Insights for Our Time

Across the world, we see the familiar intersecting crises of persistent poverty, yawning inequality, a cataclysmic climate, the waning of already fragile faith in institutions, and of state-orchestrated neglect—each with their own ties to anti-Black racism. 

At the same time, the world's changemakers continue to find each other and craft solutions to the intransigent troubles plaguing our world. They are practicing solidarity across far-flung borders, and crafting new worlds together.

Still, we recognise that these are difficult times, times when succour, for the heart and the mind, is especially vital for sustaining liberatory work.

In honour of U.S. Black History Month, a time when U.S. communities celebrate Black people's contributions to a just world, AFRE has invited Fellows and Staff—2022 Fellow Tisa Rodriguez, 2021 Fellow Siyanda "Siya" Siko, and facilitators Nigel Richard and Yasmeen Rubidge—to offer insight drawing on their work and curiosities.

Their considerations—of the potential of electoral politics in what has been dubbed "the year of the election," of intersectional strategies to meet the challenge of a changing climate, of the opportunities to reimagine the terrain of political struggle, and of the practices that sustain wellbeing—represent both clarity of vision and a search for meaning at a complex historical moment. 

We offer these insights from our community as a resource for the world's racial justice changemakers as you continue to dream and build toward liberated worlds for Black people, other people of colour, and all people. 

Nigel Richard on Remaking the landscape of Struggle.

"I've always been fascinated by time," AFRE Senior Programme Director and Facilitator Nigel Richard says, reflecting on his work on Race Beyond Borders Season 3.

An exploration of the possible futures of race and Blackness, the season began with a prequel that featured a breakdown of the politics of time by 2018 Fellow, lawyer and afro-futurist artist Rasheedah Phillips. 

"Rasheedah clarifies that the way we think about our political lives is essentially in time," Nigel recalls. "So, we say a person does time when referring to incarceration. Or we think of electoral politics in increments of two years or four years.”

A sense of urgency is also galvanising in the context of the harms of anti-Black racism, Nigel observes, but it may obscure the longer arch of time from view. "So many of our struggles are decades to centuries-long and may well be that," he says. "So, what does it mean to define a different relationship to time, a different way of seeing time, as part of political strategy?" 

Such a strategy would interrogate the taken-for-granted frameworks within which much of the world makes sense of time, including the notion that the earth comprises 24 time zones all measured relative to Greenwich Mean Time, or of counting time by the days, months and years of the Gregorian calendar.

"What if Black people could reconstruct time? Not so much the physics of it, but the ways in which we understand it socially." Nigel says. "Or what if we realise that we can make mould, shape, lobby and reject at the level of constructs like time or national borders or even continental ones?"

For Nigel, political work that operates at the level of constructs such as time and space, can be vitally empowering. “It's also the art of warfare," he says. "If you change the terrain, you can alter how smaller battles are fought." 

Tisa Rodriguez'22 on what it takes to make the most of electoral politics.

Nearly half of the world's eight billion people live in a jurisdiction where elections–local, regional, national – will be held this year. The sheer volume of these elections has led many observers to dub 2024 as the year of the election. 

In South Africa and the United States, AFRE’s initial bases of operation, coming elections are among the most significant in recent years: 30 years after the fall of apartheid, South Africa has failed to live up to the promise of liberation in 1994. Rather, public services and core infrastructure has declined in ways that have worsened poverty and inequality. Similarly the U.S. remains deeply divided, and the resilience of its democracy is under question, while a rightwing backlash against the teaching of histories related to racial justice persists.

Yet our 2022 Fellow Tisa Rodriguez remains hopeful. A longtime leader in the California chapter of the U.S. Democratic Party, Tisa has a unique vantage point on the inner workings of electoral politics. From there, she sees an important shift. "It's not perfect - nothing is perfect - but more Black people - Black women - are being taken seriously on the content of their ideas, both as candidates and as the staffers who set policy agendas," she says. 

These shifts are, in part, the result of concerted efforts of programmes that have, for many years, provided mentorship and leadership support to women interested in politics. 

In Tisa's experience, that kind of slow, long-term work, what she calls "the grind", is where change happens. It's also the basis of her commitment to democracy in the U.S. and beyond. "I choose to have faith in democracy because I've seen how change happens by showing up consistently, and I know that if we work for something, we can get it done," she says.  

Yasmeen Rubidge on practices for wellbeing

Rising alongside our era's multi-pronged crises are rates of stress and stress-related illnesses. For the changemakers challenging injustice and crafting new worlds, the risks of stress and burnout, already well-known to be high, have deepened since the COVID-19 pandemic.

In her work as a facilitator in and beyond AFRE, Yasmeen Rubidge witnesses these realities of stress and burnout among racial justice leaders. "Work to achieve equity costs the people who do it and it costs them disproportionately," she says.

And, she observes, these costs are by design. "Racial capitalism and its institutions are predicated on the inflammation of our bodies, the dissolution of our bodies, the pain in our bodies," she says. 

Disrupting these patterns of harm, Yasmeen argues, first calls for a recognition of the systemic nature of chronic stress, burnout, and other threats to wellbeing. "We often start the conversation around wellbeing saying, 'Something is happening to my body, and I need to go to a doctor to take care of my own health', and that's part of it right? But we don't make the connection that what we are experiencing is systemic," she says. "So the first step is to have compassion for ourselves, and to stop personalising that which is systemic."

She also recommends finding community with others working to make sense of the systemic scales at which stress operates, and designing new systems that support wellbeing. 

As far as concrete tips for managing stress, Yasmeen encourages changemakers to identify simple strategies, like deep breathing and exercise, that they can engage consistently. That consistency will help build a reservoir of wellbeing from which to sustain oneself in times of stress.

Importantly, she also calls for sensitivity to the body. "By the time stress arrives, our bodies have given us multiple signals, signals that we tend to override as we chase the cycles. So for me, it's quite simple and yet utterly radical to connect with our bodies," she says. 

Siyanda Siko'21 on intersectional strategies for climate justice.

Progress on climate action has been "woefully inadequate", according to the World Resource Institute's most recent State of Climate Action report.

The consequences are dire. "It comes as no surprise to anyone who sweated through it: 2023 was the hottest year in human history," one January 2024 news story begins. 

Nevertheless, the climate justice movement has seen a "slow inexorable rise" over the last three decades, shifting global awareness about the urgency of the climate crisis.

Notably, the movement is part of a larger conversation that's re-examining humanity's relationship to the planet and uplifting models shaped by mutuality rather than extraction - many of them rooted in Indigenous cosmologies. Our 2021 Fellow Siyanda "Siya" Siko's work in the sustainability sector lives in this realm.

As manager of Sustainability Programmes at Sibanye-Stillwater, Siya designs programmes aimed at facilitating a "just transition" to a post-mining economy. "Mining has been vital to technological innovation," Siya says, reflecting on the many technological, industrial and medical uses of mined materials. "But it has always been difficult to reconcile the contestation between environmental sustainability and social justice in the sector."

Siya works amid that contestation, embedding programs that advance sustainability efforts related to human rights, gender justice, and economic empowerment into Sibanye-Stillwater's work.

Informed by his current work and his broader experience in sustainability and climate justice, Siya is developing a project – the Mbokodo Climate Change Innovation Challenge (MCCIC) – that facilitates climate-adaptive innovation. "We so often think of climate change in terms of threats," he says, "but with this project, we're looking at the opportunities for innovation that our changing climate creates," he says.

Created in partnership with the Bophilo Impilo Development Centre (BIDC) and with funding support from AFRE, the MCCIC aims to provide training and funding for climate solutions.

The project aims to resource Black women, in particular, who are known to be among the most vulnerable to climate change's threats and the most effective agents of mitigation and adaptation.

Siya's commitment to work at the nexus of climate, gender and racial justice comes in part from his upbringing by a mother and grandmother who came of age in apartheid-era South Africa. Reflecting the values of Black feminism, he believes corrective strategies for climate change must be intersectional. "Any approaches designed to tackle climate change should explicitly touch on issues of race and gender. That will have the greatest effects," he says.