-
Then He Sent Prophets
In mid-fourteenth century Fes, Zakaria is a gifted young scholar trying to make ends meet while committing to a rigid moral code. Refusing to be tempted by a life of power and fortune, he is writing a reform book about Islam to guide a society that has lost its moral compass. But Zakaria lives in a time of compromise—unsuited for idealists, especially those with modest means. Devastated by his inability to pay for the treatment of his sick daughter, he seeks a job at the palace through Ibn Khaldun, the sultan’s secretary
Zakaria joins the royal chancery and tries to nourish the idea that he could walk the thin line of serving the sultan without sacrificing his principles. Soon enough, however, a rumor spreads that the sultan has murdered twenty children from the royal family to consolidate his reign. Zakaria’s equally idealist childhood friend, Musa, gets involved in a related incident, accuses all who serve the sultan of complicity in this crime, and falls out with Zakaria for the first time in their lives. Unable to resign from his job because a palace official has acquired his “blasphemous” manuscript and is manipulating him, Zakaria spends a year tormented by his conscience and shunning public affairs. But the situation in Fes goes from bad to worse, Musa decides to take part in an attempt to topple the sultan, and the death of Zakaria’s proud grandmother, who was disappointed in how his life had turned out, pushes him to the brink of collapse. To save his protégé, Ibn Khaldun convinces the sultan that Zakaria should join Muhammad ibn Yusuf, the exiled king of Granada, on his journey to Andalusia to reclaim his throne.
During the expedition, Zakaria acquires the complete trust of Muhammad, who decides to make him a principal adviser. Zakaria develops ideas of grandeur, convinces himself this is his much-awaited chance to use his scholarship to help people, and persuades Muhammad against all counsel to withhold military activity to avoid a civil war. Zakaria’s purposefulness, however, is soon diverted by a mad obsession with Muhammad’s enchanting sister Aisha, and his insistence on withholding military activity backfires after a rebellion breaks out in Fes, leading to the withdrawal of the sultan’s army supporting Muhammad and leaving him exposed. On receiving news that his family has perished in a fire in the uprising in Fes, Zakaria suffers an emotional shock but follows Muhammad, whose fondness of Zakaria has turned into an abhorrence, in a failed attack on Granada. Muhammad escapes to his allies in Castile after sacrificing his loyal guards and vindictively assaulting Zakaria, who loses consciousness on the battlefield.
In Castile, Zakaria comes to his senses, recalls his family’s tragedy, develops an intense rage, cuts his relationship with Aisha, and contemplates killing Muhammad upon hearing he has accepted military help from the Castilians to reclaim his throne. Before executing this plan, Zakaria learns that his daughter has survived the fire and is in Granada with Musa. Zakaria sets out there, wishing the reunion with his daughter would spare him some of his agonies, but she shuns him, and after the war starts, he blames himself for leaving Castile without killing Muhammad, believing his death would have saved thousands. Muhammad and the Castilians move to attack a castle near Granada, and Zakaria joins the defending army along with Musa. In an ensuing battle, Zakaria slays a preacher supporting Muhammad, whom Zakaria has known since childhood and always considered corrupt, while Musa’s fierce resistance against the invaders inspires Muhammad to abdicate his throne. Zakaria returns to Granada in a shattered state as the Castilians continue their attacks with the pretext of reinstating Muhammad despite his withdrawal.
The killing of a soul makes Zakaria finally realize that all his attempts to live ethically have led to misfortunes because they were driven by pride—not empathy. This desire to love and excuse everyone is, however, challenged by witnessing a simple incident of domestic violence, where he finds himself neither able to justify it nor act to change it without compromising his new spiritual realization. Concluding that life is unbearable because living would always entail compromises, watching the Castilians closing in on Granada and Musa vowing to fight to the death, and judging that Muhammad’s abdication of the throne, despite his past failings, makes him the best possible ruler, Zakaria decides to sacrifice himself, save his childhood friend, and end the war. After impersonating Musa, Zakaria deceives Muhammad’s cousin, the king of Granada, into seeking the arbitration of the Castilians and sets out with him to Seville, where they are both executed.
Part I
- The Eyebrow
- Blamed for Everything
- The Cursed Child
- The Slippers
- The Enemy of Horses
- Tamima’s Stone
- The Overthrown King
- Except the Sultan
- Muslims and Mujrims
- No Musicians or White Storks
Part II
- The Royal Chancery
- Are We Not All Muslims?
- On Ethics and Rituals
- The Voice of Fes
- The Rift
- A Cup of Milk
- A Year to Forget
- The Bad Smell
- A Sultan’s Verdict
- Um al-Wazir
Part III
- The Journey
- The Caravan
- The Race
- The Princess
- The Savior
- An Eye Without an Eyebrow
- The Sword Verse
- The Philosopher King
- The Mad Scholar
- Jahannam
Part IV
- The Crow
- The Fall
- The Frying Pan
- The Hypocrite
- Reunion
- A Knight without a Horse
- An Innocent Soul
- The Mirror
- Gold and Diamonds
The Red Prophet
-
The Ones We Lost: How Reflecting on Death Helps Us To Lead A Meaningful Life
For many years, Oyunga has chronicled stories of life and death as both existential and ritual experience among the Luo community, Kenyans, and Africans at large. Since 2020, he has explored the themes of Living and Dying. Life exists in the midst of death and yet death remains one of the most disruptive affairs of our lives. The book revolves around the idea that the stories of death are the stories of life, and by focusing on how our loved ones died, we extract lessons for living fulfilled lives that prepare us for the inevitability of death. It focuses on how we can unravel the mystery of the separation, by accepting the reality of death and what it is meant to teach.
Contents.
- Foreword
- Preface
- Introduction
- Is this How I die?
- Baba’s Gone
- The Unmournable Ones
- The Urban
- Children of a Revolution That never Was.
- Comedy and Tragedy
- Death of a Father figure.
- The Pugilist
- Our Man in Somalia
- Memories of Silence
- Fall of a Rugby Great
- Gone, without a whisper
- Dani is dead
- Digging your own grave
- Death in a strange land.
- Here But I’m Gone.
- The Winter of our lives.
- Baptism by Fire.
Epilogue
The Ones We Lost, is an anthology that comprises a collection of short essays and curated obituaries drawn from a two decade career as a columnist and a participant-observer of Kenyan social reality. Each story is independent but also interconnected, weaving the common thread of using those stories of those who died as a mirror to raise awareness in how we take responsibility for our lives.
-
Beside the Sickle Moon: A Palestinian Story
Beside the Sickle Moon is an original work of fiction based on Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Set in the year 2065, the story tells a first person narrative through Laeth Awad, a Palestinian who lives above his convenience store experiencing days pass through smoke clouds with his cousin Aylul. One night upon returning to their village from Ramallah they encounter an Israeli checkpoint within the buffer zone that hadn’t been there before. It isn’t long until the two stumble upon Israel’s plans to construct a luxury hotel for incoming settlers, Ma’al Luz. Demolition crews and military personnel are due to fulfill this contract in the months to come and with them as overseer is the infamous Meir Cohen, a Mossad operative who played a key role in the fall of Gaza.
Aylul believes from their father, a Hamas militant who died in the battle for Jericho, that only the threat of annihilation breeds the best of human action. They use their contacts to connect with Ibn Walid, leader of the now destitute organization that hides in tunnels throughout the country. A deal is struck but first they must prove themselves by stealing from thieves. Aylul double-crosses Ibn Walid in favor of the far more powerful Fatah, who grant them strength to defend their village from occupation. With these resources in hand Aylul forms Al Mubarizun, a group crowning themselves Palestine’s final resistance.
Laeth doubts the existence of a future, lost in philosophical ambivalence as he follows his cousin into the depths of guerrilla warfare. He questions the futility of resistance when all former allies have normalized relations with Israel. And what of the innocents on the other side of the Wall who had no say in where they were born? Though a minority of the population, he is not alone in this sentiment. Palestinian youth begin to empathize with this logic enough to create a new social movement, the Forgotten Ones. Coining the derogatory term that their critics slung, the grassroots NGO advocates for a peaceful transition to Israel’s one-state conquest where most Palestinians hear whimpers of surrender
-
The Unfinished Business of Liberation and Transformation: Revisiting The 1958 All-African People’s Conference
This book features essays, speeches, and reflections from the 60th anniversary commemoration of the All-African People’s Conference (AAPC), an epochal event in the history of the emancipatory struggles of African people. The four-day conference was a collaboration between the Institute of African Studies, Trades Union Congress of Ghana, Socialist
Forum of Ghana, Lincoln University, and the Third World Network Africa.
The book consists of three sections. The first contains ten essays on some of the conference’s key themes – decolonising knowledge production, a new politics for substantive democracy and security, economic liberalisation and the crises of work, and Pan-Africanism yesterday, today, and tomorrow. The second section features speeches delivered at the Conference – the welcome and closing addresses, solidarity messages from prominent pan-Africanists as well as an interview with the last living delegate of the 1958 All-African People’s Conference. The last section contains the conference background documentation and the Statement of Issues and Recommendations adopted by the Conference. The bookends are two poems by pan-Africanist scholar-poets. The book offers valuable perspectives on Africa’s current predicaments and what a truly liberated Africa can offer to the world.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Invocation
- Ancestral Roll-Call – Kofi Anyidoho
Introduction- Back to the Future: The 1958 AAPC and the Power of Optimism
Section 1
- Revisiting The 1958 All-African People’s Conference –The Unfinished Business of Liberation and Transformation – Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja
- Revisiting The 1958 All-African People’s Conference –The Unfinished Business of Liberation and Transformation – Horace Campbell
- Pan-Africanism in Mwalimu Nyerere’s Thought – Issa Shivji
- Ghana (1957 – 1966): Reflections and Lessons From a 20th Century Pan-African Liberated Nation-State – D. Zizwe Poe
- Transnational Citizenship on the Borderlands: Towards Making (Non)Sense of National Borders in Africa – Edem Adotey
- Looking Backwards to Run Forward: A Critical Examination of the 60th Anniversary of the 1958 All-African People’s Conference – Mjiba Frehiwot
- Generating Inclusive and Sustainable Growth: Challenging Neoliberal Approaches to Gender Mainstreaming in Regional Economic Integration in Africa – Adryan Wallace
- A Brief History of Development Initiatives in Africa – Anthony Yaw Baah
- Pan-African Epistemologies of Knowledge Production: A Deconstruction-Based Critical Reflection – James Dzisah & Michael Kpessa Whyte
- Hip-Hop Studies as a Model for Anti-imperialist Research in Africa – Msia Kibona Clark
Section 2
- Speech by the chair of the Secretariat 60th Anniversary of the All-African People’s Conference – Dzodzi Tsikata
- Speech by H.E Thabo Mbeki former president of South Africa
- Speech by the Deputy Chairperson of the African Union Commission, H.E. Kwesi Quartey
- Speech by the Chair of the 60th Anniversary of the All-African People’s Conference – Akilagpa Sawyerr
- In-conversation: Speaking with History (participant at the 1958 AAPC) – G. A. Balogun interview – Edem Adotey
Section 3
- AAPC @ 60 Conference Background Documentation
- On culture at the AAPC @ 60 – Eric Tei-Kumado and Edem Adotey
- AAPC @ 60 Conference Recommendations and Issues for the Future
Exhortation
- De Geas of Rickydoc: an Exhortation – Arthur Flowers
-
Oh, Sorry! Rituals of Forgiveness, Crises and Social Struggles in Postmodern Capitalism
As the world grapples with the legacy of crimes of enslavement, colonialism, genocide and mass killings, imprisonment and murder of children, attempts at eliminating cultures and history of Indigenous peoples, looting and other crimes against humanity, the performance of public atonement has become increasingly prevalent. Apologies from state actors and institutions are issued in solemn ceremonies, often acknowledging the collective guilt for historical atrocities. Despite the solemnity of these events, there is a growing scepticism surrounding the sincerity of these apologies, particularly when they are not accompanied by tangible reparations, healing, reconciliation or systemic change. This scepticism is rooted in a perception that these acts of contrition are sometimes less about making amends to the aggrieved and more about assuaging the guilt of the aggressors and maintaining the status quo, providing the illusion of progress without the substance.
In this compelling work, Oh, Sorry! Rituals of Forgiveness, Crises and Social Struggles in Postmodern Capitalism, the authors unveil the complex interplay between public apologies, social justice and popular mobilisations. They argue that these acts of contrition while heralding unresolved histories into the public eye, serve as battlegrounds where the definitions of truth and the contours of historical memory are fiercely contested. This collection of essays illuminates the paradoxical nature of these rituals, positing that rather than catalysing transformative change, they simply cement the prevailing societal structures, emboldening states to persist in their destructive paths under the guise of remorse. Such apologies often precede an expected forgetfulness, rendering truth a malleable tool to compartmentalise the past as a distant occurrence, not an ongoing narrative. The discourse laid out in these essays emphasizes the tension inherent in the act of forgiveness—an act that, within the established framework, demands that the state remain unchallenged, wielding the power to decree what should or should not be forgiven.
The editors of this book did not intend this to be a comprehensive treatise on the rituals of forgiveness: the chapters are devoted primarily to the experiences of Latin America, particularly of Mexico, Guatemala, Chile, and Brazil. But there is also a chapter on the struggles for Palestine — so relevant in the face of the current genocidal invasion by the Zionist State of Israel into Gaza, the world’s largest and most densely populated concentration camp. Nithya Nagarajan explores the ongoing plight of Palestinians since the Nakba in 1948, and event that, for over 75 years, has not only subjected Palestinians to severe hardships but has also seen their resistance and struggle for liberation being ideologically effaced by Israeli and mainstream media efforts, portraying Palestinians as victims rather than agents of revolution.
Forward by Firoze Manji
Introduction
One
Rituals of Forgiveness: The Performance of State Violence in the Context of Crisis by Panagiotis Doulos & Edith González Cruz
Two
From Forgiveness to Permission: The State and “the Indigenous” in the Face of Planetary Collapse by Ines Durán Matute.
Three
End(s) of Forgiveness by Minas Vlachos
Four
The Fierce Dispute for Memory, Truth and Justice in Guatemala by Carlos Figueroa Ibarra.
Five
Never Again? A Critique of Narratives of Forgiveness and Reconciliation in Post-dictatorial Chile by Roberto Longoni Martínez.
Six
Rituals of Forgiveness as a Political Strategy of the Capitalist State: The Brazilian Case of “O Amor Venceu” in Lula’s Victory in 2022 by Leonardo Carnut, Lúcia Dias da Silva Guerra & Áquilas Mendes.
Seven
The No-bodies: Between Forgiveness and Overflow. Notes Against Forgiveness as a Dispositive of Control in Times of Explicit Antagonism by Milena Rodríguez Aza.
Eight
The March of Return: Struggle for Palestinian Liberation in the Unfinished Nakba by Nithya Nagarajan.
-
Beyond the Internet: Radical Voices of Dissent
The title of our book is open to multiple interpretations, and purposely so, with the deliberate insertion of ‘beyond.’
For example, on a philosophical level, the word beyond means to examine the metaphysical character of the relationship between the Internet and dissenting voices. This isn’t abstract, because metaphysics is based on searching for the nature of reality, identity, of understanding causality, theorizing time and space.
So, the ‘nature of reality’ is to examine the relationship between the Internet and Dissent, which then allows us to understand ‘causality’. ‘Identity’ speaks for itself, and ‘time and space’, for example, is central to many indigenous peoples’ thinking in Latin America with regards to ancestral issues, colonialism, and relations with nature.
It also includes issues concerning potentialities (dissent and activism), which connects to our central question: What is the relationship between the Internet and dissent?
On a concrete level, we know that the relationship between technology and resistance differs according to the context of each struggle. Many resistance groups and individual dissenting voices embrace the Internet, whilst others do not, and this is what we are seeking to explore and understand.
The perfect dream of technolibertarians or cyberlibertarians that the Internet would enhance freedoms, free from state authority, is over, if ever it had begun.
In many cases, the Internet has become a form of State surveillance over the activities and thoughts of political activists forcing groups to move ‘offline’, or to use old fashioned terminology, ‘take to the streets.’
But conversely, many dissenting voices embrace the Internet and social media, and it’s our purpose to explore the uses the Internet may or may not have in specific contexts.
Thus, our aim is to listen to the voices of those at the sharp end of resistance, and to inquire what role, the Internet plays, in their respective forms of resistance.
CONTENTS
When Radicalism Becomes Dissent (David Berry)
The Internet & Dissent (David Berry)
The Cheran Insurrection: Peoples’ Grassroots Democracy (Victor Alfonzo Zerthuche Cobos)
Kurdish Resistance & Homeland (Name Pending)
New Weapons of Resistance in the Amazon (Sue Branford & Mauricio Torres)
Burmese Guerilla Warfare, Technology & Identity (Maran Ja Yi Ma)
Struggles for Nationhood: Comparing the Mapuche of Chile & the Welsh (Franco Ramos Guiterez & David Berry)
In Conversation with Caoimhghin O’ Croidheain: Radical Irish Artist (Iglika Gerganova)
An Interview with Iranian Artist Roshi Rouzbehani (David Berry)
Defenders of the Land: The Colombian Minga (Valentina Murillo)
Grassroots Journalism in India: the story behind Khabar Lahariya (Rosa Sylvia Parks)When Radicalism Becomes Dissent (David Berry)
The Internet & Dissent (David Berry)
The Cheran Insurrection: Peoples’ Grassroots Democracy (Victor Alfonzo Zerthuche Cobos)
Kurdish Resistance & Homeland (Name Pending)
New Weapons of Resistance in the Amazon (Sue Branford & Mauricio Torres)
Burmese Guerilla Warfare, Technology & Identity (Maran Ja Yi Ma)
Struggles for Nationhood: Comparing the Mapuche of Chile & the Welsh (Franco Ramos Guiterez & David Berry)
In Conversation with Caoimhghin O’ Croidheain: Radical Irish Artist (Iglika Gerganova)
An Interview with Iranian Artist Roshi Rouzbehani (David Berry)
Defenders of the Land: The Colombian Minga (Valentina Murillo)
Grassroots Journalism in India: the story behind Khabar Lahariya (Rosa Sylvia Parks) -
Lines of Fire: Poetry of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Movement
“It is unclear when ‘Lotus’, a literary magazine of progressive Afro-Asian writers largely funded by the USSR, published its last issue after a successful run spanning two decades (1968-1991); but it was certainly a voice of the Palestinian people.
Professor Tariq Mehmood Ali teaches English at the American University of Beirut and is an award-winning novelist and a documentary filmmaker. A few years ago, he launched a project to restore the magazine’s legacy. The project involves curating, saving, preserving, and digitizing old issues, offering historical depth to the Palestine movement and potentially making the magazine accessible to a new generation of readers from Palestine and the rest of the Global South.
“‘Lotus’ resolutely opposed Zionism, seeing it as a racist tool of imperialism,” says Prof Ali, who has pored over innumerable issues of the magazine. He suggests that Palestinians would not have had such a raw deal if the publication was still in circulation.
‘Lotus’ championed the cause of the Palestinian Liberation Operation (PLO) and even passed a resolution on Palestine at its third Afro-Asian conference held in Beirut (1970-71). These and other details find mention in Prof Ali’s book ‘Afro-Asian Poetry that Changed the World’, scheduled for a spring 2024 release.
‘Lotus’ was a trilingual quarterly magazine published in Arabic, English and French – and then translated into numerous languages of formerly colonized countries.
“The writers of ‘Lotus’ as well as the journal itself had a huge cultural impact at the time, affecting tens of millions of people. This was the first time writers of Africa and Asia were able to talk to each other, across their vast continents, outside the prism of their colonial and imperial usurpers,” says Prof Ali, who is currently busy digitizing and archiving the magazine. …
Some of the prominent writers who contributed to ‘Lotus’ included Youssef El Sebai, Abdel Aziz Sadek, Edward El Kharrat (Egypt), Mouloud Mammeri (Algeria), Mulk Raj Anand (India), Hiroshi Noma, (Japan), Dr Soheil Idriss (Lebanon), Sononym Udval (Mongolia), Faiz Ahmed Faiz (Pakistan), Mario De Andrade (Portuguese Colonies), Mohamed Soleinian (Sudan), Alex La Guma (South Africa), Anatoly Sofronov (USSR), Adonis (Lebanon) and Mahmoud Darwish (Palestine).
The magazine instituted the Lotus Prize and among its recipients were Pakistan’s Faiz Ahmed Faiz and India’s Harivansh Rai Bachchan (whose son Amitabh is a well-known actor). Translation bureaus were launched in many countries of the two continents – so that people could read each other’s works.
By Lamat Hasan, an independent journalist based in Delhi.
-
Episodes from a colonial present
Postcolonial critique deconstructs global inequality in its epistemic and material dimensions. This collective comic project illuminates everyday life’s coloniality as well as the decolonising potential of everyday struggles in the spaces, discourses and practices of so-called ‘global development’. -
Transcending our Colonial Place: Africa and the dialectics of emancipation
Fanon exhorted us (his posthumous comrades) to abandon Eurocentric thinking and to reconnect with dialectical thought in order as he puts it to “work out new concepts” and he insisted that “if we want humanity to advance a step farther […] then we must invent and we must make discoveries”. I propose to take Fanon at his word and to return to the dialectic as subjective thought rather than as motion of history; as a specific political subjectivity rather than as an objective development. Dialectical thought should be considered as the core feature of any politics of emancipation, a politics that is founded on what is common to humanity, an egalitarian alternative to the existing neocolonial racist capitalist organisation of society.
This book seeks to outline and assess the thinking of emancipatory politics in Africa as it changed in different historical periods. It also contrasts such politics to state political subjectivities which, by their very nature, reproduce given social placements or stated differently the allocation of people to hierarchical locations in society. Emancipatory politics always affirms a rejection of the place allocated to the oppressed and therefore contradicts and transcends the regular state subjectivities embodied in culture which ultimately attempt to justify such placement. Emancipatory politics is exceptional and therefore rare, and it is dialectical because it combines in a contradictory manner the culture of placement from which it emanates with the idea of universal freedom.
Dialectics is not the affirmation of historical necessity; it is a subjective political possibility opposed to (neo)colonial capitalism which has relegated the majority of our population to conditions of perennial impoverishment, oppression and gradual alienation from any Idea of being Human. This work illustrates the fact that dialectical thought has existed in Africa over millennia, with its earliest manifestation being in Ancient Egypt. The text also draws on the universalist content of African proverbs to show the possible dialectical content of African modes of thought, illustrating the emancipatory potential already in existence in some African cultures.
The contemporary attempts at achieving freedom on the African continent – the liberation struggles of the twentieth century – failed fundamentally because they rapidly abandoned any idea of universal humanity and held that emancipation was to be achieved through the medium of the state. It was the desire of the oligarchy that inherited independence to be accepted and integrated into the global capitalist economy for the purposes of state-led ‘development’. The effect, after a short nationalist interlude, was not an inclusive form of ‘nation-building’ but rather the building of a neocolonial state by a Western-oriented oligarchy unable or unwilling to meet the basic needs of its own people. To succeed in this endeavour, the newly independent state retained many oppressive features of its colonial predecessor remoulding them to suit its needs. The book shows how in an overwhelmingly neocolonial context, it is of little consequence to the oppressed masses in Africa whether their political system is formally labelled as ‘democratic’ or not. In fact, given the endemic corruption among the oligarchies in power, military dictatorships can garner mass popular support for shorter or longer periods if they are seen to resist (however mildly) neocolonial domination. The recent examples (early 2020s) of proto-nationalist military coups in Francophone West Africa (Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger) are cases in point.
This book develops theoretical arguments that redirect intellectual thought away from Euro-American liberal conceptions as well as from neo-nativist fashions and vulgar Marxisms, so as to reassert the importance of latent ‘African potentials’ that are frequently embodied in collective popular statements for rethinking, dialectically, a true politics of emancipation on the African continent.
1) the Ancient World: Ancient Egypt (The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant – 4000 BCE) and Plato (as read by Alain Badiou);
2) Pre-colonial Africa and resistance to slavery: the Donsolu Kalikan (in the Manden/Mali, 1222), the Antonian Movement (in Kongo, 1684-1706) and its continuation in the Lemba Movement, and the Haitian Revolution (undertaken by slaves from Africa),
3) The National Liberation Struggles of the 1960s as thought by Fanon and Cabral, and
4) The mass popular struggles in South Africa during the 1980s.