Anarchist Social Justice

Edward Martin & Mateo Pimentel

In our last publication, we addressed some of the problems of the TPP. It endangers the planet, threatens labor, violates human rights, and it globalizes free trade into another form of neo-imperialism. This is further proof that the 1 percent, both in the United States and around the world, undermine democratic self-determination in the economic and political realms. We argue that free markets, as they manifest themselves today, destabilize the world economy, while fair markets stabilize. Most importantly, the global economy needs to move away from comparative advantage theory towards fair competitive advantage. Although it works for the plutocracy and its corporations, comparative advantage is outdated, and it spells bad news for the rest of us. We argue for an economy, a global economy, based on “common pool resource theory,” in which the economy is understood as a natural resource to be protected just like the environment. We borrow this idea from Elenor Ostrom. Indeed, it is time to start thinking about the economy in the same way that we (ought to) think about preserving the environment and protecting it accordingly.

What follows is the final part of our analysis of oligarchy.

Community of Meaning, Popular Justice

As a justifiable reaction to the problem of oligarchy in organizations and liberal democratic institutions, some theorists and activists have identified alternative political arrangements to liberal democratic organizations and institutions. Such anarchist examples include Chomsky’s recommendations of the Kibbutzim villages of Israel and the worker-owned cooperatives of Spain’s Mondragon experiments. Other anarchist examples are based on the New Social Movements (NSM) school, which for the most part have become an activist alternative means of self-governance through autonomous grass roots organizations (see Alan Scott’s Ideology and New Social Movements). Leading NSM theorists include Alain Touraine, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Claus Offe, Immanueal Wallerstein, Michel Foucalut, and Jurgen Habermas. These proponents base their anarchist tendencies on identity, politics, culture, and ideology, which for all intents and purposes has emerged in the women’s movement, ecological and environmental movements, LGBTQ rights, peace movement, and more.

Currently, anarchist NSM organizations have surfaced in the current culture through what can be described as the “community of meaning” and “popular justice.” The goal of these alternative methods of self-governance is to bypass the rigid oligarchy of the state, and for that matter, even nonprofit organizations that tend toward oligarchic structures. As such, the community of meaning concept is based to a large degree on the anarchist-environmentalist-feminist notion that human relationships in society are primarily based upon a “conscience collective,” that is, the fostering of diverse talents and skills within a local setting (community, neighborhood, school, etc.). The strategy enables persons to respond to various needs and cultivate unique talents while striving to maintain sustainable development strategies and promote “socio-economic justice.” The community of meaning can also be understood within the context of Marxist anarchist tendencies in which the state would eventually give way to self-governing communities with the intention of fostering both individual and collective solidarity “determined precisely by the connection of individuals, a connection which consists partly in the economic prerequisites and partly in the necessary solidarity of the development of all … on the basis of existing productive forces” (see Marx and Engels, The German Ideology). Likewise, individuals within a particular community are united, according to Durkheim, not so much by what they have in common, but rather, by their very differences, interdependence, and “organic solidarity.” The community of meaning, as Hampson and Reddy assert, becomes and indispensable condition for cooperation within society and is subsequently grounded upon ensuring a sustainable planet based on the fundamental human needs of local communities as the policy priority. This approach necessarily commits local and global communities, as Mittleman argues, to sustainable development strategies based upon mutually interrelated human concerns. Thus, if sustainability is to have priority in local policy initiatives at both the local and global community levels, and if public or nonprofit organizations are unable to meet this criteria, then anarchist communities of meaning must bypass these institutions and promote local and global strategies favorable to environmental and socio-economic justice based on sustainable development goals. The guidelines for a community of meaning, act as a strategy in which concerned people seek to address the causes of poverty and simultaneously prevent, and even reverse, environmental degradation. Moreover, the community of meaning, whether informal or formal in nature, seeks to seeks to implement where possible, policies based on what is known as “popular justice.” In fact, Engle Merry and Milner argue that the anarchist combination of the community of meaning and popular justice strategies “is part of a protest against the state and its legal system by subordinate, disadvantaged, or marginalized groups.”

The notion of popular justice for Engle Merry, “is a process for making decisions and compelling compliance to a set of rules that is relatively informal in ritual and decorum, nonprofessional in language and personnel, local in scope, and limited in jurisdiction.” Theoretically, popular justice governs the community of meaning and simultaneously attempts to apply local standards and rules, that is commonsense forms of reasoning to human relationships rather than state laws. Forums of popular justice, in its original conception, are specifically intended to resolve disputes that involve small sums of money, aspects of family life, and interpersonal injury short of murder. Nevertheless, popular justice forums can act, in similar capacity, as a model by which environmental and socioeconomic justice concerns can be addressed as a form of binding arbitration. According to Engel Merry and Milner, these forums thus create a venue for the less powerful members of society, such as, “the urban poor, rural peasants, the working class, minorities, women,” to voice their concerns. In contrast, elites utilize formal legal institutions through the state, since those same elites have co-opted those very institutions and can thus control those institutions for their own ends.

In the past, popular justice has manifested itself in numerous venues. One form of popular justice can be identified as “reformist.” In the reformist tradition popular justice intends to develop adequate procedures for the varied complexities the legal system facilitates; its goal is to make the system work more efficiently, not to change its fundamental principles. This is intended to increase popular participation in the functions of a centralized judicial system. Reformist approaches to popular justice usually appear in countries based on the principles of liberal democracy and capitalist economies. Failures in the judicial system are generally attributed to the burdens on the legal system rather than to the underlying structures of capitalism and its relationship to law and the state. On the other hand, the socialist tradition of popular justice is derived from Marxist-Leninist theories about the role of popular justice “tribunals” to empower the masses to address violations of laws and rules. The role of the tribunals is to also educate the masses in the creation of the Marxist “new man” of the revolutionary socialist order. According to Engle Merry, the masses are included when “socialist popular justice promises to transform relations of power from the domination of the bourgeoisie to that of the proletariat.” Yet popular justice in this tradition tends to reinforce existing structures of power in the same manner as that of the reformist. Both socialist and reformist approaches promote a form of institutional justice closely connected to, and controlled, by the state.

Another model of popular justice, based on violent uprisings in the anarchic tradition, is one that is associated with mass revolt against the state and the existing social order. While anarchic uprisings certainly can be nonviolent, they nevertheless tend to be violent and are derived from popular unrest due to perceived social injustices. As a result of anarchic uprisings, the masses generally intend to terminate their oppression and punish or reeducate their enemies. In this case the masses do not rely on an abstract idea of justice, but on their own experience and extent of the injuries they have suffered. However, this type of popular justice in its violent form is usually “quelled by the state or brought under control of local communities.”

The anarchic-environmentalist-feminist notion of popular justice associated with the community of meaning, tends to be more closely connected to, and controlled by indigenous people and grassroots movements. While this version of popular justice does not necessarily rule out its use by elites, it nevertheless attempts to function outside the state and institutional mechanisms. A withdrawal from society, which is arguably too rigid, hierarchical and bureaucratic to serve the needs of a popular majority, is one of the goals of popular justice. The central understanding of this form of justice, according to Rifkin, is “decentralization … replacing centralized bureaucracy with small, local forums on a more humane scale.” In this sense community norms govern people in a more humanistic and democratic manner while simultaneously maintaining local autonomy.

Conclusion

As Weber observes, “How are freedom and democracy in the long run at all possible under the domination of highly developed capitalism?” Some would argue that the vast disparity of economic power and wealth that is increasing in the United States, translates into greater inequality for the poor and marginalized. The question remains pertinent today. As this crisis deepens (the contradiction between the egalitarian expectations of democracy and the rational utility of capital), the state and its citizenry have the historical choice to address this conflict. Here, Marcuse urges the human community to initiate “the radical reconstruction of society … to find there the images and tones which may break through the established universe of discourse and preserve the future.” If organizations and their policy outcomes are to have greater meaning and democratic accountability for the twenty-first century, and if in fact it is worthwhile to understand how organizations tend to serve elites within these very organizations, and not the rank and file members that comprise it, then the primary goal of a democratic society would be to strengthen their democratic institutions and restructure the allocation of power away from elite control. As such, anarchist principles of social justice point the way for this restructuring and renewal of democratic institutions. The strengthening of democratic institutions must therefore come from outside these very institutions as a form of ongoing anarchist critique, agitation, and even civil disobedience if needed. The continued challenge for committed democrats is to be mindful that democratic institutions act on behalf of an elite interest and, ipso facto, subvert democratic egalitarian self-determining groups. Hence, providing resistance to the oligarchic nature of democratic institutions in the United States and other democracies through anarchic justice is vital to democracy and greater democratic participation. Anarchic resistance to democratic institutions is, in essence, the lifeblood of democracy.

Here is what we prescribe. We argue for anarchy as a form of democratic governance. One way to engender this in the United States is to move to a parliamentary system. Secondly, we argue for a Marxist form of economics that prevents exploitation. Additionally, Ostrom’s “common pool resource theory” is part of the solution. Finally, we argue, along with C. Wright Mills’ thesis in his great work The Power Elite, that the state has been coopted by the rich, or the 1 percent, and that the capitalist class uses the state at the expense of everyone else. In our next series, we want to take a look at liberalism and address some of the hidden aspects of social justice hidden therein, specifically through John Locke and Adam Smith.

40 Reasons Our Jails and Prisons Are Full of Black and Poor People

Bill Quigley

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) reports 2.2 million people are in our nation’s jails and prisons and another 4.5 million people are on probation or parole in the US, totaling 6.8 million people, one of every 35 adults. We are far and away the world leader in putting our own people in jail. Most of the people inside are poor and Black. Here are 40 reasons why.

One. It is not just about crime. Our jails and prisons have grown from holding about 500,000 people in 1980 to 2.2 million today. The fact is that crime rates have risen and fallen independently of our growing incarceration rates.

Two. Police discriminate. The first step in putting people in jail starts with interactions between police and people. From the very beginning Black and poor people are targeted by the police. Police departments have engaged in campaigns of stopping and frisking people who are walking, mostly poor people and people of color, without cause for decades. Recently New York City lost a federal civil rights challenge to their police stop and frisk practices by the Center for Constitutional Rights during which police stopped over 500,000 people annually without any indication that the people stopped had been involved in any crime at all. About 80 percent of those stops were of Black and Latinos who compromise 25 and 28 percent of NYC’s total population. Chicago police do the same thing stopping even more people also in a racially discriminatory way with 72 percent of the stops of Black people even though the city is 32 percent Black.

Three. Police traffic stops also racially target people in cars. Black drivers are 31 percent more likely to be pulled over than white drivers and Hispanic drivers are 23 percent more likely to be pulled over than white drivers. Connecticut, in an April 2015 report, reported on 620,000 traffic stops which revealed widespread racial profiling, particularly during daylight hours when the race of driver was more visible.

Four. Once stopped, Black and Hispanic motorists are more likely to be given tickets than white drivers stopped for the same offenses.

Five. Once stopped, Blacks and Latinos are also more likely to be searched. DOJ reports Black drivers at traffic stops were searched by police three times more often and Hispanic drivers two times more often than white drivers. A large research study in Kansas City found when police decided to pull over cars for investigatory stops, where officers look into the car’s interior, ask probing questions and even search the car, the race of the driver was a clear indicator of who was going to be stopped: 28 percent of young Black males twenty five or younger were stopped in a year’s time, versus white men who had 12 percent chance and white women only a 7 percent chance. In fact, not until Black men reach 50 years old do their rate of police stops for this kind of treatment dip below those of white men twenty five and under.

Six. Traffic tickets are big business. And even if most people do not go directly to jail for traffic tickets, poor people are hit the worst by these ticket systems. As we saw with Ferguson where some of the towns in St. Louis receive 40 percent or more of their city revenues from traffic tickets, tickets are money makers for towns.

Seven. The consequences of traffic tickets are much more severe among poor people. People with means will just pay the fines. But for poor and working people fines are a real hardship. For example, over 4 million people in California do not have valid driver’s licenses because they have unpaid fines and fees for traffic tickets. And we know unpaid tickets can lead to jail.

Eight. In schools, African American kids are much more likely to be referred to the police than other kids. African American students are 16 percent of those enrolled in schools but 27 percent of those referred to the police. Kids with disabilities are discriminated against at about the same rate because they are 14 percent of those enrolled in school and 26 of those referred to the police.

Nine. Though Black people make up about 12 percent of the US population, Black children are 28 percent of juvenile arrests. DOJ reports that there are over 57,000 people under the age of 21 in juvenile detention. The US even has 10,000 children in adult jails and prisons any given day.

Ten. The War on Drugs targets Black people. Drug arrests are a big source of bodies and business for the criminal legal system.   Half the arrests these days are for drugs and half of those are for marijuana. Despite the fact that Black and white people use marijuana at the same rates, a Black person is 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for possession of marijuana than a white person. The ACLU found that in some states Black people were six times more likely to be arrested for marijuana than whites.   For all drug arrests between 1980 and 2000 the U.S. Black drug arrest rate rose dramatically from 6.5 to 29.1 per 1,000 persons; during the same period, the white drug arrest rate barely increased from 3.5 to 4.6 per 1,000 persons.

Eleven. Many people in jail and prison because the US has much tougher drug laws and much longer sentences for drug offenses than most other countries. Drug offenders receive an average sentence of 7 months in France, twelve months in England and 23 months in the US.

Twelve. The bail system penalizes poor people. Every day there are about 500,000 people are in jails, who are still presumed innocent and awaiting trial, just because they are too poor to pay money to get out on bail.  Not too long ago, judges used to allow most people, even poor people to be free while they were awaiting trial but no more.   In a 2013 study of New York City courts, over 50% of the people held in jail awaiting trial for misdemeanor or felony charges were unable to pay bail amounts of $2500 or less.

Thirteen. This system creates a lot of jobs. Jails and prisons provide a lot of jobs to local, state and federal officials. To understand how this system works it is good to know the difference between jails and prisons. Jails are local, usually for people recently arrested or awaiting trial. Prisons are state and federal and are for people who have already been convicted. There are more than 3000 local jails across the US, according to the Vera Institute, and together usually hold about 500,000 people awaiting trial and an additional 200,000 or so convicted on minor charges. Over the course of a year, these local jails process over 11.7 million people. Prisons are state and federal lockups which usually hold about twice the number of people as local jails or just over 1.5 million prisoners.

Fourteen. The people in local jails are not there because they are a threat to the rest of us. Nearly 75 percent of the hundreds of thousands of people in local jails are there for nonviolent offenses such as traffic, property, drug or public order offenses.

Fifteen. Criminal bonds are big business. Nationwide, over 60 percent of people arrested are forced to post a financial bond to be released pending trial usually by posting cash or a house or paying a bond company. There are about 15,000 bail bond agents working in the bail bond industry which takes in about $14 billion every year.

Sixteen. A very high percentage of people in local jails are people with diagnosed mental illnesses. The rate of mental illness inside jails is four to six times higher than on the outside. Over 14 percent of the men and over 30 percent of the women entering jails and prisons were found to have serious mental illness in a study of over 1000 prisoners. A recent study in New York City’s Rikers Island jail found 4,000 prisoners, 40 percent of their inmates, were suffering from mental illness. In many of our cities, the local jail is the primary place where people with severe mental problems end up. Yet treatment for mental illness in jails is nearly non-existent.

Seventeen. Lots of people in jail need treatment. Nearly 70 percent of people prison meet the medical criteria for drug abuse or dependence yet only 7 to 17 percent ever receive drug abuse treatment inside prison.

Eighteen. Those who are too poor, too mentally ill or too chemically dependent, though still presumed innocent, are kept in cages until their trial dates. No wonder it is fair to say, as the New York Times reported, our jails “have become vast warehouses made up primarily of people too poor to post bail or too ill with mental health or drug problems to adequately care for themselves.”

Nineteen. Poor people have to rely on public defenders.   Though anyone threatened with even a day in jail is entitled to a lawyer, the reality is much different. Many poor people facing misdemeanor charges never see a lawyer at all. For example, in Delaware more than 75 percent of the people in its Court of Common Pleas never speak to a lawyer. A study of Jackson County Michigan found 95 percent of people facing misdemeanors waived their right to an attorney and have plead guilty rather than pay a $240 charge for a public defender. Thirteen states have no state structure at all to make sure people have access to public defenders in misdemeanor courts.

Twenty. When poor people face felony charges they often find the public defenders overworked and underfunded and thus not fully available to provide adequate help in their case. In recent years public defenders in Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri and Pennsylvania were so overwhelmed with cases they refused to represent any new clients.   Most other states also have public defender offices that have been crushed by overwork, inadequate finances and do not measure up to the basic principles for public defenders outlined by the American Bar Association. It is not uncommon for public defenders to have more than 100 cases going at the same time, sometimes several hundred. Famous trial lawyer Gerry Spence, who never lost a criminal case because of his extensive preparation for each one, said that if he was a public defender and represented a hundred clients he would never have won a case.

Twenty One. Lots of poor people plead guilty. Lack of adequate public defense leads many people in prison to plead guilty. The American Bar Association reviewed the US public defender system and concluded it lacked fundamental fairness and put poor people at constant risk of wrongful conviction. “All too often, defendants plead guilty, even if they are innocent, without really understanding their legal rights or what is occurring…The fundamental right to a lawyer that America assumes applies to everyone accused of criminal conduct effectively does not exist in practice for countless people across the US.”

Twenty Two. Many are forced to plead guilty. Consider all the exonerations of people who were forced by police to confess even when they did not do the crime who were later proven innocent: some criminologists estimate 2 to 8 percent of the people in prison are innocent but pled guilty.   One longtime federal judge estimates that there is so much pressure on people to plead guilty that there may easily be 20,000 people in prison for crimes they did not commit.

Twenty Three. Almost nobody in prison ever had a trial. Trials are rare in the criminal injustice system. Over 95 percent of criminal cases are finished by plea bargains.   In 1980, nearly 20 percent of criminal cases were tried but that number is reduced to less than 3 percent because sentences are now so much higher for those who lose trials, there are more punishing drug laws, mandatory minimum sentences, and more power has been given to prosecutors.

Twenty Four. Poor people get jail and jail makes people worse off. The poorest people, those who had to remain in jail since their arrest, were 4 times more likely to receive a prison sentence than those who got out on bail. There are tens of thousands of rapes inside jails and prisons each year. DOJ reports over 4,000 inmates are murdered each year inside each year. As US Supreme Court Justice Kennedy told Congress recently “This idea of total incarceration just isn’t working. And it’s not humane. We [society and Congress and the legal profession] have no interest in corrections, nobody looks at it.”

Twenty Five. Average prison sentences are much longer than they used to be, especially for people of color. Since 1990, the average time for property crimes has gone up 24 percent and time for drug crimes has gone up 36 percent. In the US federal system, nearly 75 percent of the people sent to prison for drug offenses are Black or Latino.

Twenty Six. There is about a 70 percent chance that an African American man without a high school diploma will be imprisoned by the time he reaches his mid-thirties; the rate for white males without a high school diploma is 53 percent lower. In the 1980, there was only an 8 percent difference. In New York City, for example, Blacks are jailed at nearly 12 times the rate of whites and Latinos more than five times the rate of whites.

Twenty Seven. Almost 1 of 12 Black men ages 25 to 54 are in jail or prison, compared to 1 in 60 nonblack men. That is 600,000 African American men, an imprisonment rate of five times that of white men.

Twenty Eight. Prison has become a very big private business.Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) owns and runs 67 for-profit jails in 20 states with over 90,000 beds. Along with GEO (formerly Wackenhut), these two private prison companies have donated more than $10 million to candidates and spent another $25 million lobbying according to the Washington Post. They lobby for more incarceration and have doubled the number of prisoners they hold over the past ten years.

Twenty Nine. The Sentencing Project reports that over 159,000 people are serving life sentences in the US. Nearly half are African American and 1 in 6 are Latino. The number of people serving life in prison has gone up by more than 400% since 1984. Nearly 250,000 prisoners in the US are over age 50.

Thirty. Inside prisons, the poorest people are taken advantage of again as most items such as telephone calls to families are priced exorbitantly high, some as high as $12.95 for a 15 minute call, further separating families.

Thirty One. The DOJ reports another 3.9 million people are on probation. Probation is when a court puts a person under supervision instead of sending them to prison. Probation is also becoming a big business for private companies which get governments to contract with them to collect outstanding debts and supervise people on probation.Human Rights Watch reported in 2014 that over a thousand courts assign hundreds of thousands of people to be under the supervision of private companies who then require those on probation to pay the company for the supervision and collect fines, fees and costs or else go to jail. For example, one man in Georgia who was fined $200 for stealing a can of beer from a convenience store was ultimately jailed after the private probation company ran up over a thousand dollars in in fees.

Thirty Two. The DOJ reports an additional 850,000 people are on parole. Parole is when a person who has been in prison is released to serve the rest of their sentence under supervision.

Thirty Three. The DOJ reported in 2012 that as many as 100 million people have a criminal record, and over 94 million of those records are online.

Thirty Four. Everyone can find out people have a record. Because it is so easy to access to arrest and court records, people who have been arrested and convicted face very serious problems getting a job, renting an apartment, public assistance, and education. Eighty-seven percent of employers conduct background checks. Employment losses for people with criminal records have been estimated at as much as $65 billion every year.

Thirty Five. Race is a multiplier of disadvantage in unemployment for people who get out of prison. A study by Professor Devah Pager demonstrated that employers who were unlikely to even check on the criminal history of white male applicants, seriously discriminated against all Black applicants and even more so against Black applicants with criminal records.

Thirty Six. Families are hurt by this. The Sentencing Project reports 180,000 women are subject to lifetime bans from Temporary Assistance to Needy Families because of felony drug convictions.

Thirty Seven. Convicted people cannot get jobs after they get out. More than 60 percent of formerly incarcerated people are unemployed one year after being released. Is it a surprise that within three years of release from prison, about two-thirds of the state prisoners were rearrested?

Thirty Eight. The US spends $80 billion on this big business of corrections every year. As a retired criminal court judge I know says, “the high costs of this system would be worth it if the system was actually working and making us safer, but we are not safer, the system is not working, so the actual dollars we are spending are another indication of our failure.” The cost of being number one in incarceration is four times higher than it was in 1982. Anyone feeling four times safer than they used to?

Thirty Nine. Putting more people in jail creates more poverty. The overall poverty rate in our country is undoubtedly higher because of the dramatic increase in incarceration over the past 35 years with one research project estimating poverty would have decreased by 20 percent if we had not put all these extra people in prison. This makes sense given the fact that most all the people brought into the system are poor to begin with, it is now much harder for them to find a job because of the barriers to employment and good jobs erected by a criminal record to those who get out of prison, the increased number of one parent families because of a parent being in jail, and the bans on receiving food stamps and housing assistance.

Forty. Putting all these problems together and you can see why the Center for American Progress rightly concludes “Today, a criminal record serves as both a direct cause and consequence of poverty.”

What does it say about our society that it uses its jails and prisons as the primary detention facilities for poor and black and brown people who have been racially targeted and jail them with the mentally ill and chemically dependent? The current criminal system has dozens of moving parts from the legislators who create the laws, to the police who enforce them, to the courts which apply them, to the jails and prison which house the people caught up in the system, to the public and business community who decides whom to hire, to all of us who either do something or turn our heads away. These are our brothers and sisters and cousins and friends of our coworkers. There are lots of proposed solutions. To learn more about the problems and the solutions are go to places like The Sentencing Project, the Vera Institute, or the Center for American Progress. Because it’s the right thing to do, and because about 95 percent of the people who we send to prison are coming back into our communities.

Slow Living and the Fast-Track to Nowhere

Colin Todhunter

Modern culture is an advocate of speed. From urban planning and transport systems, to the food industry and beyond, ‘fast living’ cuts deep and affects almost every aspect of life.

In terms of distances, things today are more spread out yet are more interconnected than in the past. This inter-connectedness has had the effect of shrinking even the largest of distances and is ably assisted by digital communications technology and rapid transit systems. Airports and metro transport links are being extended or built, huge concrete flyovers cut through neighbourhoods and separate communities from one another and employment is being centralised in out of town business parks or city centre office blocks. Speed of communications and transport narrows the distances.

Encouraging further urban sprawl is of course highly profitable for the real estate, construction, automobile and various other industries. It is not that we need this type of urban planning and development, but powerful economic interests and their influence in/over governments dictate it’s the type we get.

Speed and high-energy living have become an essential fact of life. In the process, our communities have become disjointed and dispersed. We have sacrificed intimacy, friendship and neighbourliness for a more impersonal way of accelerated living. And the process continues as rural communities are uprooted and hundreds of millions are forced into cities of ever-increasing sizes to indulge in the fast life.

In the virtual world, friends possibly half the world away are made and ‘defriended’ at the click of an icon. Likes and dislikes are but passing fads. Meaningful social activism has been trivialised and reduced to the almost meaningless clicking of an online petition. It’s more convenient and quicker than taking to the street. After the near destruction of working class movements in many countries, this is what ‘protest’ has too often become.

In the ‘real’ world, where ‘clicking’ just doesn’t cut it, how to physically move from A to B as quickly as possible dominates the modern mindset – how to get to work, the airport, to your kids’ schools, the hospital or the shopping mall, which are increasingly further away from home. Many now appear to spend half their lives in transit in order to do what was once achievable by foot or by bicycle.

It’s all become a case of how to eat fast, live fast, consume fast, text message fast, Facebook fast and purchase fast. Speed is of the essence. And it seems that the faster we live, the greater our appetites have become. The mantra seems to be faster, quicker, better, more. In a quick-paced, use-and-throw world, speed is addictive.

But there is a heavy price to pay. We are using up the world’s resources at an ever greater pace: the materials to make the cell phone or flat screen TVs; the water to irrigate the massive amounts of grain and land required to feed the animals that end up on the dinner plate as the world increasingly turns towards diets that are more meat based; the oil that fuels the transport to get from here to there, to ship the food over huge distances, to fuel the type of petrochemical agriculture we have come to rely on, or the minerals which form a constituent part of the endless stream of consumer products on the shelves. Greed and the grab for resources not only fuels conflict, structural violence imposed on nations via Wall Street backed economic policies and death and war, but high energy, accelerated living takes a heavy toll on the environment and, if we are honest, on ourselves, in terms of our health and our relationships.

If the type of high energy living outlined above continues, we are heading for a crunching slowdown much sooner than we think. It will be catastrophic as current conflicts intensify and new ones emerge over diminishing resources, whether water, oil, minerals, fertile land or food.

The term ‘slow living’ was popularized when Carlo Petrini protested against the opening of a McDonald’s restaurant in Piazza di Spagna inRome in 1986. This reaction against fast food sparked the creation of the Slow Food movement. Over time, this developed into other areas, such as Cittaslow (Slow Cities), Slow Living, Slow Travel, and Slow Design.

What was Carlo Petrini actually originally arguing against? Fast food is food that is grown quickly, eaten quickly and prepared quickly. It is convenience food of dubious nutritional quality that fits in with the belief that the ‘good life’ equates with fast living. It is food that tends to rely on petrochemical pesticides, fertilizers and transport across huge distances.

Food that is chemically processed and which relies on hormones, steroids and other similar inputs in order to ‘speed things up’ in terms of crop or animal growth and delivery to plates that may be half a world away from where it is produced by agricultural workers who themselves are undernourished or malnourished. It is nature speeded up, but also nature that has been contaminated and distorted and pressed into the service of big oil and agribusiness interests.

On the other hand, slow food tends to imply food that is grown or produced locally and with minimal bio-chemical inputs. It tends to rest on the sourcing of local foods and centuries’ old traditions and ideally sold by neighbourhood farms and stores, not by giant monopolistic retailers that are integral to the fast food industry. Slow food also implies more nourishing and healthy food and agriculture that places less strain on water resources and soil to produce better yields and which does not pollute either body or environment as a result of chemical residues or uproot communities or destroy biodiversity.

Slow food is associated with lower energy inputs. It is less reliant on oil-based factory-processed fertilizers/pesticides and oil-based transportation across lengthy distances, not least because it is organically produced and locally sourced. In their ultimate forms, slow food and living slow can arguably best be achieved via decentralization and through communities that are more self-sustaining in terms of food production/consumption as well as in terms of other activities, including localized energy production via renewables or industrial outputs such as garment making or eco-friendly house building. In this respect, slow living extends to remaking the communities and relearning the crafts and artisan skills we have often lost or had stolen from us.

Ultimately, urban planning and the ‘local’ are key to living slow. No need for the automobile if work, school or healthcare facilities are close by. Less need for ugly flyovers or six lane highways that rip up communities in their path. Getting from A to B would not require a race against the clock on the highway that cuts through a series of localities that are never to be visited, never to be regarded as anything but an inconvenience to be passed through en route to big-mac nirvana, multiplex overload or shopping mall hedonism.

Instead, how about a leisurely, even enjoyable walk or cycle ride through an environment free from traffic pollution or noise, where the pedestrian is not regarded as an obstacle to be honked at with horn, where the cyclist is not a damned inconvenience to be driven off the road or where ‘neighbourhood’ has been stripped of its intimacy, of its local ‘mom and pop’ stores, of its local theatres?

Having jettisoned the slow life for a life of fast living, we are now encouraged to seek out the slow life, not least for example through tourism. The trouble is that with more and more people seeking out the slow life for two weeks of respite, destination slow suddenly became a complete mess. Instead of genteel locals, pristine forests and refreshing air, what you experience is sprawling hotel complexes, endless buses and taxis clogging up the place along with thousands of other tourists.

And the locals – they abandoned the slow life once mass tourism arrived and jumped on the bandwagon of fastness to rent out their rooms at inflated prices, to open restaurants serving fast food that caters to fast tourism. The slow mindset suddenly became abandoned in the quest to make a fast buck from the tourists, and before you knew it, six lane highways arrived, water was gobbled up by tourist complexes and urban sprawl sprawled even further across the once pristine hillsides or beaches.

But that’s what fast living or, to be precise, the system that creates it does. It corrupts and destroys most things that get in its way. It recasts everything in its own image. Even ‘slowness’ has become a bogus, debased commodity sold to the fast living, fast consuming masses.

What can we do on a practical level that does not result in the debasement of the slow life? Is living slow nothing more than the dreamers mandate for taking us all back a century or two?

For some advocates of slow living, it is about trying to live better in a fast world, perhaps making space to enjoy ‘quality time’. For others, however, it comprises a wide ranging cultural and economic revolution that challenges many of the notions that underpin current consumption patterns and ‘globalization’.

Loosely defined, slow living is nothing new. From Buddha to the social philosopher Ivan Illich in the 1960s and 70s, the philosophy has always been around in different guises and has been accorded many labels. Whether it is anti-globalization, environmentalism, post-modernism, the organic movement, ‘green’ energy, localization or decentralization, these concepts and the movements that sprang up around them have embraced some notion of slowness in one form or another.

In India, the Navdanya organization is wholeheartedly against the destruction of biodiversity and traditional farming practices and communities and presents a radical critique of consumerism, petro-chemical farming and Western agribusiness. The views of Vandana Shiva, Navdanya’s founder, are well documented. Shiva advocates a radical shift of course from the one the world (and India) is currently on. Navdanya has even opened a Slow Food Café in Delhi.

On a general level, again taken loosely, slow living might involve improving the quality of life by merely slowing down the pace of living. In urban planning, for example, it may mean pedestrianising urban spaces and restricting motorized traffic, especially car use. In many European cities cycling is encouraged by offering the public the free use of bicycles. Visit any Dutch city to see that cycling is a predominant mode of transport, which certainly makes a positive contribution to the easy going ambiance.

In the UK, in part as a response to traffic congestion and the negative impacts of motorized transport on communities, a movement emerged in the early nineties to ‘reclaim the streets’, to hand them back to local residents who felt a need to claim ownership of their communities and public spaces, which had essentially been hijacked by commuters or large corporations.

Living slow may entail slowing down in order to develop some kind of spiritual connection with one’s inner self. It might also involve opting for more environmentally friendly products while shopping, living in more eco-sensitive housing, developing small cottage industries or just generally leading a ‘greener’ lifestyle as a consumer.

But it’s no good adopting a piecemeal, watered-down approach. The root of the problem needs to be addressed. The slow life, whether slow food or slow urban environments, is impossible if we fail to realize that decisions about urban planning, economic activity, investment, products and services, etc, are made through the capture of governments, regulatory agencies and courts by corporations adamant on expanding and perpetuating their dominance.

In order to achieve any semblance of genuine, lasting change towards a better, slower world, we must eradicate the material conditions that produce and perpetuate class-based exploitation and divisions on an increasingly global level. These conditions stem from patterns of capital ownership and the consequent flow of wealth from bottom to top that occurs by various means of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (corruption, tax evasion/avoidance, bail outs, ‘austerity’,  ‘free trade’ agreements, corporate taxpayer subsidies, capital market liberalization, etc).

What we need is proper democracy achieved through, for example, common ownership of banks and key industries and a commitment to ‘green’ policies and renewable energy. This entails challenging the oligarchs and their corporations that have colonized almost every aspect of modern living, from healthcare, urban planning, food and agriculture to education and development, in order to effect change that is beneficial to their interests and thereby enslaving us all in the process.

Terrorism In Kenya: Media Practitioners Must Not Fall Prey

Collins Wanderi

According to the United States Army Field Manual, 1996, “information is the currency of victory” in warfare. Every good soldier knows that both conventional and non-conventional wars are fought in several theatres of operation. To declare a conclusive conquest in modern warfare, it is not enough to win significant battles in the field but the war must also be won in the hearts and minds of the people in the countries or territories under assault. The use of information operations is critical in any war or battle and can influence the final result of the conflict. Even military coup plotters know that to dislodge an existing political regime they must first seize national broadcasting stations to control the flow of information; whip up emotions against the regime and maintain public support.

Terrorist organizations too have adopted information operations as a method of conveying their extremist ideology and to instil maximum fear in target populations. Terrorist groups like Al-Shabaab use both mainstream and social media to spur new attacks and shape public opinion. Although Al-Shabaab has substantially lost the physical war after being dislodged by the Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) from much of the territory and grounds of tactical importance they held in southern Somalia, the militants appear to be winning the psychological war in Kenya.

Al-Shabaab’s new narrative that Kenya should withdraw its forces from Somalia has been buoyed by sections of local media who constantly use shallow “experts” and political opposition to spread this terrorists’ propaganda as the ultimate panacea to repeated terror attacks within the country. What these media practitioners and politicians forget is that Kenya is at war; and in every war civilian casualties are, regrettably almost a guaranteed certainty. Al-Shabaab is leveraging on spreading hate, fear and outrage among ordinary Kenyans to achieve a political aim; the withdrawal of KDF from Somalia. And some media houses, journalists and politicians are playing along and urging the government to accede to the demands of the terrorists.

Terrorists cannot flourish without the media. They adore publicity which helps them spread their ideology, aims and objectives. Exposure also helps terrorists to spread fear and despondency among real and potential victims. Technology has created a limitless virtual space and social media which have given terrorist organizations an expedient and affordable medium to spread materials and information that promote their propaganda; extremist ideology, recruit new followers and mobilize resources.

Al-Shabaab has since November 2011 created and maintained real and parody accounts in social media for this purpose. Bloggers and social media activists often spread propaganda; materials and information crafted by Al-Shabaab just to gain new followers. Mainstream media and accredited journalists too, keen to compete with bloggers, unwittingly pick the same information and relay it to the wider audience who invariably take it as the gospel truth. Similarly, competition between local media houses to access and relay information that keeps their audiences captivated, boost ratings and increase profits has given Al-Shabaab room to influence public opinion and set the agenda in public debate. Consequently, Al-Shabaab is now adopting more ruthless methods and severer tactics on its actual and potential victims in Kenya to create greater impact and attract better media coverage and attain maximum publicity and attention.

Media practitioners must realize that terrorists can do anything to manipulate journalists to communicate their message. Reporters can be bribed and gullible editors manipulated to pick information from blogs and parody accounts operated by terrorist groups to unconsciously spread terrorist propaganda. Cabinet Secretary Joseph Nkaissery was right to censor the local media for repeatedly broadcasting exaggerated figures on the number of casualties in the recent Al-Shabaab attack at Yumbis in Garissa County.

The initial information broadcast by some media outlets and journalists on 26th May, 2015 exposed them as robots that are all too ready to spread war and terrorist propaganda without questioning its source or veracity. Such media houses are certainly vulnerable to manipulation by Al-Shabaab to advance its political objectives and set the agenda for public debate in Kenya. All journalists and editors must remember that Al-Shabaab is a terrorist group which has no chance of physically defeating the KDF or the African Union Forces in Somalia. This is why the group has resorted to the use of psychological warfare through deliberate and sustained violent attacks on unarmed civilians and threats of use of such violence in Kenya and Somalia to achieve a desired political end.

The Gloomy Side of a Young Entrepreneur

Michael Musau

It is five years since I published a book titled “Unpackaged Gains: 29 Great Lessons that I have learnt as a young entrepreneur.” As you’d expect if you never got to read the ‘not so widely circulated book,’ most of the lessons were stated in the negative - what not to do! After having the book in the shelves and a couple of university libraries, it was no surprise that I had to get back to business and keep running the business that I had come to call my other ‘better for worse half.’  One thing about gaining momentum once you’re in business is that you never want to let go. But it got to a point two years ago when I had to let go; but it wasn’t easy- leaving me with such sad emotions, gloom, regrets, frustration, bitterness, you name it. Now that I am learning that it’s time to pick up the pieces, see someone else reap the benefits from my hard work, I have also come to terms with the fact that entrepreneurship is not what majority of business people out here think it is.

When I was starting my first business seven years ago, a few guys, much older than me would tell me: “you just won’t make money, at least not anytime soon.” It sounded ridiculous at the time, because even before I went into running my company on a full time basis, I was already making money, and lots of it. One thing that I didn’t realize was that any money that your business makes in its formative years is never your money but the business’ money.  If you’re unlucky to have started your business after making sacrifices to save, then perhaps better for you; because the idea of ‘making it’ yet doesn’t fool you too soon.

One thing that I have learnt from the older business men who have been in it for over 20 years is that sometimes, what seems to be a few months before loads of money starts coming in could be many years of wait. And that’s why they say that entrepreneurship is just not for the faint hearted.

Another thing is that no matter how committed you are at first into making your personal relationships work, they will definitely face a blow because the reality is that you’ll always be distracted; mentally, physically or financially.  I have on many occasions found myself having to walk out of events just because the emergency call came and I just wasn’t confident that anyone else was well suited to solve the problem at hand. And even worse is the fact that you have to contend with being the last person out of the office, the first one in every morning and sacrifices over the weekends; sometimes to the extent of working on Sundays.

Being the jack of all trades again will hurt you even more. I recently had the opportunity to be on a panel that was interviewing for a value chain position for a regional firm supporting young farmers.  My colleague was surprised at just how much I had perfected my human resource skills; something that I didn’t even know about myself because everything just felt like my everyday life. I have found myself having to edit the content of my website without having to call for IT professionals, having to stock up on office basic supplies to doing my own Quickbooks, PowerPoint presentations to the extremes of being the agronomist in a rural plantation.  It’s tough; it’s at times exciting but also a way out of the comfort zone that our careers entangle us in. But does it define the success of what we do in the long run? Arguably not - we end up so tired and unable to do anything much after those work hours. 

Then comes the harder problem; the toughest challenge that I had when running my business was having to separate myself from the company. Few of us get too entangled into the affairs of the company that we forget that the two are separate entities. Due to this, you end up biting the harder challenges of your growing enterprise, making personal payments for company expenses and worst of all, spending ‘your personal’ time on the business. This is the one problem that most entrepreneurs don’t treat as a such, but one whose implications can be costly. I have found myself years later personally carrying the baggage that should have been the company’s.

Sometimes, entrepreneurs go an extra mile and spend a lot of money to have professionals write for them well laid out business plans. The sad truth is that those business plans are never the Bible they think they are. In fact, there is usually a high chance that your performance is never anywhere close to your performance. I am not saying that you shouldn’t have a business plan. However, your business’ initial goals should be to aggressively drive a demand for its products and/or services. Trying to match up performance with expectations can be quite gloomy, if not plain frustrating. There is no pain in always abandoning the plan if it can’t work at all, or the business because you can always start all over again.

Then there’s always the frustration over making some decisions that you’ll find yourself having to make along the way. These could vary from taking a loan to bringing in shareholders, hiring relatives to making some commitments.  I have over the years been haunted by mistakes that arose from decisions I wish I never made. One best way to deal with this is just learning to let go, after all, they shape the person you become.

Finally, running a small business is about risks; it is taking chances and we could either succeed or fail miserably. Learning from the past, I have taken every new challenge with the hope that it will succeed. I however handle each one of them like it could be that one good thing that could just go wrong. I am a risk taker but risks aside, the thing we think we see too clearly could be the worst thing we wish we didn’t see at all.

Africa and the Danger of a Single Story

HE John Dramani Mahama

What is the story that comes to mind when people hear the name “Africa”? The presentation, or representation, of one? That has always been the danger when it comes to how we discuss Africa. There has always been the assumption of a monolith: Africa as one country, not 54; One culture, not an immeasurable number; One climate, hot! hot! hot! Africa as one intractable reality.

When you hear the name Africa spoken on television or radio or in an unfamiliar public space; When you read the name Africa in a newspaper or magazine, do you, for even the briefest of moments, wonder about the story that will follow? Which Africa will it show? Will the story simply be about malaria, Ebola, high infant mortality and poverty; or will it also mention the innovative ways in which these critical issues are now being addressed?

Take, for instance, MedAfrica, the free mobile phone app that was created and launched in Kenya. We’re talking about a country with a population of roughly 44 and a half million—and only 7,250 doctors to serve it. MedAfrica provides people with basic information about health and medicine, it provides its users with possible diagnoses for symptoms, and it also connects them, through a directory, to doctors and hospitals.

Another is WinSenga, a low-cost mobile app that was launched in Uganda. WinSenga monitors the heart rate of an unborn baby and provides a diagnosis that is then sent to the mother via text message, along with suggestions for possible actions that can be taken.

Then there’s M-Pesa, a micro financing and money transfer service that relies on mobile networks, not the Internet. It allows users to pay bills and school fees, buy groceries, or make cash transfers.In 2014 alone, M-Pesa, which was created and launched in Kenya, facilitated over 40 billion US dollars worth of transactions. The app is now being used in numerous other African countries, as well as in Afghanistan, India and Eastern Europe.

If you think these three apps are impressive, there are dozens more that I could list. There are African-made and Africa-centered apps for almost everything; for cow farming and horticultural irrigation; for locating lost members of refugee families; for scheduling, tracking and paying for motorbike delivery services; for tutoring students who are studying and preparing for exams.

And for those who fear that technology is turning our world into one that is devoid of real human contact and concern, a world in which we are no longer our brother’s keeper, there’s an app called Olalashe that might restore your faith in both technology and humanity. Olalashe means “brother” in the Maasai language, and if ever you find yourself in a dangerous place or situation in Africa, with one touch, this app will send an SOS message to all of your specified emergency contacts along with a link to your exact location.

Most of the world is well aware of the very real problems that exist on the African continent. I just wish that most of the world were also as aware of the very original and modern attempts being made by Africans to solve some of these problems. It should be common knowledge that South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya are fast becoming the international leaders of mobile app innovation. So much so that people have started referring to Kenya as the Silicon Savannah.

It should be common knowledge that in terms of mobile phone usage, over the next seven years, sub-Saharan Africa will be the fastest growing region globally. As early as 2016, mobile broadband connections will reach 160 million; quadruple what it was in 2012. My own country, Ghana, is a leader in providing broadband access. Only last Monday I commissioned into service an 800km optic fibre cable, which will provide 26 districts with high-speed access.

When it comes to Africa, when it comes to the information and the images that are associated with that name, it feels as though there is a constant battle between the rural and the urban, the traditional and the contemporary. There is a tug-of-war between the decades during which we were supposedly lost and the ones during which we are supposedly rising. It is always one or the other. Rarely is the spectacular multiplicity of our continent acknowledged, let alone promulgated.

Imagine this: A story about the nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples of Africa. Who might be the focus of such an article? Hunter-gatherers, such as the San and the Hadzabe? Pastoralists like the Maasai and the Fulani? What if the article included all of those peoples and perhaps also focused on another type of itinerant lifestyle, that of—and I’ll borrow a name made popular by the multi-hyphenated author Taiye Selasi—an Afropolitan?

What is an Afropolitan, you ask? Taiye Selasi offers a definition in her essay, “Bye Bye Babar”: “[T]he newest generation of African emigrants [.] You’ll know us by our funny blend of London fashion, New York jargon, African ethics, and academic successes. Some of us are ethnic mixes, e.g. Ghanaian and Canadian, Nigerian and Swiss; others are merely cultural mutts: American accent, European affect, African ethos. Most of us are multilingual: […] We are Afropolitans: not citizens, but Africans of the world.”

With all due respect to this new generation of African emigrants, by this definition one could argue that Dr. Kwame Nkrumah was an Afropolitan; as was Mzee Jomo Kenyatta and numerous others of their generation, including the African Oxonians I mentioned earlier. But even before them, there were others, like Anton Wilhelm Amo, who is said to be the first African to attend a European university. Amo, a member of the Nzema tribe, was born in the area that is now Ghana. He was taken to Europe at an early age and became a chambre slave to Duke Anthony Ulrich of Brunswich-Wolfenbüttel who supported his studies.  Amo earned numerous diplomas and degrees, including a Doctorate of Philosophy in 1734. He was fluent in English, French, Dutch, Latin, Greek, German and, one would assume, an indigenous language or two… or three.

Throughout the centuries there have been people like Anton Wilhelm Amo, Africans of the world whose stories have not been told widely, Africans of the world whose names and contributions have been all but forgotten by history.  “A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves,” the Nigerian-British author Ben Okri has written. “Sick storytellers can make nations sick. Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings [.]”

We are taught at an early age about borders and boundaries, the physical structures that separate “us” from “them.” Sometimes I wonder at the dialogue that must have taken place at the Berlin Conference that partitioned Africa. “I have signed a treaty with the King of Dahomey and my troops just discovered the source of the river Volta” the French must have said. “You can keep the Ivory Coast, we will take the Gold Coast, we are in possession of the Fort at Elmina” The English must have replied.

All this while our great grandfathers and mothers went about their daily chores, oblivious that their destinies were being changed forever in an European city 5000 km away. The borders on the maps of Africa that I studied in school, and the names that were affixed to the land within those borders, gave me a very clear indication of how certain people could be defined and where those people belonged.

We, for instance, were from Ghana. Those other people across the border from us, depending on which direction you travelled, were from Togo, Cote d’Ivoire or—Upper Volta, which, as you know, is now called Burkina Faso.

Different places, different people; at least that’s what I thought—until someone told me a story that broadened my perspective. That someone was Salifu. During my youth, he worked for my family as a watchman. He’d been a serviceman with the British Brigade. He even served in the Second West African Infantry brigade during World War II. Those experiences and the alleged nonpayment of his pension by the British had left him bitter.

All of Salifu’s stories, no matter how wonderfully they started out, seemed to end with him saying, “One day, those British will get theirs. They will find themselves trapped between the devil and the deep blue sea.”

There’s one story Salifu told me that I keep coming back to. I’ve told it over and over again in speeches; I even wrote about it in my book. It was about the proverbial Gali family, whose house sat right on top of the border between Ghana and Togo. The house had been handed down from generation to generation of the Gali family. The house was there long before the border. In those days, the Galis called themselves Ewe. That was the name of their tribe, and their language. But the border had brought confusion into their lives.

You see, technically, their front door, sitting room, eating area and kitchen were on Ghanaian soil. But the bedrooms, bathrooms and back door were all in Togo. So suddenly the Galis found themselves straddling two places and two additional identities. By day, when they walked out of the front door to go to work and school, they were to be Ghanaian. They spoke English, the country’s official language. By night, when they exited the back door to join their neighbors in the common courtyard, they were Togolese, and were required to speak French, that country’s official language.

“You see the problem those British and French made and then left for us to solve?” Salifu would ask after he told that story. “What happens when your house is divided?”

The borders in Africa that are the most challenging, yet at the same time the most crucial to cross are the ones that have been imposed on us by others. On 25th May 1963, a group of leaders from all corners of the continent gathered in Addis Ababa to form an organization whose primary goal was the unity of African people. They were fed up with those artificial borders, as well as the division and confusion they caused. It was a courageous act, driven by a lofty goal, one that the Organization of African Unity, which now goes by the name “the Africa Union”, has been pressing forward to achieve— sometimes steadily, sometimes clumsily—since the day of its inception.

There are now also a number of regional blocs, such as the Economic Community of Central African States, the East African Community, the Southern African Development Community, and the Economic Community of West African States, that are also working towards that goal of unity. These regional communities are working to enable the free movement of goods, services, capital and people across those once rigid borders. And now more than ever before technology has made the goal of African unity a virtual reality. It’s easy to take this newfound mobility on the continent for granted and forget that it hasn’t always been this way.

Not so long ago—as recently as the late 1960s and early 1970s—unless it was on foot or with an automobile, you couldn’t travel from one African country to another, even if they were neighboring, without first going through Europe. Even postal mail and telephone calls were routed through at least one European country, sometimes two.

It is true that our physical borders, those colonial constructs, are no longer as monumental or divisive; but they are not the only borders in existence. There are new borders being drawn every day—by religious intolerance, by economic disparity, by gender discrimination, by xenophobia and ethnic conflicts, and by terrorism, hatred and fear. The challenge to moving forward is finding new ways to not only cross these borders but to also erase them completely.

The late Chinua Achebe, our literary father, was fond of recounting an old proverb that says, “the reason the hunter is always victorious is that the lion does not have a storyteller.” We must insist on being the experts of our own experiences, on telling our own stories of the Africa we know, as Noaz Deshe did in his film, “White Shadow,” about the plight of albinos in Tanzania; and Young Kim did in his film, “City of Dust,” about life in the slums of Uganda.

In 1969 when FESPACO, the biennial film and television festival in Ouagadougou, was launched, only 23 films were shown. Filmmaking in Africa was still in its fledgling stage. Now the film industry in Nigeria alone—Nollywood, as it has been nicknamed—is the third most lucrative film industry in the world, behind cinema in India and the United States.

The world is literally at our fingertips. In 140 typographic characters, we can share even the most mundane news of our lives with complete strangers in faraway places. With a single hashtag, we can appeal to the humanity of our brothers and sisters across the globe and ask for help with a deadly epidemic, or with the return of kidnapped schoolgirls.

We must continue to take to Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. We must continue to post, share, pin and blog about all our victories, whether large or small, personal or political. When we celebrate yet another free and fair election, we celebrate our future.

When we recognize people like Patrick Ngowi, who is revolutionizing the solar industry; Dele Olojede, the first African-born Pulitzer Prize winner; and Farida Bedwei, a brilliant software engineer with cerebral palsy who is a shining example of the many abilities of the so-called disabled, we recognize our own limitless potential. Each story affirms that the true wealth of our resource-rich continent lies not in the gold, silver, diamonds, bauxite, coltan or oil but, rather, in our people.

That is why dialogues and exchanges are so important. They give us an opportunity to share accomplishments and experiences and, yes, frustrations; they allow us to understand that we are part of a movement, a unique moment in time. But most of all, they remind us that if we want to give this moment its due, if we want to keep it from being omitted from the pages of somebody else’s history book, then we must be the magicians, the storytellers, and the historians who claim it, — for posterity, and in the name of our beloved motherland Africa.

I wish to close with a few lines from the poem “Random Notes to My Son,” by South African poet laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile or, Bra Willie, as he is affectionately called.

“I have fallen with all the names I am but the newborn eye, old as childbirth, must touch the day that, speaking my language, will say, today we move, we move”