It is important that the activists/organisers/movements applying to this Fellowship program are working on at least one of the thematic areas outlined below:

1. Intellectual restoration:

African people, like all other peoples, are bearers of civilizational seeds that have blossomed throughout history. 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 myths. Psychological warfare waged against African 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 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.

2. Economic self-determination

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 will achieve economic self-reliance

Our program is one of moving from a corporatist and overly-mechanised economy to a humane and cooperative economy 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.

3. Ecological sovereignty

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 criminalised. Every day, the callous hand of capitalism ravages Africa by grabbing land, extracting precious resources, and polluting Africa’s soil, water, and air.

At Mwamko, we will; explore older and newer responses that underpin a people-centric ecological 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 organisations working on land, food and seed sovereignty.

4. The Unfinished African Liberation Struggle

African people worldwide who struggle daily against systemic, structural and institutional forces are part of an ongoing and unfinished struggle. Honouring that genealogy of resistance, rebellion and revolution and walking with it to the finish line is the only way to complete and full liberation. We state this out of the realisation that our movements didn’t issue out of a vacuum or an emptiness. They come from a historical process that updates and clarifies itself at every turn. Our conjuncture contains within it, the embers and fires of bygone struggles against class, race and gender and these are to be nurtured accordingly. We are not mere accidents of history but its very products.

The majority of the issues we are agitating and organising against, including environmental justice, need political solutions. We must politicise the mass-based dimensions of our organising. In the course of that process, our organisations and movements must remain vigilant and ensure that national mobilisation does not become a tool for the demobilisation of the Pan-African struggle. More importantly, we must never allow our struggles to be used by the anti-people system to legitimise itself.