Africa World Now Project

By: Africa World Now Project
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  • Summary

  • Africa World Now Project is a multimedia educational project that produces knowledge about the African world through a series of methods that include: radio, podcast, publishing, film festivals, webinars, social media, etc. Africa World Now Project is, in essence, a multimedia open-access 'classroom' that provides actionable information which explores continuities and discontinuities in the history, culture, and politics of the entire African world. AWNP does this by engaging in organic discussions with scholars, artists, journalists, activists, organizers and others who are intentionally disruptive in assessing the various issues that exist in the entire African world.
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Episodes
  • the political praxis of Jamil Abdullah al-Amin

    the political praxis of Jamil Abdullah al-Amin
    Jul 24 2024
    On August 31, 1967, several thousand delegates gathered at the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago for the opening rally of the National Conference for New Politics (NCNP) convention. This event was an ambitious attempt to develop a broad coalition of over 200 different organizations, that included the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Students for a Democratic Society, the Socialist Workers Party, and the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. According to Arun Kundnani [2023] in ‘The New Malcolm X’: Who was Jamil Al-Amin – The Forgotten Radical of the Civil Rights Movement?, “On the opening night, Dr. King outlined an anti-capitalist politics that had become essential to his worldview.” This, of course, has been erased from dominant discourses on Dr. King. For King: “Capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of Black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor – both Black and white, both here and abroad.” The only solution: “a radical redistribution of political and economic power” (Kundnani, 2023). Another key point to highlight was that there was talk at the convention of running King as an independent candidate of the Left in the following year’s presidential elections.” Despite the prominent role of King and SCLC, the leading Black organization at the NCNP convention was the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), chaired by Jamil al-Amin, then known as H. Rap Brown. Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Jamil al-Amin worked with the civil rights movement in Alabama and Mississippi in the mid-1960s. He was only twenty-three years old when he was elected SNCC’s national chair, four months before the NCNP convention. As he traveled the US that summer, federal agents and informants constantly tailed him. In the month and a half before arriving in Chicago, he had been shot in the face with buckshot by a deputy sheriff and arrested twice, on incitement to arson and riot in Maryland (a state attorney later admitted to fabricating the charges) and on firearms charges in Louisiana (these were voided on appeal when it emerged that the judge had announced at the state’s Bar Association convention before the trial that “I’m going to get that ni**er”). A few days before the NCNP convention, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover sent a memo to all the bureau’s field offices, instructing them to establish new, secret “counter-intelligence endeavors,” to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings.” Arun Kundnani is a writer interested in race, Islamophobia, surveillance, political violence, and radicalism. Born in London, he moved to New York in 2010 and now lives in Philadelphia. Kundnani is the author of What is Antiracism? ([published by Verso Books, 2023), The Muslims are Coming! (Verso Books, 2014) and The End of Tolerance (published by Pluto Press, 2007), which was selected as a New Statesman book of the year. He has written for the Nation, the Guardian, the Washington Post, Vice, and The Intercept to name a few outlets. Educated at Cambridge University, he holds a PhD from London Metropolitan University. He has been a scholar-in-residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and a former editor of the Race & Class, the quarterly journal of the Institute of Race Relations in London. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana; Ayati; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Listen intently. Think critically. Act accordingly.
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    1 hr and 49 mins
  • the sociopolitical thought of General Baker, DRUM & The League Of Revolutionary Black Workers

    the sociopolitical thought of General Baker, DRUM & The League Of Revolutionary Black Workers
    Jul 6 2024
    Today, we will listen to General Baker from a 2010 talk he gave at the U.S. Social Forum held in Detroit where he maps the history of struggle in Detroit, the formation of radical workers movements, and the legacies of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Born in Detroit, Michigan, on September 6, 1941, right after his family had moved north from Augusta, Georgia. General Baker’s father worked for Midland Steel in the 1940s, and later in a job with Chrysler. The Baker family settled in a home in Southwest Detroit. Gen Baker grew up in a union household, and often attended union events with his father. Baker graduated early from the nominally integrated Southwestern High School in 1958. General Baker is one of the founding members of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) in 1968 and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in 1969. Baker’s involvement in radical politics dates from the early 1960s. He had been a member of UHURU and the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) and later the Communist League. Following the Detroit riot of July 1967, an event known to some as the Great Rebellion, General Baker and his fellow radicals sensed an opportunity for new organizing efforts. In September 1967, Baker, John Watson, Mike Hamlin, and Luke Tripp started a newspaper called the Inner-City Voice. The paper focused on issues of concern to Detroit’s Black population, including working conditions, housing, health care, welfare programs, and schools, all from a Marxist perspective. In addition to publishing the Inner-City Voice, Baker, Hamlin, and other Inner City Voice staff members formed a study group to discuss how to implement revolutionary political change. On May 2, 1968, in response to a work speedup at the Dodge Main plant in Hamtramck, Baker led several thousand workers out of the plant in a wildcat strike. On May 5, the Chrysler Corporation dismissed Baker from his job for violating the no-strike clause of the collective bargaining agreement between Chrysler and the United Auto Workers (UAW). As a result of this strike, Baker and his fellow activists formed DRUM. DRUM saw both Chrysler and the UAW as enemies of workers of African descent, and from 1968 into the early 1970s, DRUM worked to gain more power for African American workers and to improve working conditions at Dodge Main. General Baker is and will continue to be one of our important sociopolitical and cultural theoreticians of the 20th century that provided essential perspectives for the 21st century. As part of the collective of revolutionary workers who sought to organize the Black working class in conjunction with addressing issues in the larger Black community, Gen Baker was a living example of theory and practice in context of Black liberation, globally. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana; Ayati; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Listen intently. Think critically. Act accordingly.
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    1 hr and 12 mins
  • the time of the Black radical tradition

    the time of the Black radical tradition
    Jun 18 2024
    re/posting from our archive ... from 7+ years ago. a lot to grasp here!
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    57 mins
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Profile Image for Terri

Refreshing!

Professor Paul Zeleza brings perspective to how we as non-African natives view the African Diaspora in terms of education and religion. The baseline of our knowledge production is heavily influenced by the constructed agenda of those who want to control the narrative which in turn are highly inaccurate. The challenges of access and resources to higher education in certain areas of the African continent, and opportunities to build universities that help build the intellectual economy and so much more! I am eager to knowledge build with more works from Paul Zeleza. This was a refreshing build for critical thought on the global level in our current situation…

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