Africa World Now Project

Delegates 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...

this #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...

Image: 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, pa...

Image: “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 polit...

In 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 d...

Bedour 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...

It 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 mod...

Black 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...

**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 ideologic...

Writing 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 oppr...

According 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,...

As 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. Speci...

In 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 Revolutio...

The 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 𝘈𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘤...

Gloria 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 subordi...

Normally, 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...

This 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 B...

Cultivating 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 b...

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 m...

Abdul 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 preemi...

Image: 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 collectiv...

Art — 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 a...

**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...

Image: 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://med...

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...