Our Pillars
Intellectual restoration
African people, like all other peoples, are bearers of civilizational seeds that have blossomed throughout history. Finding its first known fruition in ancient Egypt, there existed a consistent building and renewing of civilizations until the advent of the colonial state.
The colonial state worked to ensure that euro-centric worldviews were upheld, while African ways of being and knowing, our intellectual traditions, were treated as mere superstitions and myth. Psychological warfare waged against our people also reinforced, and still reinforces, inferiority complexes that have thrown the African intellectual tradition and the knowledge encapsulated in it, in all its diversity, into disarray.
We at Mwamko aim to discover the principles that undergird our various intellectual and rational orders from our respective homelands and create a renewal and a coming into our own that will reverberate in the multiple states of our being.
To move the narrative of the African struggle from a misery-based totalization of dispossession into a life affirming direction; we will examine and challenge false universals thrusted on our movements and organizations, generate a cohesive philosophical and ideological framework to guide the African revolution and connect African historical and intellectual traditions to our contemporary struggles.
Economic self-determination
Our people live in saddening conditions marked by gut-wrenching poverty, are deprived of basic needs, their rights to self-determination, barred from their lands, and are everyday humiliated and subjugated in a world completely laid to waste by capitalism.
In this world, global capital and its local agents exploit Africa and her people through lopsided trade agreements, land and mineral concessions, and illicit financial flows, among others.
Our view of self-determination is rooted in a solidarity and cooperative economic model that moves beyond the thirst for profit and surplus to the development of the human being and her community. It is only by grounding the movement and the change impulse in the communal setting, as opposed to looking at the nation state as the site of our development that we can achieve economic self-reliance
Our program is one of moving from a corporatist, overly mechanized and tech based economy to a humane, cooperative and craft based one that is able to draw strength from technological advances made over these past decades. To do this, we will build and deepen economic analysis rooted in solidarity and cooperative economic models, and work towards creating a broad-based anti-capitalist framework
Ecological sovereignty
African indigenous ways of life have always been attuned to environmental needs and alert to looming disasters, whilst traditional farming methodologies and ways of being have always conserved and protected the land from deterioration.
Today, large multinational corporations are waging war on the sovereignty of land, seed and food systems on the African continent and beyond. As the African savannah disappears to be replaced by an ever encroaching desert and concrete, our seeds are concurrently being patented and small farm holdings criminalized. Every day, the callous hand of capitalism ravages Africa by grabbing land, extracting precious resources, and polluting Africa’s soil, water, and air. Our very sovereignty as a people is under attack.
After a careful contemplation and analysis of movements that are involved in ecological struggles, we realize that there is a need to renew our commitment to the land through a preservation of older methods and adoption of newer responses to ensure our ecological sovereignty.
At Mwamko, we will; explore older and newer responses that underpin a people-centered agricultural practice and theory; struggle for the sovereignty of our land, seed and food systems; renew commitment to the land through groundings and material engagement with it; and build solidarity with progressive movements and organizations working on food, land and seed sovereignty.
