Pan-Afrikan Centaurians: Celebrating the 100th birthdays of Franz Fanon and Patrice Lumumba

Talks, film, food and performance

One hundred years ago this month saw the birth of two thinkers and fighters whose legacies are, if anything, even more relevant today than ever.

As the entire colonial-capitalist world piles its military might into extinguishing the steadfast population of Gaza, it proves once again that even genocide cannot crush a guerilla resistance which is integrated into the people.

In Colombia and Kurdistan, however, armed resistance has been renounced by movements which had been waging such a struggle for decades.

Frantz Fanon’s work, both as an active member of the Algerian liberation struggle, and as a philosopher and psychiatrist in service of the people, speaks directly to all these issues. This is especially true of his final book, The Wretched of the Earth, dictated from his hospital bed in the last weeks of life as he lay dying of leukemia, which describes the very dynamics unfolding in front of our eyes today with uncanny resonance.

That same year, 1961, saw Patrice Lumumba killed. Lumumba was the first elected President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, whose commitment to resisting the incorporation of Congo into the neocolonial world order would cost him his life at the hands of Belgium, the USA and MI6.

With youth on the rise in Kenya, new military governments challenging French imperialism in the Sahel, Sudan and the Congo reeling from brutal inter-imperialist ‘civil wars’ being played out on their soil, and Africa still suffering from the fallout from NATO's destruction of the Libyan Jamahiriya and the execution of its leader Muammar Gaddafi, what lessons can be learnt from Lumumba and his tragic end?

To celebrate the 100th birthdays of these two towering figures in African liberation and the struggle against white supremacy, we will be hosting talks, discussion and musical performances to educate, uplift and empower.

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We will be joined by:

Speakers
* Roger MacKenzie, international editor of the Morning Star and author of Rebirth of the African Phoenix: A View from Babylon
* Tirivashe Jeli, British-Zimbabwean historian and scholar of the “Mfecane,” whose work revisits the immediate pre-colonial period of African history from a decolonial lens using oral testimony to reclaim the period from stereotyped Eurocentric interpretations.
* Natty Mark Samuels, founder and director of African School, who will be introducing us to Bingy drumming, providing a workshop on African Astronomy (for ages 11 and up), and sharing a piece on Lumumba

Performers
* Andre Jahnoi, hiphop artist and organiser with an insurrectionary sound
* Andrew AJ Jones, Spoken word artist
* Astrosnare, hiphop artist
* Ras Gary, performance poet
Plus:
* Tamarind Galaxy: Interactive workshop celebrating African astronomy for ages 11 up
* All Age Kids Zone
* Delicious food provided!