Africa World Now Project

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 ex...

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 Conscienci...

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 for...

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 soluti...

[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...

[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 en...

We 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...

[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 bein...

[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...

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 peacefull...

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...

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, provide...

[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 t...

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...

[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 margina...

Note: 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...

[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 Afri...

Note: 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/pheno...

Data 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 o...

Place as understood in Africana deep thought and practice, is both material and nonmaterial. The seed of humanity’s ability to evolve is rooted in the practices that are intent to create a balance between this fact. Imbalance, conscious and unconsciously created have deep implications on the lived realities of every community around the globe. Being so, the remedy to imbalance can also be located...

In, Amilcar Cabral and the Theory of the National Liberation Struggle, Professor Nzongola-Ntalaja writes that: “Amilcar Cabral’s contribution to understanding the success and failures of liberation movements, resides in his demonstration that national liberation struggles have two phases: the national phase and the social phase, with the latter being more crucial to its ultimate conclusion (1972:...

To unpack the complexities of Africana resistance, particularly its most “radical” elements—whether expressed through collective or/and individual activities and thought, it is vital to identify and map the traditions that inform and challenge their praxis. To be clear, the processes of identification and mapping is to highlight points of continuity and discontinuity, in order to understand distor...

On October 12, 1983, Maurice Bishop, prime minster of Grenada and one of the founding leaders of the New Jewel Movement, was placed under house arrest at the orders of Deputy Prime Minister Bernard Coard (Maurice Bishop Speaks, xii-xiii). On October 19, Maurice Bishop and five other central leaders of Grenada’s revolutionary government and the New Jewel Movement were murdered, at the orders of Dep...

The ghosts of Hegel, Hume, Locke, and other so-called enlightenment thinkers, are not ghosts at all. The limiting racialized reasoning; the logics of racial capitalism they espoused are in fact material and nonmaterial at the same time. We are living in the 21st century, with 14th century logics and reasoning. The complexities of the language formulated during this period have ensured that this wi...

Writing in Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, CLR James argues that: “the cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression. For the one aims at perpetuating resented injustice, the other is merely a momentary passion soon appeased." The range and scope of CLR James’ work cannot possibly be captured in our l...