DO IT AFRAID! - CONVERSATIONS OVER COFFEE W/SUSAN & FRIEINDS

Click the link or dial in and join the conversation 319-527-6754. Joining the conversation today are Hassan Shabazz President, and Kenneth Hunter of the Prisoners Rights Clinic in Richmond, VA. How was it possible for Guinea-Bissau, reputed to be one of the most backward countries in Africa, with no access to modern technology, ideas, or organizational forms, its population suffering under one of the most repressive colonial regimes, to build a victorious movement for revolutionary change? They could do this in areas where a more or less complete colonial silence and stagnation had previously reigned. Who were the men and women who conceived the possibility of liberation? Who forged the instruments, learned to use them, taught others to use them, and led these struggles through every kind of mental ambush and physical barrier? Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and Sao Tome' produced a number of outstanding revolutionary thinkers who proved able to live their thought in their practice, and who, in doing that, displayed a rare and often decisive talent for explanation in writing and the spoken word. Among these thinkers was Amilcar Cabral. In 1956 he launched his revolutionary party. But if one had to define a single influential aspect of Cabral's approach, perhaps it would be his insistence on the study of reality. He said, "Do not confuse the reality you live in with the ideas you have in your head." Your ideas may be good, even excellent, but they will be useless ideas unless they spring from and interweave with the reality you live in. What is necessary is to see into and beyond appearances: to free yourself from the sticky grasp of received opinions, whether academic or otherwise. Only through a principled study of reality, of the strictly here and now, can a theory of revolutinary change be integrated with its practice to the point where the two become inseparable. This is what he taught. LET'S TALK ABOUT IT