Language & Praxis of Decolonization through the Reclamation of Land & Dignity

Africa World Now Project

[Note: Produced and aired in 2017]

In the Wretched of the Earth, Fanon writes: “Decolonization never goes unnoticed […] it infuses a new rhythm, specific to a new generation of men, with a new language and a new humanity...” (Fanon 1961:2)

However, the process of decolonization has yet to reach full expression. The praxis of decolonization, the promise of a radical humanism, a new relation of being in the world, remains severely arrested.

If decolonization was an intentional and direct response to colonialism, decolonization failed in uprooting the colonial repressive systems…on mass scale.

For Fanon, “the colonial world is a compartmentialized world […] a world divided in two. The dividing line, the border…” An idea Du Bois names as the color line, the poverty line…a siphoning of the world’s resources into the hands of a few, safeguarded and securitized by barracks, the police station, drones, the banks, multinational corporations, private interests and capital.

In the past twenty years, throughout the Africana world as well as the global south, burgeoning social movements constituting what Sylvia Wynter describes as “the vast majority of peoples who inhabit the favela/shanty town’ of the globe and their jobless archipelagos…at the national level, Baldwin’s ‘captive population’ in the urban inner cities, (and on the Native Reservations of the United States),” have reinvigorated and expanded the arena and language of grassroots politics and political action (Wynter, No Humans Involved: 60).

We see this, in particular with the youth movements across Africa and more clearly with the “Black First, Land First” which invokes the Fanon postulation that: “For a colonized people the most essential value, because it’s the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity” (Fanon 1961: 44).

Today, we will deeply engage with the language and praxis of decolonization through one of the most important land and dignity movements in South Africa… Abahlali baseMjondolo, also known as Durban Shack Dwellers’ Movement with Dr. Yousuf Al-Bulushi, an assistant of Professor of Peace Studies at Goucher College.

After this, we look at the the community of Buenaventura (along with communities in the Chocó region of Colombia) where a general strike was launched (May 16th)) demanding that the Colombian government meet the basic human rights to water, education, health, culture, land and freedom from racism and violence. The strike caused businesses to closed, road blocks were set up at several points along the main road and peaceful protestors chanted, sang, danced and banged cooking pots to call attention to the desperate situation.

According to a recent report from the Black Alliance for Peace, released on June 12, after many hours of dialogues and negotiations an agreement was reached in the early hours of Tuesday 6th June, bringing an end to a 22-day strike in Buenaventura, Colombia. The strike, in the mainly Afro-descendant and Indigenous city on Colombia’s Pacific Coast was an inspirational reminder of how collective, local level and “people-centered” human rights processes can challenge economic powers and neoliberal politics (Baraka, 2013)[1].

We will hear a report on what happened and prospects of this agreement from Afro Colombian human rights activist Charo Mina Rojas of Black Communities Process in Colombia-International Working Group (PCN); and Afro Colombian Solidarity Network. Enjoy the rest of program.

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; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Enjoy the program.