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I see the invisible
USD $ 5.00 – USD $ 20.00Select options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product pageI see the invisible
Truth be told, I never thought I would write another volume of poetry after the last, I will not Dance to Your Beat (2011). The reason was that my previous volumes were reactive to the circumstances of the times. Patriots and Cockroaches (1992) was a reaction to the socio-political corruption that had engulfed Africa and dimmed the enthusiasm that had been built by the years of struggle for independence. Whereas we thought we were stepping into a post-colonial era, what we stepped into was a vicious neo-colonial times. The next collection, Poems on the Run (1995) was a reaction to military autocracy and the repression that followed. The volume was literally written underground. This was followed by Intercepted (1998) all written while detained at Kalakuta Republic of Alagbon Close. We Thought it was Oil But it was Blood (2002) responded to two things primarily – extractivism and the accompanying human and environmental rights abuses in the Niger Delta and elsewhere. The massive erosion of biodiversity and attacks on food sovereignty through the introduction of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) into our agricultural system inspired I Will not Dance to your Beat.
What you have in your hands, or on your screens, is a compilation that is largely more meditative than the previous collections. There are moments of reflection on the colonial and neoliberal foundations that permit a willful disconnection from nature and the resultant destructive extractivism.
Some of the poems came through conversations and poetry writing sessions with Peter Molnar, Maryam al-Khawaja — Rafto Human Rights laureates and Salil Tripathi, a member of the board of PEN International, in August 2017. The sessions held at a beautifully rustic location in Celleno, Italy, were documented on celluloid by the duo of Maria Galliana Dyrvik and Anita Jonsterhaug Vedå of SMAU, a multimedia firm in Norway. Poetic relationship with Maria and Anita has continued over the years and their work continues to inspire more and more poems.
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Episodes From a Colonial Present
Editors and Authors: Daniel Bendix, Chandra-Milena Danielzik, Franziska Müller, Lata Narayanaswamy, Juan Telleria, Miriam friz Trzeciak, Aram Ziai
Artists: Hangula Werner, Roshni Vyam, Michel Esselbrügge, Qi Zhou, RotmInas – Rotmi Enciso & Ina Riaskov, Maite Mentxaka Tena, Lena Ziyal
Postcolonial critique reveals the traces of the colonial past in every corner of our present lives and exposes the colonial violence inherent in global inequality. This collective comic project illuminates the coloniality of everyday life as well as the decolonising potential of everyday struggles in the spaces, discourses and practices of so-called global development.
Reviews
What an absolute impertinence! My lawyers are already involved. It’s just as well that I was able to use tax money for the purchase.
—Queen Elizabeth III love true crime books, but this one got a bit boring after a while. It could do with more bloodshed.
—Lothar von TrothaI added this book to my list to burn. Just saying.
—Diego de LandaA waste of time. So glad I didn’t buy it, but stole my copy.
—Christopher ColumbusI didn’t get it. Are they suggesting colonialism is not quite over?
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Select options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page
From Citizen to Refugee: Uganda Asians Come to Britain
In his introduction to this new edition of From Citizen to Refugee: Uganda Asians Come to Britain, Mahmood Mamdani reminds us that long before 1972, most Ugandan ‘Asians’ had already been disenfranchised by law, both Ugandan and British. Despite a global industry that insists otherwise, Uganda Asians are a poor fit as victims: there was no large-scale loss of life during the expulsion, nor were there massacres of Asians, only of ‘indigenous’ peoples. Asians in Uganda, as in East or Southern Africa, he argues, were immigrants, not settlers: immigrants are prepared to be a part of the political community, whereas settlers ‘create their own political community, a colony, more precisely, settler colonialism.’ Mamdani insists that there is no single Asian legacy. there are several and they are contradictory. The Asian question in Uganda remains, but it is no longer the original Asian question. But it does allow us to think more broadly. Just as US law recognizes African Americans as Americans of African descent, so too must those of Asian origin in Africa consider themselves, and be considered, Asian Africans. It is in his bittersweet and touching book on the Asian expulsion from Uganda that one can trace the beginnings of author and intellectual Mahmood Mamdani’s world-view.. … In From Citizen to Refugee: Uganda Asians Come to Britain Mamdani offers portraits of people reduced to a vegetative existence in refugee camps, feeling the burden of not being fluent in English and struggling with the uncomfortably cold weather. Not surprisingly, these few months played a pivotal role in shaping Mamdani’s theoretical and political leanings, and it is here that one can locate his preoccupation with the formation of racial, ethnic and class identities during the colonial era and his overarching concern with issues of citizenship.
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Agroecología Abolicionista, Soberanía Alimentaria y Prevención de Pandemias
USD $ 5.00 – USD $ 15.00Select options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product pageAgroecología Abolicionista, Soberanía Alimentaria y Prevención de Pandemias
La COVID-19 ha expuesto la naturaleza racializada de los sistemas alimentarios, pero también potencialmente otorga oportunidades para construir de nuevo. Maywa Montenegro explora una serie de defectos, desde las cadenas de suministro fracturadas hasta las infecciones no controladas entre los trabajadores de alimentos esenciales y comunidades negras, marrones e indígenas victimizadas por el virus a lo largo de viejos surcos de opresión racial. Ella rastrea los orígenes probables de la COVID-19 hasta los sitios de desborde forjados por la expansión agroindustrial en regiones boscosas donde los patógenos brotan libremente e infectan a los humanos. La agricultura animal de tipo industrial impulsa estos cambios ecológicos que incuban futuros brotes. Las pandemias tienen sus raíces en la separación violenta de las comunidades de sus territorios, semillas, conocimientos y riqueza. El racismo permite ese robo como elemento fundamental para la expansión capitalista.
Para hacer frente a las pandemias y las injusticias alimentarias, Montenegro invoca una agroecoecología abolicionista. Ninguna alternativa anticapitalista puede ignorar el racismo que es fundamental para el sistema alimentario industrial transnacional. Académicos como Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore y Mariame Kaba han argumentado que, aunque la abolición se ve con frecuencia como una estrategia de oposición, para erradicar, por ejemplo, prisiones y policía: la abolición es igualmente propositiva. Una agroecología abolicionista abre múltiples posibilidades que responden a las exigencias de un planeta pandémico: no existe una “normalidad” a la que podamos regresar con seguridad.
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Abolitionist Agroecology, Food Sovereignty and Pandemic Prevention
USD $ 5.00 – USD $ 15.00Select options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product pageAbolitionist Agroecology, Food Sovereignty and Pandemic Prevention
COVID-19 has exposed the racialized nature of food systems, but also potentially grants opportunities to build anew. Maywa Montenegro explores a series of breakdowns, from fractured supply chains to uncontrolled infection among essential food workers to Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities scythed through by the virus along old grooves of race-class oppression. She traces the likely origins of COVID-19 to spillover sites forged by agroindustrial expansion into forested regions where pathogens spring free and infect humans. Industrial animal agriculture drives these ecological changes that incubate future outbreaks. Pandemics have their roots in the violent separation of communities from their territories, seeds, knowledge and wealth. Racism enables such theft as fundamental to capitalist expansion.
To tackle pandemics and food injustices, Montenegro calls for an abolitionist agroecology. No anti-capitalist alternative can ignore the racism that is central to the transnational industrial food system. Scholars including Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Mariame Kaba have argued that although abolition is frequently seen as an oppositional strategy — to eradicate, for example, prisons and police — abolition is equally propositional. An abolitionist agroecology cracks open multiple possibilities that respond to the exigencies of a pandemic planet — there is no ‘normal’ to which we can safely return.
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I am a man of peace: Writings inspired by the Maynooth University Ken Saro-Wiwa Collection
USD $ 5.00 – USD $ 20.00Select options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product pageI am a man of peace: Writings inspired by the Maynooth University Ken Saro-Wiwa Collection
This book marks the 25th anniversary of the execution of Nigerian activist and written Ken Saro-Wiwa. The 21 essays, by international contributors, and 42 poems by new and established poets, are inspired by his ideals and activism.
The volume includes contributions by people intimately connected with Saro-Wiwa. His brother Dr Owens Wiwa recounts how his older brother awakened and nurtured his awareness of the tremendous damage Royal Dutch Shell was doing to their homeland, in collaboration with the then Nigerian military government. His firsthand account of the brutality of the military government and its impact; his unsuccessful efforts to save the life of his brother; his time in hiding and subsequent escape, with his family, from Nigeria and his efforts to retrieve the remains of his brother for burial, makes for very moving reading. Likewise, Noo Saro-Wiwa shares her story of growing up in England with strong links to family in Nigeria, and the trauma of hearing of her father’s execution while at University.
Maynooth University, where the editor works as Deputy Librarian, holds the death row correspondence from Ken Saro-Wiwa to Sister Majella McCarron. McCarron provides two personal essays. One, a reflection on the events that shaped her work with Saro-Wiwa in Nigeria and her subsequent efforts to save the lives of the Ogoni 9: the second essay explores her experience as a table observer of the Shell to Sea campaign, which strove to have gas, discovered off the west coast of Ireland, refined at sea rather than inland.
The damage that Shell has caused in Ogoni and the issue of redress are topics addressed in essays by experts including Mark Dummett, of Amnesty International, who investigated how Shell and other oil companies have caused or contributed to human rights abuses through their operations in the Niger Delta. Daniel Leader, a barrister and partner at Leigh Day’s international law department, the firm who have led a number of ground breaking human rights cases, including a series of cases against Shell on behalf of Nigerian communities, explores the issue of legal redress. Architect, environmental activist, author and poet Nnimmo Bassesy’s wide ranging essay presents Saro-Wiwa as activist and writer and creator of the Ogoni Bill of Rights, against the backdrop of the UNEP report of the Environmental Assessment of Ogoniland, which recorded that drinking water in Ogoni had benzene, a carcinogen, at over 900 times the level permitted
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Silence Would Be Treason: Last writings of Ken Saro-Wiwa (Expanded 2nd Edition)
USD $ 10.00 – USD $ 20.00Select options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product pageSilence Would Be Treason: Last writings of Ken Saro-Wiwa (Expanded 2nd Edition)
These letters and poems are invaluable fragments of a living conversation that portrays the indomitable power in humans to stay alive in the face of certain death – to stay alive even in death.
Reading through the treasure trove of the letters and poems compiled here as The Last Writings of Ken Saro-Wiwa evokes intense memories of his resolute struggles against an oil behemoth and a deaf autocratic government. His crusade frames one of the most tumultuous periods of Nigeria’s history; his tragic story evokes anger and demands action to resolve the crises that first led the Ogoni people to demand that Shell clean up Ogoni lands or clear out of the territory.
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PAS DE REDD EN AFRIQUE
La présente publication du Réseau Pas de REDD en Afrique (No REDD in Africa Network) a pour but de démystifier le REDD, les projets de type REDD et toutes leurs variantes, et de montrer ce qu’ils sont vraiment : des mécanismes injustes conçus pour lancer une nouvelle phase de colonisation du continent africain. Les exemples présentés démontrent clairement que le REDD est une escroquerie et que les pollueurs savent qu’il leur permet d’acheter le « droit » de polluer.
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Oil Politics: Echoes of Ecological Wars
USD $ 1.00 – USD $ 25.00Select options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product pageOil Politics: Echoes of Ecological Wars
The essays here contribute to developing and deepening an understanding of the ecological challenges ravaging Nigeria, Africa and our world today. They illustrate the global nature of these terrors. These essays are not meant just to enable for coffee table chatter: they are intended as calls to action, as a means of encouraging others facing similar threats to share their experiences.
Set out in seven sections, this book of 54 essays deals with deep ecological changes taking place primarily in Nigeria but with clear linkages to changes elsewhere in the world. The essays are laid out with an undergird of concerns that characterise the author’s approach to human rights and environmental justice advocacy. The first section rightly presents broad spectrum ecological wars manifesting through disappearing trees, spreading desertification, floods, gas flaring and false climate solutions.
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