Africa World Now Project

According to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz in an article titled, Settler Colonialism and the Second Amendment in Monthly Review, which is adapted from her recently published book, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, Professor Dunbar-Ortiz points out that: “in a book first published in 1876 but written decades earlier, historian Joseph Doddridge (1769–1826), a minister and early settler in...

Reconstruction, the period so named after the U.S. Civil War, is a period that in its totality is a clear articulation of the lasting implications of settler colonialism. Take the conceptualization of ‘reconstruction’ itself. This concept implies an implicit notion of equality, collectivism, cooperation, rebuilding, togetherness, democracy, so on and so forth. W. E. B. Du Bois writing in a chapter...

In Two Thousand Seasons, Ayi Kwei Armah writes: “we are not a people of yesterday. Do they ask how many single seasons we have flowed from our beginnings till now? We shall point them to the proper beginning of their counting. On a clear night when the light of the moon has blighted the ancient woman and her seven children, on such a night tell them to go alone into the world. There, have them cou...

Samir Amin wrote in 2016 that: “Partial awareness emerges from particular struggles, for example, from the struggles of peasants or women for the defense of human commons or the struggle for respect of popular sovereignty. The progress of the convergence of these particular types of awareness would make it possible to advance towards the formulation of new ways to surpass capitalism. But note…incr...

Hip hop, as a cultural product of Africa and African descendant peoples is a rich field of inquiry. Hip hop as a viable platform that highlights calls for social change is the life-giving breath of hip hop. Nevertheless, a viable work that dives deep into the sociopolitical and philosophical foundations of hip hop as a human expression of African futures is still yet to be written. Most work on hi...

Amie Césaire writes that: “at the very time when it most often mouths the word, the West has never been further from being able to live a true humanism—a humanism made to the measure of the world.” Sylvia Wynter adds clarity in that “[O]ur now immensely large-scale systemic injustices, as extended across the planet, are all themselves as law-likely and co-relatedly indispensable to the institution...

Today, we will take a look the legacy and contributions of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz as he expands the notions and ideas of African world history, justice, freedom, & citizenship… The collective and historical consciousness of the world in general—and the Africana world, specifically are still trying to grasp and in many instances are still grappling with the profound impact of the trajectory s...

The control of information…the foundation of knowledge formation…is a crucial tool of oppression. The manufactured ignorance of the masses has been utilized to create a globalized order that positions one group of people against another group of people, nevertheless, the reality suggest that… groups of people who are in bitter conflict with each other...actually have more in common than differ. Th...

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 undoubtedly just as important today, than when these words were first uttered. More importantly, they are fueling grassroots organizing and resistance efforts in South Africa, as well as in B...

According to Patterson and Kelley (2000) attempts to identify and make sense of the African diaspora are almost as old as the diaspora itself. Dating back at least to Juan Latino (a 16th century Spanish black professor at Granada), Ottobah Cuagano and Olaudah Equiano in the eighteenth century, and Jose Manuel Valdes (a Afro Peruvian physician who proved that cancer was not contagious) in the eight...

For Enrique Dussel: “Modernity dawned in 1492 and with it the myth of a special kind of sacrificial violence which eventually eclipsed whatever was non-European.” For Walter Mignolo, 1492 is the moment at which “there is a bifurcation of history”. For Sylvia Wynter: “(T)he 1492 event would set in motion the bringing together of separated branches of our human species within the framework of a sing...

On the evening of Wednesday, March 14, 2018 Marielle Franco, a city councilor for Brazil’s Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL), was killed as she was riding in a car in Rio de Janeiro. Reports suggest that a Cobalt-model car pulled up beside her and fired thirteen bullets into the vehicle. The bullets killed her and her driver. Franco’s press secretary, who was in the backseat with her, survived. A...

Today…we will explore the work of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o with Dr. Josh Myers, Assistant Professor in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (b. 1938) is one of the African world’s most prolific writers, thinkers, cultural workers, play-write, activist. Growing up in colonial Kenya, his dream of a free Africa has shaped his works. In 1977, with ‘Ngaahika Ndeenda'...

The ability to make language—words extend from the page…to become alive… to dance in the mind of a reader…creating vivid pictures that map time and space…weaving multiple experiences into a common tapestry of human history is an ability that only a few writers possess. It would not be a stretch to place such writers in the deep tradition passed down by generations of ancient priest, mystics, think...

The dominant narrative presented on the ANC, the struggle against South African Apartheid, the conditions and systems implemented when the ANC became the ruling party suggest that in a post-Apartheid South Africa, the people of South Africa experience distinctly identifiable improvements in their lived-conditions. However, according to Benjamin Fogel and Sean Jacobs, in their article Zuma is not t...

“As I face Africa, I ask myself: What is it between us that constitutes a tie that I can feel better than I can explain?” This was a question W.E.B. Du Bois asked himself in 1940 and we might imagine time and again before and after that moment. It was the question that guided his scholarship and his activism. Africa, was as Nahum Dmitri Chandler has argued, “the limit of the world,” and thus we mi...

According to Hotep Idris Galeta, the famed south African jazz-musician and educator, in his article, "The Development of Jazz in South Africa", he wrote that "South African Jazz has had many elements contributing to its evolution and development. The most prominent and significant being the rich eclectic cultural diversity of the country’s inhabitants and the influence of African/American musical...

To understand, analysis, or critique the conditions within which the African world lives without centering the role of settler colonialism as a function of racial capitalism has proven to be limited in range and scope in understanding the conditions within which the African world finds itself, today. Virtually no part of the modern United States—the economy, education, constitutional law, religiou...

The idea and practice of maroonage is an intriguing part of the vast story of African world resistance; a story that has deep implications on the idea and practice of freedom for the 21st century; it provides alternative models of social organization that challenge the current model of the nation-state; and a lens through which an African world future can be brought into sharp view—a sort of lens...

This program is intent to push the boundaries of Black thought as Black Critique. What do I mean? Contextualization is an art, an art that I find an affinity with and seek to perfect. Not for a personal gratification, but to discover and map a “rhythm” ---much like John Coltrane or an African shaman---that can serve as a spark of our critical consciousness. Black critique is a process of organic a...

The conceptual and practical use of racial capitalism by many young activists who were shocked and ignited by their exposure to the events that spurred Ferguson, the uprising in Baltimore, continual state violence at the hands of a hyper militarized police force…and the many reflective actions produced in settler colony seeking to still become a nation-state…has taken on a life that I would argue...

Program originally produced and aired: 2016 In his poem “Countries want independence, nations want liberation, and the people, the people want revolution”, Amiri Baraka writes: “Revolutionary Unity gained only thru struggle long sought for must be fought for Revolutionary Unity a fiery beacon in a world made perpetual night by imperialism The basis of struggle Unity Revolutionary Unity Unity gaine...

In this episode.... we can listen to Pt. 2 of the conversation I had with Fred Moten where we explore the ideas set forth by radical thinkers ranging from anti-colonialist such as Sylvia Wynter and Aimé Césaire to scholar-activists such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Amiri Baraka. You can catch Pt. 1 of our conversation on our SoundCloud archive. Professor Fred Moten is currently Professor of English at...

Black radicalism [consequently] cannot be understood within the particular context of its genesis. It is not a variant of Western radicalism whose proponents happen to be Black. Rather, it is a specifically African response to an oppression emergent from the immediate determinants of European development in the modern era and framed by orders of human exploitation woven into the interstices of Eur...