Shailja Patel

In the past three months, Africa, and the world, have lost three great activists - Dekha Ibrahim, Wambui Otieno, Wangari Maathai

It's terrifying to think that if Wangari Maathai had not taken on Moi and his cronies, we would have no Uhuru Park today. As Keguro Macharia writes, in his Gukira blog: ‘Indeed, the history of public space in Kenya is inextricably linked to Wangari’s name.’

‘Well-behaved women seldom make history’ - Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.

I support wholeheartedly the right of public workers to strike. The importance of this strike, unprecedented in breadth and scope, and the challenge it poses to the neoliberal state, cannot be overestimated, for South African, continental, and indeed global labour movements.

brightness of joy how it
drips off our fingers
pools in our navels
gulps up the sun

thirst of our joy how it
swallows the highways
matatus and weaverbirds
rocket our ribs

Thank you for your life, and your work.

Your 'Peoples History of the United States' taught me more than all the years of my degree in economics and politics. Gave me a lifelong set of tools to excavate the untold histories of my own country - and the world.

Watch the seminar on YouTube:

Part I: Introduction by Madeleine Grieve, director of the Stockholm International Poetry Festival, and Ngwatilo's richly melodic poem on exile, belonging, identity, goat meat....

The president of South African begins legal proceedings against Zapiro for exercising his constitutional and journalistic rights to freedom of speech and expression. This move should draw universal, unequivocal, international opposition, derision and condemnation.

‘It's what we do at a very determined individual level that changes what happens in whatever field we work in.’
Bantu Mwaura, interviewed by Doreen Strauhs and David Paul Mavia, 2006