Africa World Now Project Collective cover art

Africa World Now Project Collective

Africa World Now Project Collective

By: Africa World Now Project Collective
Listen for free

About this listen

 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.All rights reserved
Episodes
  • the story of the league of revolutionary Black workers

    the story of the league of revolutionary Black workers
    Nov 6 2025
    The struggle of the LRBW was centered on the political development of Black workers inside the development of global capitalism in the United States and within a leading sector of capitalist production in the early and mid-twentieth century, which was then, the auto-industry. This socio-economic location molded a section of Black workers into working-class revolutionaries. The historical moment that shaped LRBW was located at the nexus of the post-World War II capitalist expansion and the beginning of capitalist globalization, rooted in the new technical evolution of the forces of production: a turn to industrial automation of the workplace. The very process of their pedagogy of revolution, was their study of theory and what is produced when this theory is applied to real-world experiences, which shaped their practice into workers power. To study the intellectual processes of the LRBW in the context of a developing global capitalism, as they are identifying a pedagogy of revolution is an essential frame of reference that can offer contemporary working-class movements a guide of action. Meaning, the point of discovering the intellectual processes (theoretical development) of the LRBW opens space for us to understand the processes of how [and in what ways] they were intent to developing a worker’s movement. As we pay attention to their ability to identify and name the world around them and the steps they took to then engage their realities in a larger context is an important point of entry to building working class unity. This development, seen as a process, serves to situate them historically, while also guiding us to identify what to extract from their practice that can be applied to the [static] and evolving conditions workers find themselves in today. What questions were left for us to take up, what are the contours of their thought and practice that be extended and expanded? What are the similarities and dissimilarities in the conditions that workers find themselves across sectors? And What is to be done? The LRBW is an interesting and complicated expression of the relationship between Black workers in Detroit and the global capitalist system. It was a struggle between autoworkers, the union, and the automobile industry. It encompassed the struggles and contradictions between the workers and the bosses, as well as between workers and the union of which they were a part. This period exposed the glaring internal and external contradictions of racism within and around the workers movement, historically and in that moment. Yet, the LRBW was able to develop a process of struggle combining both theory and practice. Today, we explore the story of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers with Jerome Scott and walda katz-fishman, authors of Motown and the Making of Working-Class Revolutionaries: The story of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. walda katz-fishman is a scholar activist and professor of sociology at Howard University. A founding member and former board chair of Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty & Genocide, she is a contributing author or editor of popular education toolkits and books, including The United States Social Forum: Perspectives of a Movement and The Roots of Terror, among others. Jerome Scott is a former autoworker, labor organizer in Detroit auto plants, and member of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. The founding director of Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty & Genocide, he is a contributing author or editor of popular education toolkits and books, including The United States Social Forum: Perspectives of a Movement and The Roots of Terror, among others, as well.
    Show More Show Less
    1 hr and 19 mins
  • Pt. III | Fanon & the decolonial imperative Pt II

    Pt. III | Fanon & the decolonial imperative Pt II
    Oct 16 2025
    This cannot be repeated enough, as the dialectical relationship between anti-colonial praxis and the colonial logic of capital becomes ever more fascistic, we must be ever more clear on how violence is necessary to distort and make imperceptible … the possibilities of a future. Simply put, the ever more overt application of violence as a means to maintain oppressive social structures that guide the formation of consciousness, the more it arrests our ability to engage with ‘the beyond struggle’, beyond the now moment. The vast majority of us are caught within the cyclical patterns of manufactured realities of capitalist imagination. Capital needs the literal life-[blood] of those who are constituent parts of these manufactured realities; realities captured in incorrect notions of the inevitability of conflict, induced resource scarcity, the logic of private property, aggressive individualism, and the insolvability of the climate crisis. We are expected to spend majority of our time and energy surviving the daily crucible designed by capital. Ok, I can go on … but let’s not get lost in the rhetoric and now that you are probably equally lost in this long opening thought, we should, at this point, circle back to what I suggest cannot “be repeated enough” …: And that is…: Colonial violence and colonial discourse are at the heart of Western modernity. They are constituent features of Western European modern ontology, knowledge production and distribution, and sociopolitical thought and economic practice codified in the 14th century. The use of ontology is another way of saying, the study of the reality of ‘being’; in simpler terms, what makes a thing, a thing. It is clear [or at least it should be] what and who the ‘monsters’ are, so it is not necessarily novel in itself. But it still bears repeating. To add more clarity, adding more perspective, hoping to make more sense, what I am suggesting here is that we are living in the 21st century with 14th century conceptualizations of reality produced from the subsequent violence inherent in the contradictions built over centuries through capitalist logic … all interdependent on supremacist notions of a constructed whiteness. A world where false notions of reality are attached to color [and class, culture, gender, and formations of consciousness]. This violence we are facing is what Fanon was unpacking. Structures of violence is what Fanon was intent to deconstruct, and one of his important contributions to a: decolonial imperative. Therefore, it is, here, within the material and nonmaterial parameters of violence that we can explore and examine Fanon’s corpus to construct frameworks of analysis. Though we should never neatly apply, nor seek to use linear logic, without taking into consideration the historical evolution in the material [and nonmaterial] conditions over time and space, Fanon’s decolonial imperative stands as an important point of entry to understanding the current historical moment. Nicholas Mwangi is a writer, organiser, and member of the Ukombozi Library in Kenya. He contributes regularly to People’s Dispatch. Nicholas has co-edited Breaking the Silence on NGOs in Africa and Kenyan Organic Intellectuals Reflect on the Legacy of Pio Gama Pinto. He is currently working on a forthcoming book titled The Crisis of Capitalism in Africa with the Organic Intellectuals Network in Kenya. Waringa Wahome is an organizer, political theorist, lawyer and also the coordinator of the legal empowerment hub at Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC). Waringa Wahome is a lawyer at Waringa Wahome & CO Advocates as well as member of the Kenyan Organic Intellectuals Network. Please forgive the quality of audio in certain parts of our conversation, the ideas and voices are essential and vital, so we choose to share with you. Not to mention one of our comrades/colleagues was outside of Nairobi at the time of the recording.
    Show More Show Less
    1 hr and 10 mins
  • Free Frank McWorter, Freedom Seekers & New Philadelphia w/ Abdul Alkalimat

    Free Frank McWorter, Freedom Seekers & New Philadelphia w/ Abdul Alkalimat
    Oct 6 2025
    It was 1839 and Frank and Lucy McWorter were getting married for the second time. The wedding was a reaffirmation of their love and a recommitment to all they’d built together. They had come to Illinois with four of their children and built a farm of golden wheat fields and towering stalks of corn. Though there was plenty of symbolism in their renewed vows, the McWorters remarried for a more pragmatic reason — they had been enslaved in Kentucky when they first committed to each other, but such marriages were rarely respected by U. S. courts. They had still been enslaved when they started their family, but Frank quickly began to plot their way to freedom. Frank’s owner and father, George McWhorter, trusted Frank to manage his farm and gave him leeway to earn money doing extra work. So, Frank learned how to mine and manufacture his own saltpeter, a necessary component in gunpowder. He used the money he earned selling saltpeter to buy freedom for him and his family. He began freeing his family in 1817. By this time Lucy and Frank were raising Judah, Frank Jr., Sarah, and Solomon, but Frank first bought Lucy’s freedom. She was pregnant at the time, so not only did he free Lucy, but his purchase also ensured that their son, Squire, would be born free. In 1819, he bought his own freedom, becoming Free Frank, and later changed his name to Frank McWorter — dropping the “h” from his former enslaver’s last name. Frank and Lucy, along with several children they had managed to free, moved west to Illinois in 1830 to the land that would become their farm in Pike County. He traded his saltpeter operation for Frank Jr.’s freedom after Junior had fled his enslavement to Canada. Frank made trips back to Kentucky to purchase the freedom of each of his three remaining enslaved children and at least one grandchild. On each trip, Frank McWorter had to make the gut-wrenching decision of which child he would free and which he would leave behind to endure slavery. The McWorters spent $14,000 to free their family. Adjusted for inflation, that is nearly $500,000 in 2023. Frank McWorter began his farm with 160 acres and eventually increased those holdings to over 500 acres. Along with his corn and wheat, he grew oats and raised cattle, hogs, and horses. In 1836, Frank divided forty-two acres of his land into town lots and founded the town of New Philadelphia. The town, the first officially founded by African Americans, prospered with both Black and white residents and formed part of a larger rural community of farmers. The town’s very existence as a biracial community in a state with repressive Black Codes on the books until 1865 was a defiant statement against racial inequality. New Philadelphia was an audacious project, a prelude to Black communities like Nicodemus, Kansas; DeWitty, Nebraska; Blackdom, New Mexico; and Boley, Oklahoma, founded in the West after the Civil War. For more: New Philadelphia, Gerald A. McWorter and Kate Williams-McWorter Sign the petition: https://chng.it/q5Q5XS9cFd
    Show More Show Less
    55 mins
No reviews yet
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.