nkrumah

Ghanas frihetshjälte som ledde landet till självständighet. Hans kamp för ett enat och fritt Afrika inspirerade människor världen över, men han styrde också den nybildade nationen från demokrati till despoti.

Nya avsnitt från P3 Historia hittar du först i Sveriges Radio Play.

Uppläsare: Emma Peters
Scenuppläsare: Zardasht Rad

Redaktionen för detta avsnitt består av:
Emilia Mellberg – manus och research
Erik Laquist – producent
Elias Klenell – ljuddesign och slutmix

Medverkar gör också Lennart Wohlgemuth, tidigare chef för Nordiska Afrikainstitutet.

Vill du veta mer om Kwame Nkrumah? Här är några av de böcker som ligger till grund för avsnittet:
Kwame Nkrumah – The father of African Nationalism av David Birmingham
Kwame Nkrumah av Jeffrey S Ahlman
Black Star – A View of the Life and Times of Kwame Nkrumah av Basil Davidson

In this episode Dr. Jesse Benjamin returns to the podcast.

Like our previous conversation with Jesse we’re connecting to talk about a recently released book by Walter Rodney, in this case it’s Decolonial Marxism: Essays From The Pan-African Revolution, which is a previously unpublished collection of Rodney’s essays on race, colonialism and Marxism. Jesse Benjamin is a scholar, activist, publisher, and board member for the Walter Rodney Foundation, and he is the co-editor of Decolonial Marxism.

We talk about how Decolonial Marxism showcases Rodney’s range as a theorist and a thinker, as an educator, and as an activist. This collection of essays across a range of topics really provides practical examples of what we think Rodney meant by the term “guerilla intellectual.” It also gives us a glimpse of how Rodney assessed some of the movements and key theorists and leaders of his lifetime, particularly with respect to anticolonial nationalists and socialists on the African continent. Jesse Benjamin offers insights into how he reads Rodney’s work in these pieces with respect to pedagogy and epistemology. We also talk about the title Decolonial Marxism and how Rodney takes up the questions of the relevance of Marxism to African peoples and other peoples of the so-called Third World. Jesse also talks about the significance of many of Rodney’s interventions in a range of areas and approaches that are really groundbreaking or, at the very least, would’ve been quite cutting edge during Rodney’s lifetime. And all of us marvel at how relevant and insightful Rodney’s contributions remain decades after his assassination.

We strongly recommend the book for anyone who appreciates Walter Rodney’s work and if you’re not familiar with Rodney’s work it’s really essential stuff and we highly recommend it. Verso Books has published this text and they also have editions of 3 other Rodney books all of which are authorized by the Walter Rodney Foundation and Rodney’s family. And everything is 40% off over there at Verso for the rest of September.

Make sure you get connected with the Walter Rodney Foundation every year they host a Walter Rodney Symposium which is an amazing event.

And if you like what we do here we hope you will consider joining up with all of our wonderful patrons in supporting the show. We currently have a drive to add 25 new patrons this month. We only need 10 more to hit our goal for this month, so head on over to patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism and become a patron if you can spare $1 a month or more. Also while you’re there we currently have a poll to determine our next study group book, so make sure you vote on that and be on the look out for updates because we will be reconvening our study group in October.

Our previous conversations that deal most directly with Walter Rodney's work and life (from most recent to oldest):

“Almost As If Their Spirits Are Still There” - David Austin on The 1968 Congress of Black Writers

"Our Enemies Know the Power of Books" - Louis Allday and Liberated Texts

"The Wealth of Europe is the (Stolen) Wealth of Africa" with Devyn Springer

Walter Rodney's Russian Revolution - A View From The Third World with Dr Jesse Benjamin

Devyn Springer Discusses Walter Rodney

In this episode we interview Marika Sherwood. As she mentions in the episode, Sherwood was born into a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary in 1937. After World War 2, the surviving members of her family emigrated with her to Australia, she was briefly employed in New Guinea, and eventually emigrated to England, finding employment as a teacher in London. She will discuss on the episode how she became dedicated to researching and publishing Black history. Along with Hakim Adi and others, Sherwood is one of the founders of the Black and Asian Studies Association in the UK.

For us, this conversation was primarily spurred by our reading of her book Kwame Nkrumah and the Dawn of the Cold War, The West African National Secretariat 1945-1948.

In this conversation Sherwood touches on some of the methods used by British government and the British press to suppress the organizing Kwame Nkrumah - along with others like George Padmore - was engaged in, during this crucial post-war period.

She also talks about areas where she sees a need for further research on anticolonial movements and counterintelligence operations against them. Sherwood also stresses the need for the UK to release more documentation on its own counterintelligence operations against Nkrumah, Padmore and others.

We encourage people to check out Sherwood’s other work as well. To give you an idea, she sent us a list of her publications and it was 8 pages long, including over 20 books. In addition to Kwame Nkrumah, her books include work on Pan-Africanism, Claudia Jones, and Malcolm X.

In many ways this is a conversation about dedication, for Sherwood we get some understanding of why she has dedicated so much of her life to studying African movements and Black History. It also hopefully give us some sense of the dedication that Kwame Nkrumah had to all the peoples of Africa. And it also highlights the dedication of British Empire to undermining the conditions for true self-determination on the African continent and their dedication to deliberately hiding that legacy out of public record. 

We hope you enjoy this episode. This is our fifth episode of August, we already have a bunch of really exciting conversations slated to come out in September and October as well. If you’d like to become a patron of the show, you can become one for as little as $1 a month. It is with the generous support of our listeners that we can continue to bring you these conversations every week.

In this episode we talk to Louis Allday, writer, historian and founding editor of Liberated Texts.

Liberated Texts is an independent book review website which features works of ongoing relevance that have been forgotten, underappreciated, suppressed or misinterpreted in the cultural mainstream since their release.

Louis gets into a more detailed description of the site’s purpose and some of the reviews they’ve featured since its founding just over a year ago. He also talks about the importance of books to anti-imperialist struggle, and ways that the publishing industry has been targeted by counterintelligence and counterinsurgency operations by the likes of the CIA and other related agencies.

The inaugural Liberated Texts Collected Reviews volume is now available. Published by Ebb books, we’ll include links to where you can order it in the show notes.

As we mention in the episode, Liberated Texts is a resource that we use to find interesting subject matter for this podcast. We’ve previously featured a couple of discussions directly based on reviews from the site, and also featured folks who have gone on to write reviews for Liberated Texts. We’ll include some links to those in the show notes as well.

As Louis mentions in the episode, Liberated Texts is going to soon begin republishing or publishing books in English for the first time starting in July of this year. Their first book will be an English translation of Ghassan Kanafani’s On Zionist Literature. Proceeds from the sales of their first volume of collected reviews will go towards that publishing work.

And as always if you like what we do here at Millennials Are Killing Capitalism, the best way that you can support our work is to become a patron of the show. You can do that for as little as $1 a month or a yearly membership of $10.80. If you’re not able to do that right now, please do what you can to like, share, retweet and spread the word.

Links:

Liberated Texts

Order Liberated Texts from Bookshop.org

Another interview we did which talks about Walter Rodney's time in Tanzania and relationship with Nyerere.

Our episode with Bill Rolston and Robbie McVeigh

Our episode with Alex Turrall

Our previous conversation with Ju-Hyun Park.

Back in early December we published an interview with Tomás on his book Amílcar Cabral: The Life of a Reluctant Nationalist. In that conversation Tomás delved into the struggle of the PAIGC, various dynamics of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, and an analysis of Portuguese colonialism and counterinsurgency. Tomás also examined Cabral’s theory and practice in relation to Marxist thought and techniques of guerrilla warfare popular at the time. Discussing some of Cabral’s unique theoretical and practical interventions along the way.

As we mentioned at the time, there were others aspects of Cabral’s life we wanted to delve into more deeply. Such as his time with the MAC or Movimento Anticolonial (Anticolonial Movement) his relationships with, and the influence of, figures like Frantz Fanon, Sekou Touré, and Kwame Nkrumah and his thinking on issues of Pan Africanism and internationalism. In this conversation we explore those topics and also further discuss how Cabral’s speeches must be read in the context of audience both intended and unintended. As well as in relation to the concrete needs of the PAIGC’s liberation struggle in that moment. We also talk specifically about the relationships Cabral had with Léopold Senghor and Sekou Touré the heads of state of Guinea-Bissau’s neighbors, who each provided different forms of solidarity, allowed different types of activity from the PAIGC within their state, and embraced a different tactics in relation to the PAIGC’s struggle against Portuguese colonialism. Finally, Tomás discusses what he considers Cabral’s greatest contributions to African anti colonial struggle. 

It’s important to remember that many of the questions asked here remain open, but Tomás’s insights are very useful in reading Cabral’s thought and understanding the practices of the PAIGC in context.

This is our fourth episode of the month of February, and currently we’re still down 3 patrons for the month. So if you’ve been thinking about becoming a patron, now is a great time to show your support. You can do so for as little as $1 a month at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism

References in the show:

Part 1 of this conversation

Amílcar Cabral: The Life of a Reluctant Nationalist by António Tomás

António Tomás' forthcoming book In the Skin of the City: Spatial Transformation in Luanda

Cabral's "Facts About Colonialism" also known as "Facts About Portugal's African Colonies" can be found in Unity & Struggle.

Return To The Source (and mulitiple speeches within it) is also referenced in the show.

Cesaire's Notebook of a Return to the Nativeland

Fanon's Wretched of the Earth

In this episode we interview Amandla Thomas-Johnson, about his new book, Becoming Kwame Ture. Amandla Thomas-Johnson is a British-born writer of African-Caribbean descent. He is based in Dakar, Senegal, from where he covers West Africa. 

He has reported from a dozen countries, and has covered social movements from Trinidad and Tobago to Chile to Mauritania. He has worked for the BBC, The Guardian, Al-jazeera, and Channel 4, among others.

Amandla discusses the myopic historical view US historiography has of Kwame Ture (who the US generally remembers as SNCC activist Stokely Carmichael), limiting his life’s work predominantly to the 16 years he lived in the US rather than looking at it from a wholistic and international perspective. 

In the conversation, we cover Ture’s Pan Africanism, his relationship to Sékou Touré and Kwame Nkrumah, and the development of the All African People’s Revolutionary Party (AAPRP). We talk about his commitment to Palestinian solidarity and support for social movements around the world. We also discuss Ture's involvement in attempts to return Kwame Nkrumah to power in Ghana, and his involvement in the Democratic Party of Guinea (PDG). 

Along the way Amandla tells fascinating stories, including Ture’s connections to the lives of figures such as Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro and Amilcar Cabral. This conversation and the book, reveal pats of the life, politics and organizing of Kwame Ture that have largely been neglected by most biographers operating from a US centric lens.  

In contemporary African history, most narratives revolve around the year 1960. But what if I say, 1957? what do you say? Independence of the first sub Saharan African country, Ghana? Yes, that’s right. Anything else? Let’s listen to the answers by Prof. Elisa Prosperetti, History professor, specializing in modern African and world history, and currently a visiting assistant professor at Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts, United States, where she teaches a range of courses on African history. Her research focuses on the connected narratives of development, education and citizenship.

My African cliche of the day is a duty, what I could call "the duty of curiosity", a kind of minimum service that each African and Afro-descendant must perform, to help himself, and help to to make known a counter history of Africa. Being curious about Africa, for example, is going to visit a pretty beach in Mozambique, rather than Ireland; it is trying to understand pre-colonial African spiritualities before treating them as fetishes, a term which is justly colonial…. This is why I enjoy the afro-curiosities distilled by Abenafrica every day. And I invite you to be afro-curious too, because as Martin Luther King said "In the end we will not remember the words of our enemies, but rather the silences of our friends". See you tomorrow in the second part of this fascinating interview with Abenafrica. 

Son pays pour lequel il a pris tous les risques, l’a poignardé d’une blessure mortelle au cœur, de la plus méchante des blessures. Et il lutta seul face à la mort, jusqu’à la dernière heure, dans cette infirmerie de Bucarest en Roumanie.

Une telle mort est une trahison, un reniement dont le Ghana et l’Afrique toute entière se sont rendus coupables, comme disait un journaliste local, dans un article intitulé : "Nkrumah, le leader que nous n’avons jamais compris."

His country for which he took all the risks, stabbed him with a mortal wound in his heart, the most wicked wound. And he fought alone against death, until the last hour, in this infirmary of Bucharest in Romania.

Such a death is a betrayal, a denial of which Ghana and Africa as a whole were guilty, as put by a local journalist , in an article entitled "Nkrumah, the leader we never understood."

Can our African history help us address the issues we face as a people today?