umjoa; the “Black church” w/ Torin Alexander[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...
2020-06-1658 min
Africa World Now Projectin memoriam: materializing race w/ Charles W. MillsWe are currently living in an age where poverty and disease are big business. In a world where race and class continues to 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 understood 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, de...
2020-06-1154 min
Africa World Now ProjectPraxis of Decolonization & the Reclamation of Land & Dignity w/ Yousuf Al-Bulushi & Charo Mina Rojas[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 divi...
2020-06-111h 02
Africa World Now ProjectLand as a Fundamental Component in Black Liberation w/ Willie Jamaal Wright & Tasneem Siddiqui[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...
2020-06-111h 01
Africa World Now ProjectPostmodern Diversions Of Black RebellionWe 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. Peop...
2020-06-051h 16
Africa World Now ProjectReflections on Africa’s Deep Impact on Diasporic Cultural Production w/ Bro AhNote: 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 Instru...
2020-06-011h 10
Africa World Now ProjectRelationship[s], Interaction[s] & the practice of Love for Black Family StabilityImage: 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...
2020-05-191h 22
Africa World Now ProjectGerald Horne on William Patterson & the Globalization of the Freedom Struggle & Libya[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...
2020-05-051h 01
Africa World Now ProjectWe are Worth Fighting For w/ Josh MyersI 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 A...
2020-05-0558 min
Africa World Now Projectthinking through w/ organic Black radical intellectuals w/ Mutulu Olugbala [M-1, Dead Prez][Note: This program was produced & recorded in 2017] Needless to say, most of you are extremely aware that we are indeed living in a moment that implores each and every one of us to have a clear, resolute, and radical perspective of one’s own position in the current sociopolitical environment as well as develop strategies that are broadly informed to address present and coming forms of marginalization. To be clear…the current systemic forms of violence—that is legal, physical, economic, cultural, political, and social—are not new phenomena to Africans and people of African descent. I say this because historic...
2020-04-2459 min
Africa World Now ProjectAmilcar Cabral & the 21st Century w/ James EarlyNote: This program originally aired in 2016, we were just starting! ______________________________________ Amilcar Cabral…one of the African world’s foremost intellectual—theoreticians is also one of the most marginalized in the study of the African world. If we were to try to encapsulate Amilcar Cabral influence into a single phrase it would have to be his insistence on the study of reality [the material conditions within which culture moves history]. He insisted that "one does not confuse the reality you live in with the ideas you have in your head"…he would frequently elaborate on this by asserting your "ideas may be good...
2020-04-091h 01
Africa World Now ProjectThinking with Steve Biko & about South African w/ Andile Mngxitama[Note: Program originally aired in August 2016] In a speech delivered in 1971 in Cape Town, South Africa, Steve Bantu Biko proclaimed that the: “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” This time-less expression is currently fueling grassroots organizing and resistance efforts in South Africa. We see the echoes of this axiom in movements across South Africa from the Rhodes Must Fall/Fees Must Fall uprisings to the organizational expressions of resistance through organizations such as Black First, Land First or Abahlali baseMjondolo [Shack Dwellers Movement] and Landless People’s Movement; and outside of SA...
2020-04-0755 min
Africa World Now ProjectThe Life & Legacy of Carter G Woodson w/ Dr. Greg CarrNote: This version is an update to the version aired on Feb. 26 2020. Dr. Greg Carr engaged in this discussion at the Carruthers Center for Inner City Studies, Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago on January 31, 2020. ____________________________________________ When thinking of history, one tends to categorize or disassociate the contextual conditions that create & propel phenomena/phenomenon that move across time and space. Events and thought are relegated to a disassociated moment, mapped on categories of time that have been redefined to fit a particular worldview---Western European historiography and historicity and its notion of modernity. The concept is strip of its promise of futurity. I have...
2020-04-041h 50
Africa World Now ProjectThe Afterlive[s] of Marielle Franco…Black Womxn’s Resistance in BrazilData shows that, one (1) in five (5) of Rio de Janerio’s inhabitants reside in one of its more than 1,000 favelas. It is in these spaces where inequality and human potential is molded, identity is created, resistance is formulated. After the abolition of slavery in 1888, favelas began to rapidly appear. Majority moved to urban areas to take part in and create informal economies, primarily due to official policies between former plantation owners and government officials who prioritized immigration of European migrants. It is within this abbreviated history that we locate Marielle Franco, a black queer woman, mother, sociologist, socialist, human rights de...
2020-03-201h 04