History is made in the “nooks, crannies, and margins of empire,” writes Modibo Kadalie, a lifelong organizer, grassroots historian and author of the forthcoming book, Pan-African Social Ecology from On Our Own Authority! Publishing.
Kadalie and editor Andrew Zonneveld have compiled a short book of speeches, conversations and essays on pan-Africanism, national liberation and environmental movements. The collection of Kadalie’s work is vast in scope, standing firmly on its under-recognized intersections, narrated through Kadalie’s many decades of work at the grassroots level in trade unions, the liberation of the Global South and Black liberation movements in the U.S.
Kadalie lays out decades of trials and tribulations in a formidable firsthand account of his participation in the anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles of the 1960s. From organizing with the African Support Liberation Committee and collectively deciding to bar politicians from speaking at their events, to publicly condemning the revered Southern Christian Leadership Conference for its financial ties to Gulf Oil and Portugal’s colonial operations in Angola, he elevates key moments in Black working-class history with the grit of a seasoned organizer and care of a serious historian. Through his retelling, Kadalie shares key insights for movements wrestling with political questions of representation, leadership structures and transnational solidarity.
Reflecting on the failures of postcolonial states to democratize power, Kadalie argues that people engaged in social-ecological movements must turn to each other to offer the protection and infrastructure that the state fails and refuses to provide. “People don’t have to vote on that kind of stuff, you know? They just see what needs to be done and they do it,” he writes. “They organize it themselves. Someone brings a shovel, someone else brings a bag, one guy lifts this, one guy carries that, someone else drives the pickup truck — you can see it in action.”
Pan-African Social Ecology expounds on a liberatory ecological politics in plain English for the exasperated environmentalist looking to fundamentally integrate issues of race, empire and direct democratic organizing into their political practice. Readers will follow Kadalie as he recounts his lifelong journey of political reorientation in learning from the failures of Black- and Brown-led neocolonial states and working to fundamentally reorient our communities to make decisions from the bottom-up about how we fit in to the rest of the natural world.
For Kadalie, a new politics empowers everyday people to make direct choices about the trajectory of their lives, organically develop their political consciousness and function healthily among others in community. Without the closeness of intimate community, Kadalie argues, movements are destined to commit the same errors of vertical leadership that doomed the movements of his own time. The collection espouses leaderlessness as an antidote to executive board-style organization and an armor against racism, misogyny and homophobia in movement spaces.
Guided by the principles of anti-capitalism, a healthy disrespect for authority and a recognition of humanity’s embeddedness in nature, a new pan-African social-ecological ethics provides a framework for understanding the fundamental connections between social and ecological problems, and a possible roadmap out. Resilient and effective communities, Kadalie argues, root out pyramidical structures of leadership and cultivate a culture of popular participation at all levels of decision-making. Pan-African social ecology makes a clean break with representative democracy: to dismantle the nation-state, we must build up an engaged citizenry ready to determine the conditions of their lives in intimate connection with others.
For the newly politicized, the book offers a useful reflection on the pan-Africanist movements of Kadalie’s day, highlighting its successes, blunders and legacies, while introducing concepts of anti-statism, anti-capitalism and community-building.
For the experienced organizer, the real beauty of the book is in Kadalie’s practice of auto-ethnography as a movement participant. As organizers, striking the imperative balance between the individual and the collective, no less retrospectively, is a monumental task that Kadalie has achieved here with grace, warmth and wisdom.
“History must be rewritten from the point of view of these freedom-seeking resisters, not merely as individuals but as an entire freedom movement,” Kadalie writes. In this, he surely gifts us his own history replete with an abundance of lessons to learn and ideas to put into practice.
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
Last week, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy