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  • Weaving Our Stories: Return To Belonging – An Anthology

    “We are lovingly tethered to each other’s struggles, liberation and survival…This is the mantra sweetly embedded across this profound heartfelt body of work. Weaving our Stories is a beautifully curated montage of community voices committed to the preservation of their indigenous lands and culture. Here is an anthology that collectively teaches us how to resist, build and dream toward a liberated future. What Luanna Peterson and the contributors offer us is a divine vision to walk with our communities ancestors and descendants with a collective vision to world making. Throughout the anthology lives a chorus of powerful voices that are amplified in a series of interwoven manifestos, stunning visual art and spirited poetics often echoed in their mother tongue. Like strands of sweetgrass, these stories are interlocked and bound up across a multitude of lineages. Hawaii, like many of our homelands, has been a site of settler colonialism, US imperialism and pillaging of its most abundant lands. Every page of Weaving Our Stories gives us an opportunity to reimagine, regenerate and reclaim our legacies! What Weaving our Stories does is make visible the histories and possibilities of freedom for its people and living cultural archive. Upon reading this anthology, I began to realize that each of the contributors in the book serves as a griot of the oral history and creative traditions…which has always been an instrument of change and freedom! Add this to your 2024 booklist.” – Tarisse Iriarte Medina, independent curator, and consultant working in New York City and Puerto Rico


    Weaving Our Stories: A Return to Belongingedited and introduced by Luanna Peterson, is a book sewn seamlessly of art and heart.  Every story stands bravely alone but is a part of the gripping whole.  These are survivor stories, and they aren’t easy to tell.  But that’s the point, isn’t it?  The message will come home to you, as it did so beautifully to me. — Debra Lape, author of Looking for Lizzie – The True Story of an Ohio Madam, Her Sporting Life and Hidden Legacy and Factory Girl in the Rubber City – The Journal of Mary Cable.

    Weaving Our Stories is a drenching of Spirit that helped me remember the shared purpose I have with the world and now with beloved Kalihi, Waipahu, Ko‘olauloa, and all of Hawaii. It is indeed an anthology that “… celebrates the radical and revolutionary role stories [play] in supporting our healing and liberation.” Mahalo, dear poets, artists, writers, and evolutionary revolutionists, for putting this collection together. Mahalo nui Luanna Peterson for holding the center with the grace of our kupuna – all of them. Time for us to heal. It is an honor to be connected to this kaupapa. — Dr. Manu Aluli Meyer

    Full of strength and loving provocation, Weaving our Stories gathers poems, visual art, and stories of a new generation of Hawai‘i change-makers. The collection reminds us that we can seek liberation in our ancestral stories, that we reach for liberation by carrying the stories of others, and that we find liberation when we learn and extend the common patterns among us. It is a brilliant representation of Hawai‘i’s own. —  Dr. Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua

    We are lovingly tethered to each other’s struggles, liberation and survival… This is the mantra sweetly embedded across this profound, heartfelt body of work. Weaving our Stories is a beautifully curated montage of community voices committed to the preservation of their indigenous lands and culture. Here is an anthology that collectively teaches us how to resist, build and dream toward a liberated future. What Luanna Peterson and the contributors offer us is a divine vision to walk with our communities’ ancestors and descendants with a collective vision of world-making. Throughout the anthology lives a chorus of powerful voices that are amplified in a series of interwoven manifestos, stunning visual art and spirited poetics often echoed in their mother tongue. Like strands of sweetgrass, these stories are interlocked and bound up across a multitude of lineages. Hawai‘i, like many of our homelands, has been a site of settler colonialism, US imperialism and pillaging of its most abundant lands. Every page of Weaving our Stories gives us an opportunity to reimagine, regenerate and reclaim our legacies! What Weaving our Stories does is make visible the histories and possibilities of freedom for its people and living cultural archive. Upon reading this anthology, I began to realize that each of the contributors in the book serves as a griot of the oral history and creative traditions…which have always been an instrument of change and freedom! Add this to your 2024 booklist. — Tarisse Iriarte Medina, independent curator and consultant working in New York City and Puerto Rico

    The young leaders and storytellers featured in Weaving Our Stories inspire and encourage us to move beyond received narratives that nourish bigotry or diminish one’s capacity for compassion and imagination. With powerful pedagogical and artistic impacts, the stories create space for us to name ourselves and heal out loud. The voices simultaneously remember and innovate as we re-familiarize ourselves with one another as well as ‘aina, to weave a tapestry of shared feeling and responsibility. Although the anthology speaks of loneliness and attempted erasure, its words also speak of deep belonging and strength—of the artistry, energy, ingenuity, and wisdom of people, place, and culture; of our commitments to one another; and the healing that comes from washing our eyes – and seeing our truth. — Dr. Maya Soetoro-Ng


    Weaving Our Stories is a Hawaii-rooted abolitionist program that utilizes storytelling as a vehicle for liberation. Our mission revolves around teaching storytelling as an act of resistance, dismantling harmful existing narratives, and nurturing our ability to weave counter-narratives that acknowledge and celebrate the inherent beauty and brilliance within our storytellers. Through our stories, we advocate for justice and liberation.

    This anthology follows the trail of esteemed works such as “This Bridge Called My Back: Writings of Radical Women of Color” and “Na Wahine Koa: Hawaiian Women for Sovereignty and Demilitarization.” This anthology includes poetry, essays, visual art, and narratives penned by authors and artists who identify as Black, Indigenous, and people of color from Hawaii and beyond. While our contributors span a diverse spectrum of experiences and identities, they all share a common commitment to individual and collective well-being. Our contributors astutely showcase how their expressions of resistance and liberation, whether through visual art or written text, align with one or more of the central themes of Weaving Our Stories: resistance through cultural memory, accountability, resisting false binaries, and countering hegemony.

    In tandem with the community collection of stories that revolve around resistance, this anthology also highlights the remarkable achievements of our six accomplished Black youth organizers. These young individuals dedicated a year to the Weaving Our Stories Youth Series during the pandemic, delving into the power and relevance of storytelling in our journey of resistance and liberation. Each of the six youth activists provides an overview of their Community Impact Design Projects.

    These culminating endeavors addressed community issues by proposing interventions that harness our resistance themes and our three Pillars of Liberation—namely, institutions, structures/methodology, and people.

    This anthology offers celebrations of our triumphs, our joys, and our unwavering resilience. Simultaneously, they advocate for our ongoing resistance, insisting on justice and a sincere confrontation with the often-overlooked lived experiences that deserve acknowledgement.

  • Some Of Us Are Brave (Vol 2): Interviews and Conversations with Sistas in Life and Struggle

    A society born of white supremacy and patriarchy must, by definition, ignore the voices of Black women. We know that unfortunately, such an attitude will also naturally seep into every stratum of that society

    Part of the contribution to correct that was the centering and airing of Black women’s voices through Some of Us Are Brave: A Black Women’s Radio Program that aired on Pacifica’s Los Angeles radio station  (KPFK) from 2003 until 2011.

    The program covered a myriad of issues by amplifying the voices of a broad cross-section of Black women. Some of those voices have been preserved here in this volume. In addition to capturing various moments in time with a ­variety of women, this is also a means of taking the intellec­tual production of and about Black women out of the hands of institutions that are both fundamentally ­anti-Black and anti-woman. 

    Volume 1 contains interviews under the headings The Shoulders on Which We Stand and Black Lives Have ­Always Mattered.

    Volume 2 covers Black Women’s Health, Bruthas on ­Sistas, and Sistas in Struggle.

  • Some of Us Are Brave (Volume 1): Interviews and Conversations with Sistas in Life and Struggle

    This is the literature of liberation! The truth. It waters the roots of a strong and timeless tree and bears the fruit of freedom. In the tradition of Ida B. Wells, Thandisizwe Chimurenga writes for the people because she is the people, and she loves the people. The interviews and conversations in Some Of Us Are Brave include Black women and Black men on Black women. This book will educate, inspire and strengthen the mind and spirit of Black women and those that love them. —Dr. Alice Nicholas, Africologist, Assistant Professor, Poet

    Some of Us Are Brave is a courageous exploration of Black feminism within the Black left, offering invaluable insights and igniting much-needed conversations. It is a must-read for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of this vital aspect of our history and the transformative power of Black feminist thought. In a media landscape that often falls short when it comes to representing the voices of Black feminists, this series is a breath of fresh air. — Piper Carter, Detroit-based Arts & Culture Organizer
    Host of “Beyond Breaking Barriers” podcast on Black Power Media


    A society born of white supremacy and patriarchy must, by definition, ignore the voices of Black women. We know that unfortunately, such an attitude will also naturally seep into every stratum of that society

    Part of the contribution to correct that was the centering and airing of Black women’s voices through Some of Us Are Brave: A Black Women’s Radio Program that aired on Pacifica’s Los Angeles radio station  (KPFK) from 2003 until 2011.

    The program covered a myriad of issues by amplifying the voices of a broad cross-section of Black women. Some of those voices have been preserved here in this volume. In addition to capturing various moments in time with a ­variety of women, this is also a means of taking the intellec­tual production of and about Black women out of the hands of institutions that are both fundamentally ­anti-Black and anti-woman. 

    Volume 1 contains interviews under the headings The Shoulders on Which We Stand and Black Lives Have ­Always Mattered.

    Volume 2 covers Black Women’s Health, Bruthas on ­Sistas, and Sistas in Struggle.

    “This latest offering from journalist Thandi Chimurenga is something that Florida Governor Ron DiSantis would ban in a heartbeat and try and create a law banning Thandi and the powerful women she features in this book. To put it simply, this book is fiya and will cause a lot of discomfort to those who hate Black women and want to see Black history and Black liberation be erased. This won’t happen on Sister Thandi’s watch. She’s the Ida B Wells of our time who carries keen insight, unapologetic love for our people and lots of receipts to  chin check haters and institutional racists.”—David “Davey D” Cook, Professor, Africana Studies, San Francisco State University. (Host, Hard Knock Radio, KPFA, Pacifica-Berkeley)

    Watch Shaunelle Curry Founder, Media Done Responsibly

     

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  • Política e cultura no pensamento emancipatório africano

    A atual ausência de uma visão emancipatória para a África está no centro dos nossos problemas políticos relacionados à opressão racial capitalista e colonial. Qualquer tentativa de repensar a emancipação política no continente africano deve ser capaz de localizar uma concepção universal de liberdade no interior das experiências culturais singulares que as pessoas vivem. Quando esteve baseada nas tradições populares, a política emancipatória exibiu tais traços dialéticos, independentemente da maneira específica na qual cada luta pela liberdade foi pensada em diferentes contextos históricos. No entanto, apenas alguns intelectuais militantes compreenderam a importância dessa dialética no pensamento. O presente volume esboça e discute dois pontos de vista particularmente importantes sobre o papel e a relevância da cultura popular na política emancipatória em África. Cada um deles resulta de formas distintas de exploração capitalista e colonialista: o primeiro viu a luz do dia em um contexto colonial, enquanto o segundo é diretamente confrontado pelo estado neocolonial. Todas as políticas emancipatórias são desenvolvidas em confronto com o poder estatal, e todas começam com um processo de discussão e debate através do qual um sujeito coletivo começa a se formar. No continente africano, a construção de tal sujeito político coletivo tem sido informada, de maneira fundamental, pelas culturas populares. Os dois autores cujos ensaios estão aqui incluídos entenderam isso e colocaram a cultura popular no centro de suas políticas. O primeiro, Amílcar Cabral, aborda o papel central da cultura popular na luta pela independência da Guiné-Bissau nos anos 1970; o segundo, Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba, aborda a centralidade da cultura popular africana para uma política emancipatória endereçada à atual República Democrática do Congo. Apesar das décadas que os separam, tanto Cabral como Wamba-dia-Wamba desenvolvem, no centro de sua política, uma dialética que ativa os universais da cultura no presente. É essa característica que confere às suas visões uma importância central para o pensamento emancipatório contemporâneo.

  • Politique et culture dans la pensée émancipatrice Africaine

    Au cœur de nos problèmes politiques issus d’un capitalisme racial et d’une oppression (néo)coloniale en Afrique aujourd’hui se trouve l’absence de toute vision émancipatrice véritable.  Toute tentative de repenser une politique émancipatrice en Afrique doit pouvoir situer une vision universaliste de la liberté parmi les expériences culturelles singulières que les gens vivent. Les politiques émancipatrices quand elles existaient, bien que pensées dans les luttes pour la liberté ayant lieu dans des contextes historiques particuliers, mettaient toujours en vue une dialectique de ce genre quand elles étaient vraiment basées parmi les traditions populaires. Cependant, seulement une minorité de dirigeants intellectuels et militants comprenait l’importance d’une telle dialectique pour la pensée et l’action.

    Ce petit livre trace le contour et discute de deux points de vue très importants sur le rôle de la culture populaire dans la politique émancipatrice en Afrique. Chacun d’entre eux émane de formes d’exploitation capitalistes coloniales distinctes : le premier a vu le jour dans un contexte colonial classique tandis que le second est directement issu d’un contexte étatique néocolonial.  Toute politique émancipatrice est développée vis-à-vis le pouvoir d’état et toutes commencent avec un processus de discussion ou est formé un sujet collectif.  Un tel sujet politique doit être fondamentalement informé par et conçu en relation avec les cultures populaires.

    Les deux auteurs ci-inclus ont compris ce principe et mettent la culture populaire au centre de leur pensées politiques.  Le premier, Amílcar Cabral se réfère au rôle principal de la culture dans la lutte contre le colonialisme au Guinée Bissau dans les années 1970 ; le second, Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba insiste sur le rôle central de la culture populaire pour une politique émancipatrice dans la République Démocratique du Congo aujourd’hui.  Malgré la distance temporelle qui les sépare, tous les deux développent au centre de leurs politiques distinctes, une pensée dialectique qui déclenche des pensées universalistes depuis la culture populaire dans le présent.  C’est pour cela que leurs points de vue sont d’une importance capitale pour la pensée de la politique émancipatrice en Afrique aujourd’hui.

  • Breaking the Silence on NGOs in Africa

    But, it is important to note that in this multi-authored collection whose contributors are deft students of history, NGOs are seen as one articulation of a more pervasive and sinister system. Many of the authors in this collection draw a strong connection between the racial capitalism launched 500 years ago with the twin practices of enslavement and colonisation, to this current moment of neoliberalism. Drawing on local experiences, pan-Africanism, socialism, feminism, and, above all, learnings and sharings from popular education, the contributors illustrate – through their bodies and discussions and the bodies and discussions of their elders – how NGOs have long imperial genealogies. … This delicate ‘dance’, between NGO aid and substantive action, persists, and many of the contributors’ vocalise this without any blinders; they unpack these contradictions while also speaking to the realities of their political and economic conjunctures and conditions. For these reasons, Breaking the Silence on NGOs in Africa is an important complement to the critical works of the same focus that precede it … And it remains an important testament of the determination of struggling peoples to powerfully, historically, yet in complex movements, name, interrogate, and challenge the state of affairs about which they are expected to be ‘silent’. — Wangui Kimari, Wangui Kimari (2023) Breaking the Silence on NGOs in Africa, Gender & Development, 31:2-3, 758-760, DOI: 10.1080/13552074.2023.2261763

     


    Edited by

    LEWIS MAGHANGA NJUGUNA and NICHOLAS MWANGI MACHUA,
    Members of the Organic Intellectuals Network are active organizers in the struggle to achieve social justice. They have experienced the contradictions of the NGO discourse and, just like others before them, have found themselves in the struggle versus survival dilemma. To get a clear picture of our contemporary struggles and the despair brought about by NGOs operating in the proletarian movement, comrades decided to reflect, study, and analyze Prof. Issa Shivji’s book Silences in NGO Discourse: The Role and Future of NGOs in Africa. For the authors, these analyses and reflections are based on personal experiences in their day-to-day organizing. In summarizing the authors’ observations regarding the impacts of NGOs in organizing, this book calls into question the fundamental question, ‘why do NGOs exist?’ To answer this question, the authors provide a historical chronology of the resistance in Kenya, Zimbabwe and the rest of Africa, relating those to the subjective factors in existence at every period. Through this, a scientific relationship can be drawn between social movements and NGOs in our current epoch. From their experiences with NGOs, the authors, representing grassroots social movements, highlight the dangers associated with donor funding. Often, donor funding ends abruptly after making people dependent on them, creating severe strain on grassroots organizations. The more one engages with NGOs, the softer one becomes to critique NGOs, particularly in highlighting their relationship to imperialism. Further, NGOs usually help in driving reforms. However, they play no part in revolutionary work. As a result, they merely preserve the present order and help exacerbate the frustrations arising from massive inequality in our society. In the long run, NGOs play a critical role in stifling the development and independence of grassroots social movements. This publication also includes two previously published essays by Prof Issa G Shivji, Silences in NGO Discourse: The Role and Future of NGOs in Africa, &, Reflections on NGOs in Tanzania: What We Are, What We Are Not and What We Ought To Be.
    Two great interviews with the authors:

    https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/millennials-are-killing-capitalism/id1292638162?i=1000618277192

    Breaking the Silence on NGOs in Africa

  • White Saviorism in International Development: Theories, Practices and Lived Experiences

    This captivating volume dives into the complexities of racism and White Saviorism in North/South relations. With contributions from 19 experts across the Global South, this book examines its prevalence within Western initiatives for international development. Through a blend of theoretical topics, testimonies, stories and personal experiences these contributors shed light on implicit as well as explicit forms of White Saviorism – all with sensitivity to broaden an understanding through multi-dimensional approaches that truly transcend borders.

    Edited by: Themrise Khan, Kanakulya Dickson, Maïka Sondarjee

    Combining praxis-informed theorization and accounts grounded in authors’ own experiences in the White Savior Industrial Complex, these succinct and accessible chapters bring the realities of racial capitalism in international development to life. I was both educated and enraged! — Alana Lentin, author of Why Race Still Matters

    This is a must-read book for anyone who wants to understand how many people contribute to upholding an oppressive White supremacist global system. — Amiera Sawas, Researcher and Advocate

    This is a terrific work of deep unmasking and engagement with the proverbial but the always invisible elephant in the room of international development, that of the White gaze—correctly rendered here as the “industrial-colonial-patriarchal-White savior complex.” Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, author of Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization

    White Saviorism in International Development unveils the hypocrisies undergirding development projects led by the Global South for the Global South. … It examines the intimate linkages between coloniality, development, and White Saviorism.— Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores, Texas Tech University

    White Saviorism in International Development is an important and timely book that should be read by all international development students and practitioners. — Dylan Mathews, CEO Peace Direct, Chairperson CIVICUS Alliance

  • Homestead, Homeland, Home

    This is a collection of observations and meditations by Ghanaian Professor Emeritus (York University, Toronto) and philosopher Ato Sekyi-Otu on events, issues, people and ideas culled from recent history and the world, from the US and Canada to Ghana. If there is a persistent thread in these entries, it is this: Virtually all of them testify to the ironic truth of the saying that there is no place like home, no place, that is to say, which looks like the lodestar called home or comes close to approximating its promise of being a just space of human flourishing. Most of the entries are, therefore, harsh, particularly those on the USA. That is because that nation, in his view, has, in recent history, made a major contribution to rendering the world and every homestead we inhabit unhomely and sabotaging attempts to better it. But no one or place is spared, certainly not the author’s native land, Ghana. Canada appears intermittently in these pages in rather fragmentary and contrastive observations. That paucity of comments may be taken to be the complement the author pays to Canada as a place of relative civility and glimmers of decency in a mad and cruel world. It is a short work of predominantly gloomy pictures. But there are a few countervailing images and invocations of hope here and there. There are 166 entries of unequal lengths arranged around 14 headings. These epigrams are contrapuntal variations on the philosopher’s searing imprecation and visionary invocation: unfinished ode, resounding with intermittent fury, to the dawn of human existence set free from all tyrannizing enclosures.

    This is the work of an unusually awesome intellect and flawless scholarship. As Ato himself may agree, if our scholars and writers have to do their work using the English language, then we of the neo-colonies are doing that language a whole lot of good. If the book was about nothing else than Professor Sekyi-Otu’s merciless dissection of the wretched story of the life and career of Kwasi Kwarteng, an arch-conservative member of the British Conservative Party, that alone makes the book a compelling read.

    — The late, Ama Ata Aidoo,
    author, poet, playwright and academic, author of
    Changes: A Love Story and Dilemma of a Ghost

    More precious, untimely observations from the most important black political philosopher writing in English. Read, learn, savor, be provoked, read again, repeat.

    Paul Gilroy,
    author The Black Atlantic

    The echoes of Fanon pervade this incisive analysis that spares no one, refuses any postulation of idyllic longings, and interrogates our responsibilities in every aspect of the histories that live within us. This work offers a powerful and incisive reflection on human freedom and responsibility in an affirmation of dignity that can only fully emerge upon recognition of the cruelty of the inhumanities that pervades our histories and their geographies.  It is an existential call to lay bare so that we might understand the biting complexity of indignity and reach through its morass to discover the depths of our humanity no matter how deeply that humanity is assaulted.  Homestead, Homeland, Home charts this journey with biting clarity and takes irony as a “vital organ of truth and justice” to the apogee of its power.

    Jacqueline M Martinez, Professor of Communication, College of Integrative Sciences and Arts

    Arizona State University,
    Vice-President, Caribbean Philosophical Association

    I lost count of the number of times I laughed out loud reading this book and the number of times I had to put it down in chest-tightening anguish. Ato Sekyi-Otu long ago demonstrated that he was a first-rate scholar. With these meditations, though, these ‘peeves’ as he hilariously describes them, he reveals himself a member of an even more remarkable group – those who dare attempt to rouse a world lost in shadow gazing. Homestead, Homeland, Home dissects global society and reveals a malignant inhumanity. It is a challenge and resource for those who can be shaken and a damning indictment on those who will not. It is bracing, severe, funny, heartbreaking, brilliant and very, very cool.’

    Bryan Mukandi, Senior Research Fellow,
    School of Languages and Cultures, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Queensland, Australia

    This is a book of peeves well worth peeving about. It is testimony from a great elder of political thought whose heartfelt commitments to dignity, freedom, justice, and humane existence irritate his soul as a witness to the continued cruelty, degradation, and double standards unleashed against the Damned of the Earth; it is erudite outrage at so many ignored opportunities to make good on political responsibility to build a better world, a world otherwise. Every sentence, every paragraph, every page, every chapter is a Sankofic demand against historic amnesia and an encomium to re-member and, in doing so, courageously embrace our shared responsibility to build institutions for the urgent repair of nothing short of humanity’s homestead in which we are, in Sekyi-Otu’s words, “compelled to recognize that only we can save ourselves.”

    Lewis R. Gordon, author of
    Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization and
    Fear of Black Consciousness

    Homestead Homeland Home: Critical Reflections is political-philosophic tour de force by Ghana’s leading public intellectual Ato Sekyi-Otu. Each chapter brims with insight, irony (humorous and often indecent, like the George W. Bush highway in Accra), and analytical precision as he subjects the homesteads, Canada and the USA and the homeland, Ghana, to his partisan universalist critique. Ee weaves his reflections with the thoughts of philosophers, thinkers, and sages of the human condition and the poets, songwriters, and dreamers of human liberation.

    Nigel Gibson, author of
    Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination

    Raging against the solitary confinement of despair into compartmentalized finitudes and possessive particularisms, Ato Sekyi-Otu continues in these epigrammatic reflections to put his unmistakable mixture of resentment and fury at the service of a new principle of hope. In search of a place to call home, untethered to any exclusionary metaphysics of difference, he makes short shrift of the willful amnesia surrounding the criminal junction of capitalism, slavery, colonialism, and anti-black racism, with their interlocking systems of subjugation; refuses the preaching of collective guilt and abject misanthropy alike; and instills in the reader a concrete utopian belief in freedom from the dominion of race, egalitarian self-determination, and partisan universalism as common sense. These fragments of a vision of humanity unbound will leave no one untouched by their relentless tarrying with the world’s prose and intermittent poetry.

    Bruno Bosteels, author of The Actuality of Communism

    For those familiar with Sekyi-Otu’s work, Homestead, Homeland, Home is another instalment of what are gift offerings of his extraordinary mind and intellect. And for those not familiar, they better start reading these reflections right now, and don’t stop until you are fully done with them. Here is something to arouse the consciousness with beauty, poise, and quiet brilliance.

    Ato Quayson, Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Stanford University


  • MATHARE: An Urban Bastion of Anti-Oppression Struggle in Kenya.

    History is written by the victors of any war.  But what happens when the victors forget to write down their history or omit the cog of the struggle? This is the untold story of Mathare Slum that has never been told to the world: of the role it played in anti-colonial struggle and the planning ground for the Mau Mau struggle which culminated with the fall of the British Colonial Empire in Kenya in the midnight of December 12th 1963. Mathare has also played a critical role in anti-oppression struggle against the four regimes that we’ve had since independence and continues to do so up to date. This history has not been documented and has only been done piecemeal. This has overtime eroded the rich history of Mathare and led to a distorted history of once a planning ground and a bulwark of Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KFLA). The current generation are not cognizant with the critical role Mathare played in the independence of our country.

    Presently, Mathare is majorly known for all the negative reasons and its proximity to Mathari Mental Hospital has contorted its image to the outside world. My story tries to re-tell the history of Mathare from an informed insider perspective by threading the struggles from the colonial era to the present day and the role it has played in agitating for social justice.

    My story brings to view the past history of this informal settlement in the heart of Nairobi, the present struggle and the promising future through community organizing.

  • Politics and Culture in African Emancipatory Thought

    The current absence of any emancipatory vision for Africa lies at the heart of our political problems of racial capitalist and colonial oppression. Any attempt to rethink political emancipation on the African continent must be able to locate a universal conception of freedom within singular cultural experiences where people live. Irrespective of the specific manner in which such struggles for freedom were thought within different historical contexts, emancipatory politics always exhibited such a dialectic when it was based within popular traditions. Yet only some militant intellectual leaders understood the importance of this dialectic in thought.

    The present volume outlines and discusses two particularly important views concerning the role and importance of popular culture in emancipatory politics in Africa. Each is the product of distinct forms of colonial capitalist exploitation: the former saw the light of day within a colonial context while the latter is directly confronted by the neocolonial state. All emancipatory politics are developed in confrontation with state power, and all begin with a process of discussion and debate whereby a collective subject begins to be formed. The formation of such a collective political subject has been fundamentally informed by popular cultures on the African continent.

    The two authors whose essays are included here understood this and posit popular culture at the centre of their politics. The first, Amílcar Cabral, addresses the central role of popular culture in the independence struggle of Guinea Bissau in the 1970s; the second, Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba, addresses the centrality of African popular culture in an emancipatory politics for the current Democratic Republic of Congo. Despite the distance in time that separates them, both Cabral and Wamba-dia-Wamba develop a dialectics at the core of their politics which activates the universals of culture in the present. It is this that makes their views of central importance to emancipatory thought today.

  • A Mutiny of Morning: Reclaiming the Black Body from Heart of Darkness

    Nikesha Breeze has taken pages from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, taken his words, and forced them to leave his colonized mind. She has made the words her own in poetic form. She illuminates the invisible Black voices inside, a radical, surgical, and unapologetic Black appropriation, at the same time as a careful birthing and spiritual road map. The resulting poems are sizzling purifications, violent restorations of integrity, pain, wound, bewilderment, rage, and, sometimes, luminous generosity.

    The violent, scathing white supremacy of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is traversed page by page and word by word in this brilliant prayer/poem—a work of reclamation, redemption, rescue, and repossession. — Wende Marshall, co-editor Insurrectionary Uprisings: A Reader in Revolutionary Nonviolence and Decolonization