Continued…. Watch part 1 of their passionate exposition of the Congo’s tragic situation, in which mining companies aided by Western powers continue to milk the giant central African country dry. The UN and others have accused Congo of helping create a conflict that has k*lled at least 6 million since the 1990s and displaced more than 8 million. 

The coalition’s action on Wednesday represents a growth in consciousness in the global movement of resistance, transcending generations, nationalities and social classes. Their work is a testament to the power of collective action to birth a new reality.

Help these two activists roar louder by sharing and commenting on this video.

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‘FINISH THEM’ NIKKI HALEY WRITES ON ISRAELI AMMO

Viral photos of staunch Israel supporter Nikki Haley writing ‘Finish them! America [loves] Israel’ on the side of an Israeli artillery shell have elicited anger on social media. Haley’s signature comes a few months after US ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield referred to a ‘final solution’ in Israel’s military onslaught of the Gaza Strip. The phrase reminded some of the N*zis’ ‘final solution’ for Jews in the 1940s.

Danny Danon, a former Israeli ambassador to the UN and a Likud Party member of the Israeli parliament, shared the photos of Haley after accompanying her to northern Israel on 27 May.
 
The governor of the US state of South Carolina and failed US presidential candidate (funded by wealthy pro-Israel donors) paid the visit a day after a 26 May airstrike that triggered a fire k*lling 45 displaced Palestinians in a tented camp in Rafah.

Continued….. This attack came despite the International Court of Justice ordering Israel on 24 May to cease its offensive in Rafah following South Africa’s urgent request on its pending g*nocide case.

About 1.5 million people took shelter in the southern Gaza city after the Israeli government advised that the military onslaught would not occur there. Yet, in recent months, Israel had threatened to attack Rafah. Those threats became a reality with the 6 May invasion.

Now, seven months into Israel’s military onslaught and escalated siege, it has k*lled over 36,000 Palestinians, primarily women and children.

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STILL NO JUSTICE FOR MURDERED BLACK TEENAGER

31st May marks three years since the gruesome murder of British-born Jamaican teenager Dea-John Reid in broad daylight in the city of Birmingham.

Reid was murdered by a group of grown men and teenagers who chased him down a street and stabbed him multiple times while shouting racial slurs. The brutal incident was captured on security cameras.

Reid’s family are still demanding justice over his murder. A 15-year-old White boy was convicted of the lesser crime of manslaughter - but not of murder, as demanded by the family and prosecution. He received a six-and-a-half-year sentence for the crime, but he is likely to serve only half of his sentence behind bars because of the nature of the British judicial system.

Two other teenagers and two adults who had been accused of taking part in the attack on the Jamaican teenager walked free after the court acquitted them of all charges.

Continued…. Many have described the verdict as a miscarriage of justice. They blame the composition of the jury for this. Out of the 12 jurors, 11 were White, while one was of Asian descent. The Ministry of Justice says jurors are randomly selected, but given the fact that people of colour make up over half of Birmingham, it is difficult to understand how a jury in such a case could be 91% White.

This has led to calls for deliberate efforts to make juries more ethnically diverse, especially in cases where race is at the centre.

Please follow the Justice 4 Dea-John Reid campaign at https://www.facebook.com/share/c7WE41c8M2kpsEZx/?mibextid=LQQJ4d and lend the family your support.

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WHITE PROFESSOR SCHOOLED ON RACIST AMERICA

Here’s American Black writer James Baldwin explaining why he fled to France in the 1940s. Put simply, there was a ‘danger of death to negros’ in the U.S. and he had to get out.

He’s on a 1968 episode of the Dick Cavett Show, and had just been asked by a White Yale professor: ‘Why must we always concentrate on colour, when there are other ways of connecting men?’

Baldwin quickly exposes the out-of-touch academic. And reels off the list of realities facing Blacks. From the segregated congregations of the Christian church, to the real estate lobby that kept him ‘in the ghetto.’

Baldwin arrived in Paris with just $40 in his pocket. But he didn’t care. France was able to release him from the ‘social terror’ he’d experienced in the United States.

Continued….. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, was published in 1953, and it made Time magazine’s top 100 list.

Baldwin died in 1987, and is remembered for his civil rights activism as well as his writing. And, of course, passionate interviews like this.

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FRANCE’S 170-YEAR OCCUPATION OF KANAKY

The struggle against colonialism is intensifying worldwide. This video by Congolese journalist Maud-Salomé EKILA BOFUNDA (@ekilaaa) the spokeperson of the organisation @urgencespanafricanistes and @afriqueresurrection goes into the history of the indigenous Kanak people, who are confronting violent French settler colonialism and an effort to seize their lands.

What the French call ‘New Caledonia,’ aka the islands of Kanaky, an archipelago not far from Australia, has been inhabited by Pacific Islanders since around 1000 BCE. The French seized the islands in 1853 and made it an ‘overseas territory’ in 1956. Today, the French and their settlers on the island are trying to consolidate and solidify their power at the expense of the Kanak people once again.

Continued…. The goal is to eliminate the the Noumea Agreement of 1998, which grants Kanak people some level of political control over their ancestral homelands. In doing so, settlers born in France who migrated to Kanaky would be allowed to participate in local elections. For decades, the strategy on the part of the French to crush the power of the Kanak people has been to encourage more and more mass French settlement on the islands.

Many Kanak, including very well organised sectors of the population, understand that their only true pathway to liberation is through full independence from France and an end to all colonial ties and relations.

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WHY WEST BACKS ISRAEL DESPITE HORRIFIC RECORD

For more than seven months, massacre upon massacre in the Gaza Strip has been livestreamed to the world. Be it Palestinian parents begging for justice by holding up their children’s dead bodies or Israeli soldiers playing with women’s lingerie after they raid Palestinian homes, the world has seen the true face of Zioni*m. However, the West has remained Israel’s friend.

As pro-Palestine activist Fiona Lali of the UK’s Revolutionary Communist Party points out, Israel is crucial to upholding Western imperialism. It is an unsinkable aircraft carrier, a Western outpost in West Asia used to destabilise the resource-rich region.

Instead of clamping down on Israel’s military onslaught that has k*lled more than 36,000 Palestinians, the West has poured resources into Israel. That has included UN vetoes against ceasefires, refusing to recognise a Palestinian state, shipping weapons, and sending tens of billions of dollars since 7 October.

Here are two pictures centuries apart showing the same thing, the exploitation of Africans.

On the left is an 18th-century illustration of a crammed slave ship. It sparked shock and outrage after anti-slave campaigner, Thomas Clarkson (1760 - 1846), posted it all over England. Around 10-12 million captured Africans were sent across the Atlantic by European slave traders between the 16th and 19th centuries.

On the right is a modern electric car, with Africans laid out in a similar pattern along its chassis. The message being, Africans - particularly those in the Democratic Republic of Congo - are still exploited to mine minerals needed for Western high-tech goods. The drawing was sent by a reader to author Siddharth Kara who’s highlighted the abuse in his book: Red Cobalt - How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives. It’s worth a read. And we think these pictures summarise what’s happening perfectly.

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HOW ‘WHITENESS’ WAS INVENTED TO JUSTIFY SLAVERY

In this video, storyteller Garrison Hayes (@garrisonh) - who specialises in race history - sets the record straight on how the idea of ‘Whiteness’ came to be. Before the 17th century, nobody identified as White. But it was gradually adopted for political reasons - to justify supposed superiority and thereby slavery. This gave ‘philosophical cover’ for European crimes in Africa. Does it still do that today?

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MANO BROWN: BRAZIL OWES BLACK PEOPLE

In this 2007 clip, @manobrown, lead lyricist of Brazilian rap group Racionais MC’s, applauded Brazilian educational quotas for Black people and added that Brazil, the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery on paper in 1888, owes more to our kith and kin.

Brazil’s affirmative action policy requires every federal university to reserve at least half of the seats for students from marginalised groups. Out of that amount, about half of the seats go solely to Black, mixed and Indigenous people. The other half go to low-income public-school students.

Racionais MC’s began in São Paulo in the early 1990s, galvanising a politically charged hip-hop movement that swept the South American country.

Continued…. Their music sparked greater social consciousness and mobilisation of adolescents and young adults in the favelas (slums), ‘quebradas’ (ghettoes), and other working-class city and rural communities, all of which helped to propel Luiz Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva to his first presidential victory in 2002. Three previous presidential runs for Lula (1989, 1994 and 1998) proved unsuccessful. In 2020, Campinas State University, one of Brazil’s most prestigious educational institutions, included Racionais MC’s’ seminal album, ‘Surviving in Hell’ (1997), in its readings for students preparing to take the school’s entrance exam. ‘Surviving in Hell,’ like other hip-hop albums, dispelled Brazil’s creation myth and the narrative of ‘racial democracy.’

Do you think Brazil owes our people more than higher education quotas? If so, what do you suggest?

Beyond that, how can we on the continent and in the diaspora establish direct people-to-people ties to gain greater understanding to become self-determining people?

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MADARAKA: KENYA TAKES BACK POWER

‘Madaraka’ is Swahili for power - and on this day, Kenyans took theirs back from the colonial regime. Self-governance was a key milestone on the difficult road to independence. African Stream’s Wambura Mwai looks back at the drama that lead up to it. Happy Madakara Day!

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SOUTH AFRICA HEADED FOR COALITION GOVERNMENT

Results from the 29 May South Africa polls indicate that the country is headed for its first-ever coalition government. This follows the failure by the ruling African National Congress (ANC) to reach the 50 percent mark required to form government.
With nearly all the votes counted, the ANC has just slightly over 40 percent of the vote, followed by the white-led Democratic Alliance (DA) with 24 per cent. In third is the six months old Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK) party with 14.8 per cent. Finishing up the top four is Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) with 9.3 per cent. Final results are expected by Sunday night.

Continued….. The results have confirmed many pre-election polls that had predicted a major drop in support for the ruling party, and the possibility of a coalition government. The ANC has however remained tight-lipped about potential partners. The MK which is led by former ANC and South African president Jacob Zuma has ruled out going into a coalition with the ANC. The two other main parties, the DA and EFF are yet to address the issue.

The results also point to two-thirds of the country’s industrial regions falling under opposition control. The ANC looks set to lose KwaZulu Natal province to MK, while the DA is expected to retain Western Cape.

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