Ajamu Baraka representing BAP’s Haiti/Americas Team was invited to serve as part of an international delegation of human rights defenders that would accompany the activists, community leaders, government officials, and representatives of the National Liberation Army (ELN) on a historic “humanitarian Caravan” between January 17 and the 21st to the Indigenous and Afro-Colombian areas of the Pacific coast of Colombia as part of the peace process initiated by the new government in Colombia. Ajamu was also an observer and international guarantor in Havana, Cuba during the last round of the Peace Process that produced the Ethnic Chapter of the peace . . .
revolutionary socialism
Worldwide Revolutionary Black Unity: Pan-African Ideas Becoming Reality
When Teodora Gomes, an immortal leader within the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau (PAIGC), spoke there most likely wasn’t a dry eye in the room. Comrade Teodora was speaking to a room full of voting delegates present at PAIGC headquarters in Guinea-Bissau, West Africa, for the first Party Congress for the All African People’s Revolutionary Party (A-APRP). There was A-APRP participation within the room from chapters and organizing areas in Guinea-Bissau, Azania (South Africa), Kenya, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Canada, and the U.S— a pan-African vision in the making. Widely regarded and respected within the PAIGC, A-APRP, and . . .
Why I Had To Go There: Nicaragua, Power & Protaganism
“Like a lot of Black women, I have always had to invent the power my freedom requires: All my life I’ve been studying revolution. I’ve Been looking for it, pushing at the possibilities and waiting for that moment when there’s no more room for rhetoric, for research or for reason: when there’s only my life or my death left to act upon. Here in the United States you do get weary, after a while; you could spend your best energies forever writing letters to the New York Times. But you know, in your gut, that writing back is not the . . .
Reflections From the 51st Venceremos Brigade
The first Venceremos Brigade came to Cuba in 1969, just ten years after the triumph of the Cuban revolution, making the VB the oldest Cuba solidarity group in the world. The Venceremos Brigade started when a group of young people living in the US offered to send doctors, lawyers, and teachers in support of the Cuban revolution and to protest US policy against Cuba. In response, Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro explained that Cuba didn’t need doctors, lawyers, or teachers from the US – they had their own. What Cuba needed was help harvesting sugar cane. And so the Venceremos Brigade . . .
I Witnessed the Truth about Nicaragua
Entering adulthood alongside the dwindling of 2020 uprisings for Black liberation (that I had naively seen as the beginning of the end), I felt very stuck. Understanding I am a poor queer Black woman, I saw myself facing a world where the options presented for survival were dehumanizing at best, and the innate dream of living as a free person essentially destroyed. I wanted to fight the liberal tendency of American youth to begin with strong spirits of resistance, before colleging, working and/or drugging, and ultimately, laying down into the nuzzle of the . . .
Steps to a Socialist Pan-African Movement
A recently published book by Vita books publishers Essays on Pan-Africanism edited by Shiraz Durrani & Noosim Naimasiah contains essays on Pan-Africanism written by Pan-Africanist intellectuals at various times. In its preface, Prof. Issa Shivji says writings on Pan-Africanism never become dated for the desire of Africans globally for freedom continues burning, sometimes dimming into a flicker, at other times shining bright but never stuffed out however strong winds. The book has diverse chapters dating back to Karim Essack’s publication in 1993. Nevertheless, there is an important chapter on the necessity of building a Socialist Pan-African movement by Shiraz Durrani . . .
Social Democracy Will Not Save Us
The Black Liberation Movement in the United States has reached an almost unprecedented level of ideological confusion. Unlike in the 20th century, significant sections of the contemporary Black Left openly embrace an understanding of ‘identity politics’[i] that is based in philosophical idealism.[ii] A somewhat resurgent US Left has, correctly, begun to critique these perceived political errors. Unfortunately, social democrats such as DSA, Jacobin and Cedric Johnson in his award-winning article[iii] add to the ideological confusion. This essay asserts that contrary to the claims of advancing democracy and freedom, social democracy has consistently undermined the struggle for national liberation and socialism. In 1896, Eduard Bernstein, the . . .
Ahjamu Umi: Organizing to Win
Ahjamu Umi, AAPRP cadre and Hood Communist editor, and Roberto Sirvent editor of the Black Agenda Report Book Forum discuss revolutionary organizing. . . .