This is what community resistance has looked like in 2023
Dear friends and family,
We hope this blog blog you well amidst the changing seasons. As autumn transitions into winter, we want to share the reflections on the powerful journey we've had with PRALER throughout Twenty Twenty Free – a year that has been both challenging and transformative.
In the face of systemic repression through police, economic, and political violence, Twenty Twenty Free became a platform for communities worldwide to unite against miseducation and strive towards liberation through education. We want to share with you part of the journey:
With crimes against humanity needed for the financial interests of Imperialism, an educational revolution is clearly needed: a revolution to learn across cultures and geographies how to come together to build a multipolar world of global justice.
Politicians, the billionares they answer to and the media they own- all want us to accept their war on our fundamental rights, want us to accept their complicity in war crimes across the globe, but in TwentyTwentyFree millions across the world said no, and we echoed. We refused their miseducation, and started the lifelong process of action learning, inspired by ancestral resistances. We started taking power back into communities, power for communities.
As PRALER, this has been a year of preparatory justice battles, a year where the commitment of all peoples to collective liberation has grown in size. It’s been a year of so many wins, and so much loss, a year to convince ourselves of the need for this educational revolution.
Communities of resistance have been working to secure their freedom and their people’s rights to reparations, from Nigerians reclaiming their lands and destinies from the greed of French neocolonialism, to the Otomi in Mexico enacting their right to self-determination.
Here in the UK, at the heart of Empire, the PRALER network has been fighting to secure and promote such Planet Repairs wins, and to challenge miseducation. As British politicians and their billionaire allies criminalise protest, narrow the conditions for a livable future and ignore the people, hundreds have come together in the PRALER network to organise our communities, coming together to meet our own needs and enter into relationships with all communities fighting for their rights.
This year, our global network came together for power over three key dates in April, Mosiah and October:
Peace Lotus Day
On 30 April 2023 we celebrated Peace Lotus Day, commemorating the 1975 Fall of Saigon, when colonised peoples in Vietnam secured an end to foreign destruction of their homeland. This was a day to work towards a global peace with reparatory, cognitive and environmental justice at it's heart, with an end to colonial violence. COLLSAGs held film screenings, challenging colonial miseducation around peace and celebrating examples of just peace around the world. In Windrush Square we had edutainment, and community assembly.
Pan-Afrikan Reparations Rebellion Groundings
On the 1st of Mosiah, we came together for Pan-Afrikan Reparations Rebellion Groundings (PARRG) 2023. This year's theme was education in preparation for reparations, and the day was used to amplify news from the frontlines of Pan-Afrikan Liberation Struggles, and to actively listen to the voices of revolutionary youthful leadership. With film screenings, community learning circles and more we promoted the ongoing struggle for Pan-Afrikan Reparations against the continuing Maangamizi. The groundings celebrated self-repaired communities, who in the process of seeking reparations, repair and reshape the world.
Indigenous Resistance Day
On the 12th of October we celebrated Indigenous Resistance Day, a day of resistance against colonial violence, to show that another world is still possible: it is being built as we write this, by communities of resistance. Windrush Square hosted an intercontinental gathering to celebrate Indigenous resistance and to promote learning about ancestral resistance.
Reparations Season
September and October saw events celebrating Reparations Season. Planet Repairs as a framework comes from the work of the International Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations (ISMAR), meaning Afrikan reparations are integral to PRALER. Reparations Season aimed to challenge those reducing Afrikan Reparations to sums of money, building towards a participatory democratic mechanism to shape Reparations, and organising towards a United Front For and Around Pan-Afrikan Reparations.
Events included communities taking back space at the UK Houses of Parliament for the Pan-Afrikan meaning of reparations, the Hearing Session on the Maangamizi Crimes Against Indigenous Peoples, and the Inaugural Conference of the All-Party Parliamentary Group For Afrikan Reparations.
The Inaugural APPGAR Conference Statement declared the establishment of the International Standing Conference of the APPGAR and its Panels as ongoing Action-Leading Panels working throughout the year towards the APPGAR commitments. COLLSAGs engaged in action-learning to understand the importance of Afrikan reparations for all of humanity, engaging our communities in learning.
Organising our communities
We can further continue this power building if you support the PRALER fund. Supporting the PRALER Fund will help us to build up our communities for true education, for legal support, land restitution, stop the harm of colonial violence, help build real connections for communities to lead education through their own liberation.
Throughout the year, COLLSAGs built community power from Stroud to Leeds, from Bristol to London, holding popular education circles and film screenings, taking spaces for their communities, making art to celebrate resistance, and much more. COLLSAGS challenged the miseducation of our communities towards despair, and explored resistance to meet community needs and to re-build a world in which many worlds can fit.
COLLSAGs also responded to calls for glocal action from communities of resistance across the world. In response to Nigeriens taking back power from French colonialism, COLLSAGs held community hearings around the screening of Afrikan Apocalypse, a film exposing the brutality of colonial history in Niger, and the resistances that endured. When violent forces attacked the Otomi resistance in Mexico city, COLLSAGs mobilised in support . COLLSAGs also learned about GIPRAD work to monitor, to achieve safe and democratic elections in Ghana, and supported the case for reparatory justice of Florence Mbahupa Handura, of the Oveherero Indigenous community in Namibia, in her leadership to expose the role of Europe in the destruction of Indigenous lands and cultures.
Before you go:
In support of Ghana in Planet Repairs Action Dialogue 🇬🇭 we are organising to collect first and second hand laptops, phones, and fundraising for satellite phones to improve communications for frontline communities doing reparatory justice work. Contact praler@riseup.net, +44 7737 602 484 or +233 54 522 8131. We are seeking 3 phones, 2 satellite phones, and as many laptops as possible for cooperative community building!
The fight continues. Thank you for keeping in touch,
PRALER Coordination Team
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