Rhodes/Fees Must Fall Movement(s) & The Role And Responsibility of Diasporic Institutions

Africa World Now Project

We are living in a time of great challenge and opportunity. Across the African world people are challenging their historically rooted contemporary conditions. The practical work of the long tradition of African and Diasporic freedom fighters has provided the frame work for these various manifestations of Africana resistance to find a way forward---to think, reason, and see that another world is not only possible, but absolutely necessary. The current sociopolitical, economic, and cultural organization of global society is truly not sustainable.

Amie Cesaire writing in 1950—in Discourse on Colonialism brings this notion to sharp clarity when he asserts that “A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it created is decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization…” (Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism: 31)

Thinkers and fighters such as Amilcar Cabral, in a 1972 speech during one of his visits to the US argued that: “An objective analysis of imperialism insofar as it is a fact or a “natural” historical phenomenon, indeed “necessary” in the context of the type of economic political evolution of an important part humanity, reveals that imperialist rule, with all its train of wretchedness, of pillage, of crime and of destruction of human and cultural values, was not just a negative reality. The vast accumulation of capital in half a dozen countries of the northern hemisphere which was a result of piracy, of the confiscation of the property of other peoples and of the ruthless exploitation of the work of these peoples will not only lead to the monopolization of colonies, but to the division of the world…” (Cabral, 1972: 57 in Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral).

How are we to understand this long tradition…that is finding material expression in the various movements around the African world? What is the role of Diasporic institutions, such as the HBCU? More importantly, as Vincent Harding once asked what is the vocation of the Black scholar and their praxis? I would expand this question to include what is the vocation of the Black and their praxis in relation to the entire African world?

I recently sat down with Corey Walker, Dean of The College and the John W. and Anna Hodgin Hanes Professor of the Humanities at Winston Salem State University for a wide-ranging discussion of the role and responsibility of the Black scholar in this current phase of global African resistance.

Enjoy the program….

Audio credit: Africa is a Country - mini-documentary - Shutting Down the Rainbow Nation - available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksgrJyOrd7A
Image credit: Rob Siebörger. The Rhodes Statue at the UCT-ground. Photo taken 28 March 2015.