Rising Above the Toxic Rivers of Consciousness with a Clean Glass of Water

• In Event: Environmental Struggles in Africa and the Diaspora

Description for Program

Ali Mazrui’s, ‘The African Condition’ (1967) supported the concept of peace and self-determination. In the 21st century, Pax Africana: a clean glass of water for public consumption of health development and human dignity is conceptually diasporic.
A centennial emphasis on the lived experience and sacred activism of Lumumba, Fanon, and Malcolm underlies this presentation. Their empathy and preferences for social justice and human ecology are tributaries of a river of African consciousness that flows through irrigated pathways connected to deep African thought. Clearly their struggles against turbulent streams of chaos, confirm ways of knowing that evoke clarity about the values of truth, justice, balance, harmony, and reciprocity in human relationships and their application in governance. Equally important, their integrative thinking and critical methodology brings praxis to the practice of solving the world problèmatique associated with global learning under European domination. This virulent pathology of power under the turbulent depths and shorelines of European ideology created polluted reservoirs of knowledge that spread like a water-borne epidemic across the Black Atlantic, the Indian Ocean. A mindful evaluation identifies the structural violence and pathologies of power that frequently manifest as crimes against humanity and crimes against peace.
Transformation towards a Pax Africana consciousness is long overdue and, progress of cultural geography towards the sustainable interactions of health, environment and human development as it relates to the life course trajectory and alleviation of global suffering still lags.
Consequently, this project honors the centennial commitment to promoting the values of humanity. Recalling African cognition, culture, and memory of movement for structure and governance solidifies efforts for survivorship and thriving. Undoing modern realpolitik, kapitapolitik, ideapolitik, and geopolitik supports the use of a clean glass of water to upend chaos imposed under the current Anthropocene. Pax Africana can reduce the banality of evil associated with human security.

Author

• Jamal Martin, The University of New Mexico