Organising in the times of Covid-19

01/21/2022

Kali Akuno, the co-founder of Cooperation Jackson, recently wrote that "we have a little less than two years before the neo-confederates and neo-fascists install a reactionary dictatorship by the end of January 2025." What can be done under such circumstances given the rise and confidence of the right and the weakness of the left in the USA? What measures can be taken for self-defence, ensuring people have access to food and other basic necessities in the face of threats from the dictatorship and far-right militia? What should be the political response? Organizing around voting rights is necessary, but is it sufficient? What are the possibilities for mass mobilizations? Will that hasten the development of the civil war? What are the implications of COVID in this context?

As Frantz Fanon once prophetically stated, “each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.” The question is, says Kali Akuno, which one of these will we choose?

"The choice is ours. We can panic and follow the liberal road to ruin, either intentionally or by default. Or we can rise up, build on our experiences, move from our strengths and forge a new path."

Kali Akuno is in conversation with Firoze Manji of Daraja Press to discuss these and other issues in greater depth.

Date: 28 January 2022
Time: 4:00 pm to 5:30 pm, EST

01/07/2022

I speak with Rob Wallace about his excellent article on Patreon: "Don't look up...COVID's infectious period" available at https://bityl.co/AOvI. Omicron variant is everywhere. It isn't the only variant in the mix. The crisis is growing to unprecedented proportions. The response of governments is underwhelming, obsessed as they are to prioritizing profiteering over people's health. Workers on the 'frontlines' of health care, services, manufacturing, those living or working in overcrowded conditions are simply being left to suffer or die. Racism prevails. There is international apartheid but also domestic apartheid prevailing in many countries. Testing and vaccinations are necessary but completely insufficient, while healthcare systems that have long been underfunded or privatized, are facing collapse. Analyses and criticisms are equally necessary but insufficient a response. What can be done? What forms of resistance and rebellion can bring about change?

12/16/2021

My heart feels broken.

bell hooks changed my life in countless ways.

I once wrote that her work is responsible for 90% of the stretch marks on my heart and my mind.

I slept with “Teaching to Transgress” next to me when I was a brand-new professor. I was so afraid of the classroom that I needed her constant reminder of education as liberation. It had to be an honest space and that meant uncomfortable.

I bought copies of “All About Love” for our facilitators as a reminder of how a love ethic needs to guide our work—and not a soft, safe love but a fierce love in the face of the lovelessness of sexism, classism, white supremacy, and the other systems that dehumanize people and belittle love.

She was scheduled to be our first podcast guest on “Unlocking Us.” I couldn’t believe it! Barrett and I were going to fly to her sister’s house to record it. Then COVID hit and it never happened. It never happened.

To Yaba and Tarana and Laverne and Austin—can we please NEVER stop these conversations: “Which one of bell hooks’ book is that quote in . . . remember when bell hooks said . . . what about when she challenged . . . man, I don’t know the answer, but her question gutted me.”

So much grief. So much gratitude.

https://brenebrown.com/articles/2019/10/09/doubling-down-on-love/

12/12/2021

11/26/2021

I talk with April Zhu and Stoneface Bombaa about archiving lost/erased histories of resistance in Kenya through the production of podcasts and radio in Sheng, the alternate language of the informal settlements.

April Zhu is a freelance journalist based in Nairobi, where she has written on gender, urban inequality, and China-Kenya as seen from the margin. While interviewing Stoneface for pieces on police brutality in Nairobi’s ghettos for The New York Review of Books Daily and The Baffler Magazine, a theme kept emerging in their conversations: archiving forgotten histories of resistance in Kenya.

Stoneface Bombaa (Huduma Namba names Brian Otieno) is a community organizer at the Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC), where he runs the MSJC Kids Club and Art for Social Change. He is also a member of the Mathare Green Movement (MGM), a group of volunteers who, through planting trees throughout the informal settlement, practice collective imagination and action. His work at MSJC and MGM have given him a clear view of the “ecological injustice” that permeates life in Nairobi’s ghettos: exclusion from basic infrastructure like water, roads, electricity, exclusion from healthcare, exclusion from education, and so on. Stoneface has spent time helping young people in Mathare understand the systemic nature of the everyday violence that shapes their lives. Until Everyone Is Free is an extension of that work.

10/16/2021

In this fourth discussion of Fanon Today: Reason and Revolt of the Wretched of the Earth (Daraja Press, 2021), Nigel C Gibson (editor) and Firoze Manji (publisher) will be discussing the relevance of Frantz Fanon today to struggles in Northern Ireland (Feargal Mac Ionnrachtaigh), Kenya (Wangui Kimari) and Pakistan (Ayyaz Malik).
* Feargal Mac Ionnrachtaigh is a first generation Irish speaker and a product of the Irish Medium Education system in Belfast. He studied at Queens University Belfast and his doctoral thesis (2009) was pub- lished as a book, Language, Resistance and Revival: Republican Pris- oners and the Irish Language in the North of Ireland (Pluto). He is also the author of Féile Voices at 30’-Memoirs of West Belfast Community Festival Féile an Phobail (Orpen Press). He works full-time in the Irish language revival movement as Director of Irish Language youth and community organisation, Glór na Móna (www.glornamona.com) and is a prominent member of the An Dream Dearg Irish language rights grassroots campaigning network.
* Wangui Kimari is the participatory action research coordinator for the
Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC) in Nairobi, Kenya. MSJC is a community space in the informalized settlement of Mathare, which seeks to promote social justice through engaged community and social movement platforms.
+Ayyaz Mallick is a political worker of the Awami Workers’ Party from Karachi, Pakistan, a left-wing party focussed on organising workers, peasants, students, and women. He recently completed his PhD from York University, Toronto, and is currently a Lecturer in Human Geog- raphy at the University of Liverpool. His research interests are in Marx- ist and postcolonial theory with a focus on labour, urban politics, and social movements.
+ Razan Ghazzawi (she/they) is an exiled Palestinian-Syrian scholar- activist and an award winning human rights defender and blogger since 2005. They are currently finishing their doctoral thesis, an ethnographic exploration of sexuality politics in Syria in the context of the ‘war on terror’ and the ‘refugee crisis’ in Syria and Lebanon by looking at everyday violence facing Syrian and Palestinian LGBTQ persons on checkpoints and during pre-trial detentions. Razan was detained twice by the Syrian state and was exiled by Al Qayda and ISIS groups in Northern Syria. They are the founder of the Feminist ArQives since 2014 and a co-founder of Karama Bus project in Idlib, Northern Syria, since 2013. They currently reside between Brighton and Chicago and tweets under .

08/24/2021

This is the second in the series of interviews with authors of chapters in the recently published Fanon Today: Reason and Revolt of the Wretched of the Earth. On this occasion, the editor - Nigel C. Gibson - and the publisher of Daraja Press, Firoze Manji discuss with authors Samah Jabr, Elizabeth Berger, Rosemere Fereira da Silva, Miraj U. Desai and Deivison Mendes Faustino about their perspectives.

Samah Jabr is a psychiatrist and psychotherapist living in East Jerusalem, serving as the Head of the Mental Health Unit within the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
Elizabeth Berger is a child psychiatrist living in New York and a found- ing/steering committee member of the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network (https://usapalmhn.com/).
Rosemere Ferreira da Silva is Titular Professor at the State University of Bahia (Universidade do Estado da Bahia / UNEB), where she has taught since 2012. She is a specialist in Brazilian Literature, Afro- Brazilian Literature, Comparative Literature and Ethnic and African Studies.
Miraj U. Desai is a writer, psychologist, activist, dancer, artist, and author of Travel and Movement in Clinical Psychology: The World Outside the Clinic. He is on the faculty of the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health, an organization committed to advancing social and health justice.
Deivison Faustino is an anti-racist researcher and disseminator of Frantz Fanon’s thought in Brazil.

08/22/2021

The death toll continues to rise after a 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti over the weekend.

08/21/2021

This is the first of a series of launches of Fanon Today: Reason and Rationality of the Wretched of the Earth, published by Daraja Press in August 2021 (https://bit.ly/3aAmB1h). The editor of the book, Nigel C Gibson will be talking with one group of authors: Gene Reid, Lou Turner, Levi Gahman, Johannah-Rae Reyes , and Toussaint Losier about the the rationality of revolt in the US and the Caribbean

07/16/2021

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp relief the deep structural problems affecting 'non-white', racialized workers in the core and periphery. Yet, many social scientific analyses of the global political economy, at least in the pre-COVID era, have been race neutral or wilfully indifferent to the persistent racial pattern of global inequalities.

In this interview, David Austin, author of Dread Poetry and Freedom: Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Unfinished Revolution, Fear of a Black Nation: Race, S*x, and Security in Sixties Montreal, talks with Zophia Edwards, Associate Professor of Sociology and Black Studies at Providence College, Rhode Island US and author of a brilliant analysis of Racial Capitalism and COVID-19 (https://monthlyreview.org/2021/03/01/racial-capitalism-and-covid-19/) about the unremitting super-exploitation of Black and other non-white racialized labor in the core and the periphery that has persisted throughout the COVID-19 crisis, viewed from the lens of Black radical scholarship on racism and capitalism.

DATE: FRIDAY JULY 16
TIME: 16:00 EDT / 12:00 UTC-4

03/16/2021

Rene Loewenson speaks to Firoze Manji:
ON THE PODCASTS THEMSELVES
1. Your interviews have covered a wide range of countries, social groups, organising spaces, areas of struggle – what have you perceived as common across them? what has been unique or different?
a. There are many rich, interesting podcasts – If you had to name two that struck you as essential ‘listening’ which are they and why?
ON ISSUES FROM THEM
2. What have the interviews highlighted about how organising in a time of COVID is any different to prior issues, forms, spaces, processes? Is the pandemic demanding or opening new lenses, issues, strategies / tactics; or how is it affecting longstanding justice issues/ methods/ alliances?
a. Rather than ‘building back better’ your interviews point to an aspiration for transformation. From the diverse interviews you have done where do you see the windows of opportunity, key and strategic sites of struggle moving forward?
b. How do you see the longer term developments on vaccines, information technology on COVID and beyond (and in the ‘health- lifesciences-information industry’) affecting these sites of struggle?
CONCLUDING
3. Daraja publishes many interesting books also! What do the podcasts bring that you don’t find in the books- and what do the books bring that you don’t find in the podcasts?
4. Finally who / what is on your wish list for future interviews?

03/04/2021

Shemon Salam & Arturo Castillon discuss their new pamphlet on the meaning of the George Floyd Uprising (https://darajapress.com/publication/insurgent-possibilities-reflections-from-the-george-floyd-uprising)

02/25/2021

For the love of the struggle: Memoirs from El Salvador By:Andrés (Drew) McKinley is published by Daraja Press https://darajapress.com/publication/for-the-love-of-the-struggle-memoirs-from-el-salvador. This book launch is a conversation between Andrés and Brian Murphy.

"Andrés McKinley’s book For the Love of the Struggle is a moving and personal account of his involvement in the fight for justice in El Salvador during the civil war of the 1980s. But more than the events he describes, with great detail and political insight, it is his love for the people of El Salvador that sets this book apart. From working with church related organizations, to joining the guerrillas in the liberated zones, to his work along the communities opposing metallic mining, it is his relation- ship with the people, particularly the humbler ones, which stands out. Most books that deal with the civil war in El Salvador end with the signing of the Peace Accords, which put an end to the armed conflict and laid the foundation for a more democratic and just El Salvador. As important as the Peace Agreements were, they did not solve all the problems and conflicts of the country. When several rural communities were threatened in the early 2000s by the efforts of trans- national gold mining interests, they rose in defence of their rights through social organization and peaceful opposition. In spite of the repression they suffered, after 17 years of struggle they finally prevailed, showing how people united, can bring about change. This belief is particularly important now, at a moment in which our democratic institutions are being threatened precisely by those who should be the first to protect them. It is the role of organized civil society to defend what we have conquered and McKinley’s book is an excellent and timely reminder that this is something possible and necessary to achieve.— Francisco Altschul is a former Salvadoran Ambassador to the United States

02/18/2021

The Alternative Mining Indaba (AMI) is a global platform that brings all stakeholders together annually for a conference that debates, discusses various issues as well as serves as an empowerment tool through training of communities. The AMI convenes an annual conference in Cape Town every February, which is a culmination of decentralised national processes that take place in more than 12 African countries. While initially focused predominantly in Southern Africa, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania in the East have also joined, with country-specific conferences and workshops within communities where extraction of mineral resources occurs. The processes are convened as Village-level Alternative Mining Indabas (VAMIs) or Local-level AMIs (LAMIs), District-level AMIs (DAMIs), Provincial AMIs (PAMIs) and National AMIs (NAMIs). Thus the overall AMI experience or umbrella annually reaches or is accessed by about 6000 participants directly and cascades to a further 8000 through advocacy and campaign activities. The timing of these processes is to coincide and counter industry-related conferences and seminars and narratives while allowing communities to interact with government and mining company officials in the countries where mining takes place.

To date the platform has successfully grown into a space for honest engagement with policy makers including in African Union (AU) structures, SADC and soon East African Community (EAC), as well as National Governments, in relation to the importance of harmonisation of policy in the regions. The platform emphasises critical, joint and comprehensive monitoring by extractives industries, host countries, and most importantly host communities with the support of civil society organisations to safeguard preservation and care of creation for future generations.

I speak to Brown Motsau of the Bench Marks Foundation and one of his colleagues to provide a summary of the discussions and to speak about organising in the time of COVID-19

02/16/2021

I speak with Juliet Wanjira and Maryanne Kasina about COVID-19 in Nairobi.

Juliet Wanjira is co-founder of the Mathare social justice centers, founder Matigari kids book club, member of the social justice movement working group and women in social justice centers.I am a grassroots human right defender passionate about advocating for dignified lives in informal settlements and children rights.

Maryanne Kasina is a social justice political activist. She is the convener of the Women in Social justice Centres, and the co-founder of Kayole Community Justice Centre

02/11/2021

You may recall that I spoke to Mostafa Henaway last May about the scale of infections and deaths due to Coronavirus, affecting migrant workers, frontline workers, and those living in crowded accommodation. I thought it would be helpful to have an update on the current situation in Montreal.

Mostafa Henaway is a longtime community organizer at the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal which organizes with precarious im/migrant workers for their status, workplace dignity regardless of their status from undocumented workers, to temporary foreign workers, and those living with precarious status fighting for workplace and immigrant justice. Mostafa Henaway has also been a long-time solidarity activist for Palestinian self-determination with Tadamon (Solidarity in Arabic) which organizes to build active support for the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions campaign to end Israeli Apartheid. Has also been involved in Labour 4 Palestine and other solidarity movements with social movements across the Middle East and North Africa. Currently, Mostafa is a PHD candidate at Concordia University focusing on the economic geography of Amazon.com Inc. and is a writer on im/migrant labour and precarious work.

02/09/2021

I speak with Dr Rene Loewenson, a Zimbabwean epidemiologist and director of Training and Research Support Centre. After teaching for a decade at the University of Zimbabwe Medical school, she led a health department in the national trade union congress in the 1990s, worked with the African continental trade union body in health programmes and is a founder member of EQUINET (the Regional Network for Equity in Health in East and Southern Africa). She has since 1980 implemented research, participatory action research, policy analysis, training and negotiations on law and policy reform, and has led and contributed to various international consortia on equity in health, social determinants of health and health systems, on social participation in health, on policy change in family and child health and wellbeing and on public health law and practice.

What do we know about COVID-19 spread in Africa? What don't we know? Why don't we know what we need to know? Who is being infected and where? What are the good examples of state responses to the pandemic? Why has violence been such a feature of state responses? Peoples' responses - what can you tell us about organising in the time of COVID-19? Talk about EQUINET the excellent reports you've been producing on COVID-19.

02/04/2021

Access to health technologies (vaccines, medicines, diagnostics, PPE, ventilators etc) depends on the ability for distributed local production. Nationalism and protectionism on these technologies has implied a sustained struggle to get sufficient access to meet population needs, and global measures such as CTAP (for voluntary patent pooling) and COVAX (for vaccine and technology pooling) have not had the support that matches need. One of the barriers is the patent protection in the TRIPS agreement. On 18 January the WHO DG issued a warning that the world is on the verge of a “catastrophic moral failure” due to the denial of COVID-19 vaccines to developing and poorest countries. I speak with Leslie London, Professor of Public Health in the School of Public Health and Family Medicine University at the Cape Town, and Jens Pedersen from Medicins Sans Frontières

01/25/2021

Over the last few months we have seen the emergence of several successful mutations of COVID-19, famously in the UK where Rob Wallace named it the Bo-Jo virus! I speak with Rob Wallace to get a better understanding of the political and other conditions that favour the emergence of viable viruses.

Rob Wallace is an evolutionary epidemiologist with the Agroecology and Rural Economics Research Corps. He is author of Dead Epidemiologist, Big Farms Make Big Flu and coauthor of Clear-Cutting Disease Control: Capital-Led Deforestation, Public Health Austerity, and Vector-Borne Infection. He has consulted with the Food and Agriculture Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

01/20/2021

Samir Shaheen-Hussain has been involved in anti-authoritarian social justice movements – including Indigenous solidarity, anti-police brutality and migrant-justice organizing – for nearly two decades. He is a member of the Caring for Social Justice Collective, and has written or co-written about state violence and health care for several publications (see below). He is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University and works as a pediatric emergency physician in Tio’tia:ke (Montreal). He is the author of Fighting for A Hand to Hold which exposes the Canadian medical establishment’s role in the displacement, colonization, and genocide of Indigenous Peoples.

01/13/2021

09/24/2020

Sylvia Tamale, author of Decolonization and Afro-Feminism, will be discussing her new book with Charmaine Pereira, writer and feminist scholar in Abuja, Nigeria.

Host: Firoze Manji, Publisher, Daraja Press

September 24, 2002

9:00 am Eastern Time (Ottawa)
2:00 pm Nigeria Time
4:00 pm East Africa Time

08/12/2020

I speak with Banamallika Choudhury a feminist social activist and development consultant based in Guwhati, Assam. She is the Executive Director of Women's Leadership Training Centre and a co-founder of NEthing - an art and culture collective for social change. She does feminist participatory action research, writes on gender and social issues and organises women led grassroots feminist actions to address issues of gender discrimination.

08/06/2020

I speak to Dr Saerom KIM and Professor Chang-Yup KIM about how Korea has been dealing with COVID-19

Saerom KIM, MD, Ph.D., MPH, is a director of Gender and Health research center at the People's Health Institute, Korea. The focus of the research area is participation, empowerment, gender, and power in health-related decision making. Saerom has been working as a communication coordinator of the People's Health Movement, Korea.

Chang-yup KIM, MD, PhD, MPH, is a professor of health policy at the School of Public Health, Seoul National University and the president and director of the People’s Health Institute. Also, he has been the country coordinator of the PHM Korea. His current researches include health and social policy, equity and justice in health, health reform, and critical health studies. He is the founding president of the Korean Society for Equity in Health, and the former president of the Academy for Critical Health Policy, Korea Society for Global Health, and Korea Society of Health Policy and Administration.

07/29/2020

Timothy A. Wise is a Senior Adviser at IATP, where his work focuses on the Future of Food, based on his recent book, Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Battle for the Future of Food (The New Press). Tim has a long history of collaboration with IATP, on issues including agricultural dumping, U.S. agricultural subsidies and policies, responses to the 2007-8 global food crisis, the WTO, and Mexico under NAFTA. He is a Senior Adviser with the Small Planet Institute, where he directed the Land and Food Rights Program from 2013-2020. He is also a senior research fellow at Tufts University’s Global Development and Environment Institute, where he founded and directed its Globalization and Sustainable Development Program. He previously served as executive director of the U.S.-based aid agency Grassroots International. He is the author of Confronting Globalization:Economic Integration and Popular Resistance in Mexico, in addition to Eating Tomorrow. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

07/28/2020

Paul Christian Namphy works on the nexus between water / sanitation / hygiene (WASH), the health sector, and community involvement, in Haiti. Formerly in the public sector in the struggle to provide water, sanitation, and hygiene services in displaced-persons' camps after the January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and the to eliminate cholera in Haiti (the confirmed last case was seen in January, 2019!), his role has pivoted toward the battle against CoViD-19 in Haiti. In this battle, Paul Christian pivots between formally coordinating and interfacing amongst governmental and non-governmental actors in the health and water and sanitation sectors, particularly concerning migration and border dynamics, and informally volunteering for public interest initiatives in Haiti (related to mass sensitization regarding the risks of CoViD-19 and protection, anti-deportation advocacy in the context of CoViD-19, and gender roles).

07/25/2020

This special broadcast from The People's Strike provides an update on the struggles against racism across the USA.

07/23/2020

The recently ratified African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) looms over Africa. An initiative of the African Union, this mega free trade deal aims to consolidate African markets, boost trade between African countries, and ultimately encourage and reinforce regional integration. The proponents of AfCFTA say it will transform the continent into an economic powerhouse. But, let’s focus on just one category of the population, one that is pre-eminent in agriculture: what does this trade deal mean for African women and their role in the continent’s food production and trade?

I speak with Susan Nakacwa, Ugandan journalist and currently working with GRAIN. Her passion is in researching, documenting and making the case for smallholder farming on the African continent. She writes "I have opted to use my journalism training to make a case for sustainable agriculture, smallholder farming as well as gender advocacy. I believe that smallholder farmers are the custodians of healthy and sustainable agricultural practices. They are our hope in fixing our broken food system and their practices will go along way in helping to cool the planet."

07/22/2020

Desmond Cole is a Canadian journalist, activist, author, and broadcaster who lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He is the author of The Skin We're In, and essential reading for understanding the depth of racism and silences in Canada. We discuss what COVID has revealed about the nature of racism here.