Call for Submissions_ Nationalism: (Mis)Understanding Donald Trump’s Capitalism, Racism, Global Politics, International Trade and Media Wars

Nationalism: (Mis)Understanding Donald Trump’s Capitalism,  Racism, Global Politics, International Trade and Media Wars

Africa Vs North America, Volume2

Donald Trump is our example/query/ problem or solution. He didn’t really start this though. Apartheid South Africa leaders were nationalistic and racists. Robert Mugabe was a nationalist and racist and tempered heavily with Zimbabwe’s media freedoms. He also destroyed the economy through an illegal and forceful land reform program; telling the whites they don’t belong in Africa. The land question and belongingness are divisive hot topics in South Africa now. African countries have always complained of unfair international trade practices of western countries like the USA, Canada etc. Trump doesn’t want African immigrants into the USA, calling Africa a “shithole” continent. He deported and is still deporting DACA immigrants and many other illegal immigrants. He calls the media producers of “fake news”, and threatens media workers at the drop of a hat. He has fought with the Americans on several levels, he has fought with American allies on issues to do with security and trade terms. He has grown the American economy too! He is the most divisive American or western leader of our time and at the heart of his presidency, nationalistic agendas drive it.  Africa and the Americas since the colonial period have been vastly changed and shaped by settler politics as both the immigrants and natives fought for nationality and belongingness and through the centuries there has been a continuous refinement of what it means to belong (as a citizen or foreigner). We invite scholars, writers, poets etc., to respond to issues to do with nationalism espoused by Donald Trump and others in these two continents in investigating issues to do with capitalism, global politics, international trade and media freedoms. Send in your well written scholarly work, nonfictions, fictions, poetry, mixed genres…

For prose/mixed genres and plays, I piece per writer of not more than 10000 words. For poetry, not more than 3 poems per poet, preferably short poems. Include a bio note of not more than 100 words highlighting your previous publications. Send entries as one word doc to mwanaka13@gmail.com before 31 March 2019

This book will be published by Mwanaka Media and Publishing and distributed by African Books Collective UK, is the 6^th volume in acontinuation of our cross continental anthologies, and the second one in its own series. The first one had several leading scholars, writers and poets like Barbara Foley, Barbara Howard, Biko Agozino, A.D Winans, Tim Hall, C Liegh McInnis, Nat Turner, Allan Kolski Horwitz, Changming Yuan, Tiel Aisha Ansari, Diane Raptosh, Wanjohi wa Makokha, Paris Smith, Sheree Renée Thomas, and Kenneth Weene etc.. is entitled, Africanization and Americanization Anthology, Vol 1: Searching for Interracial, Interstitial, Intersectional and Interstates meeting spaces,  is published here: https://www.amazon.com/Africanization-Americanization-Anthology-Inter-racial-Inter-sectional/dp/079748616X

Due to budget constraints we can only offer contributors ecopies of the book. We are not able to pay royalties neither to offer free print copies

No simultaneous submissions. Authors retain copyrights to their work and are free to republish in the future

Primary Facts by Allan Horwitz

Our very first entry into Africa Vs North  America Anthology is from the Veteran South African Poet and Publisher with Botsotso Arts Link, Allan Horwitz

PRIMARY FACTS
‘Introduction to Marxism’ – workshop for civic activists held in a junior school classroom at Bramfischerville, Johannesburg (December, 2012)


Faces alert     but after the first words      
        turn away     regard other things       other sights  
distant but close  thoughts      take over     the classroom

who can understand  this life
beyond the needs for    food     shelter     warmth     power
and the great mating emotion?  

     
Outside      a running      a screaming for means     masses marching for basics
police and lawyers bargain with teargas and half-truths
    the new black  rulers legislate predatorial combat
                  deny sharing is more efficient and useful
           than hoarding and lording

the faces in front of me now swing to the mine dumps
next to their small houses
       the shacks on which
             dumps spew dust at spring’s start
               mining company will not grass them       nor give them  up
                                but the community is organized
                     and here i am    in this place of glaring need  
                  to play a part in   widening
                        breaking the bounds
`            the want        the absence      the  still-born       the limping
barely believed ambition

and i wonder:   can i really add?
          spin concrete from theory for spiritual grandeur
build it on                 funeral-meat      queues       joblessness
                      fatty chicken soggy with brine      rat shit       random fathers    
soap opera               cheap washing powder  
despite the handshakes of old neighbours
and the hurried breathing of first love and some success
in keeping blacklisting from the door

and can i fill out and bring to life words
                     class       privilege      corruption        revolution
                                       resistance      decay      decency      pride      
having regard to generations of anointers and usurpers
                  hero worshippers and betrayers  
                generations of take       and take more  
                genocide     migration    stock theft and insurrection


Looking about the room
i imagine Marx and Engels watching the white drawn
faces of the sons and daughters of working England
those armies of stunted black toothed laborers
trudging back to their hovels in the gloom of gaslight
the two grey bearded emancipators silently counting the thin ribs
under their coal-stained rags

and then facing this class room
what would they say to this gathering of Africans
newly freed of the yoke of slavers and kings?
                    how would they advise these newly commoditized?
these workers and their managers
                        still laughed at by the captains of spice ships
                               oil tankers and the mineral world

would they still urge a dictatorship of the dispossessed?
the centralized certainty of enlightened self- interest?
would they have the strength to thrash the comprador class as it cruises?
and to make certain
train a bald security service to guard the Liberation?


Mention of Fanon has driven talk to revolutionary violence

Azania has many martyrs
the rhetoric canonizing their blood-soaked vests
cannot tarnish their heroism
even as the Big Men  Mbeki   Zuma
self-destruct

then talk turns to tenderpreneurship
those dining out business class/affirmative class
                           on the gravy train
is that not first choice for the ‘colonized mind’
                      ignorant of  Biko’s Black Consciousness?

but what has this to do with you     white boy?
you who cannot tolerate the notion of killing for freedom
can your philosophy free people of colour?  
                    can there be colour-blind bondage?
what right have you to speak?
             you
                             with your silver spoon and degrees

                     
An hour before lunch the citizen-workers of Bramfischerville talk
about what they wish
to change    and so
                heal the stress lines fracturing
                                        their lives
thereafter
the soul will digest policy  
              plan sewers and tar roads  
many other ‘deliveries’
to this township on the edge of Africa’s grandest ‘boom and bust’city
this township pledging loyalty to a legacy
                      naming itself in his honour

but who was Bram Fischer?
who was the man who carried this name?

and i describe that    white Afrikaner  
  Marxist who lived his principles
spent many years above and underground
defying the racists
        spent many years in jail once they caught him

and affirm:    he is with us today in spirit         and he is still saying:

‘What is needed is for White South Africans to shake themselves out of their complacency, a complacency intensified by the present economic boom built upon racial discrimination. Unless this whole intolerable system is changed radically and rapidly, disaster must follow. Appalling bloodshed and civil war will become inevitable because, as long as there is oppression of a majority, such oppression will be fought with increasing hatred.’

and i add:                accept nothing blindly from figures of authority
           spend time with your family      organize your community
          find the powers that make you objective
                                 free of sentiment and greed
                   build the power that delivers the good(s)

emulate Bram Fischer    he of impeccable character
   
as Nelson Mandela declared

"Bram was a courageous man who followed the most difficult course any person could choose to follow. He challenged his own people because he felt that what they were doing was morally wrong. As an Afrikaner whose conscience forced him to reject his own heritage and be ostracised by his own people, he showed a level of courage and sacrifice that was in a class by itself. I fought only against injustice not against my own people."

but even as these ghosts speak      
           i wonder:

          Bram      
 bourgeois lawyer      son of the nationalist elite
        man in mourning for the death of the woman he loved
man almost broken by her death by drowning in a river when their car hit a cow
in the middle of the night on their way to their eldest daughter’s twenty-first birthday
there in the karoo on the road to Cape Town
and how was he to live without her and the struggle for freedom so long and hard and the odds so
unbearably high?
(this being 1964)

would you be at ease sitting in a small corner with a smoky fire
               lives counted    coin by coin
     till there isn’t even taxi fare to go and look for a job?
would you sip Coke and eat fried chicken and white bread with your bare hands?
         would you sit with the child-mother and her widowed mother
and speak of their historic duty
                           while the buzz of crony capitalists drowns out the mandate?”    

and i ask this
as i mourn the fact of your passing
before that day twenty years later when there came an end to the cruelest forms of domination


Afternoon darkens
air fills with the scent of coming rain
at the edge of the city-sprawl     houses begin to close doors
the group yawns     stretches its legs
the date for the next session left to the chair of the civic association

i get into my car

i will drive back to my book-lined house in the city    thinking
of the comment made by a young man in a yellow t-shirt
sitting near the back next to a very quiet girl with small breasts

   “thanks    thank you for coming
we are learning      but make no mistake
you leave us  here with our problems
not even God can solve because he made us
          and we humans are rotten with the apple we ate”

driving back to my island in the green belt of the city
i think:
perhaps we haven’t eaten enough



Dim light over the slime dumps
      rows of serrated edges     yellowy and trapezoid
       wind will come up       offer minute flecks of gold dust
                  gristle that blinds    that lines the throat
so the people of Bramfischerville can’t see or swallow their porridge

there will be follow ups ongoing sessions
maintaining a core of activists will not be easy
but right now i must be careful
ahead  is a road block     the cops are looking for cooldrink

i open the window
             
in the distance the lights of Joburg’s twin towers blink    
 i drive towards them
  foot on the accelerator

the past and the present stumble into each other
i smile   and    salute  
as my foot presses down    
                                                 slowly

Call for submissions

Africanization and Americanization: Searching for Inter-racial, Interstitial, Inter-sectional, and Interstates meeting spaces, Africa Vs North America, Volume 1  

These two continents were under the colonial hammer that changed them completely. They went through the worst recorded cases of slave trade, human trafficking, sexual abuses, racial abuses, genocides…. They have several races, tribes and groups in each, which they also share between each other, that has been the site of tensions. As we find our feat in the 21st century a lot of us have become colour blind, have grown beyond sections, even states and this anthology is invaluable as it would try to dissect where we came from (pre-colonial, colonial, postcolonial, post racial etc), where we are now, where we want to head toward, especially the meeting points between or among the racial lines, sectional lines, states lines in trying to find spaces we have built or want to built among ourselves (in each of the continents, or between the countries in these continents, or between these two continents) as we move into the future.  We are looking for writing that delves or tackles these issues in any genre, any topic, any style.... Send us your best essays, literary fictions, non-fictions, plays, poetry, mixed genres etc, in English language(s) (or English translations). Send work in only one genre of your choice!
Poetry (3 poems per poet, preferably short poems but we are still open for long poems)
Prose, plays and mixed genres (I piece per writer, of not more than 5000 words)
Work must be sent in only one attached document, also include your contact details in this document, i.e., Postal address, Tel no, Email address and a bio note of not more than 100 words.

Please sent your entries to Tendai R. Mwanaka at mwanaka13@gmail.com
Closing date for entries is 30 June 2017
No free contributors’ copies, no royalties but contributors will benefit immensely through publicity into both continents and worldwide.
Please adhere to submission guidelines!!