We Rise For Our Land & Kurt Otabenga Orderson

Africa World Now Project

The question of land as a fundamental aspect of African/a liberation movements is an often-neglected point of inquiry. Nevertheless, it is indeed, ever-present.

Promisingly, there has been an uptick of more folk who are paying attention to the demands of Black radical thought and behavior that sought and seek to engage in understanding its role in material and nonmaterial ways. One such important treatment is Edward Onaci’s, Free the Land: The Republic of New Afrika and the Pursuit of a Black Nation-State.

In dominant discourse, however, the question around land as fundamental to liberation is often couched in a warped sense of capitalist ownership, which highlights the fundamental contradictions engrained in an imposition of a European modernism, and its attendant political philosophy of liberalism.

All of which has produced, limited discourses around the idea and practice of rights, a discourse rooted fundamentally in what does it mean to be human as the development and maintenance of private property; all contradictions that radicals must, also, seriously engage when exploring questions around land and freedom.

It cannot be lost nor taken for granted the totalizing nature of colonialism as a product of imperialist logics, as the neglect of internal critique often leads to the reinscription the very power dynamics that movements say they intend to disrupt.

Ultimately, land, in the epistemic and ontological purview of African/a peoples is understood not in the limited capitalist sense of ownership but the transmission of communal practices of human stewardship as being primary caretakers of the planet.

And when land as a fundamental component of Black liberation is centered, ideas around national identity, critical consciousness formation, human rights, citizenship…what it means to be human can be better mapped to understand the interconnectedness of the various manifestations of the global Africana (Black) struggle for freedom. a black internationalism becomes clearly defined.

Today, we will hear a recent roundtable discussion, exploring the questions that Kurt Oderson presents in his documentary, We Rise for Our Land.

Kurt Otabenga Orderson is an award-winning filmmaker from Cape Town, South Africa, whose work has been featured on Al Jazeera, SABC, ESPN, ZDF, and HULU. He has worked on six continents and has directed and produced over ten feature documentaries screened at international film festivals, universities, and colleges.

Kurt Orderson is the founder of Azania Rizing Productions, a company that aims to inspire young people through creative storytelling about Africa and African Diasporas and is a member of the Africa World Now Project Collective.

Others you will hear are:

Savi Horne, Esq. Executive Director of the North Carolina Association of Black Lawyers Land Loss Prevention Project;

Dr. Tasneem Siddiqui, member of the Africana World Now Project Collective and Assistant Professor of History in the Department of History, Political Science and Social Justice at WSSU;

Dr. Yousef Al-Bulushi, Assistant Professor of Global & International Studies at the University of California, Irvine;

Dr. Kamau Rashid, Associate Professor of Educational Foundations and Inquiry at National-Louis University in Chicago.

And yours truly…James Pope.

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

Enjoy the program!