Horn of Africa Leftists
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The #1 Podcast From the Horn of Africa 🌍 From the Horn of Africa to the diaspora. Culture, music, global struggle.
Videos
🔴Afro-Saudi Singer Dalia Mubarak Captivates Audiences With Her Talent Across West Asia, Afro-Arab communities have often stood at the margins of public recognition, even though their presence is woven into the region’s history. Every so often, however, a figure or cultural moment draws wider attention to a legacy that has long existed in plain sight. Clip From The Voice Kids: Ahla Sawt
Horn of Africa Leftists1,115,248 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
🔴The Underrepresented Afro-Arab Communities of Yemen and Oman: Cultural Links to East Africa The Afro-Arab populations of Yemen and Oman are often overlooked, erased, and marginalized. In Yemen, Afro-Arabs, often associated with the Muhamasheen (“the marginalized”), are estimated to number between 500,000 and 3.5 million, or about 10% of the population. In Oman, the Afro-Arab population is estimated at around 200,000 people, roughly 5% of the population.
Horn of Africa Leftists148,290 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
🔴Rapper Earl Sweatshirt, Who Is South African by Origin, on Apathy and the Role of the Ruling Class in Perpetuating It To Disarm Collective Resistance Earl Sweatshirt, aka Thebe Neruda Kgositsile, was born to Keorapetse Kgositsile, a South African Tswana poet, journalist, and political activist who was an influential member of the African National Congress in the 1960s. Earl is married to Eritrean actress Aida Osman. Apathy is useful to the bourgeoisie. It disarms the masses by replacing revolutionary fervor with individualized despair. Instead of seeking collective liberation, the subject internalizes failure, turning inward.
Horn of Africa Leftists398,106 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
🔴Happy Birthday to Black Panther's Own Seed, Tupac Amaru Shakur Born June 16, 1971 Here is a clip of him rapping to his song Panther Power at the age of 17. First played August 19, 1989. 🎶'Cause lady liberty's a hypocrite, she lied to me Promised me freedom, education, equality Never gave me nothin' but slavery🎶
Horn of Africa Leftists460,823 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren
🔴Sudanese Artist Alsarah Sings in the Ancient Nubian Language Alsarah , the Sudanese musician in America, is known for both her solo work and her band, Alsarah & The Nubatones. Through her music, she celebrates Nubian heritage, language, and culture.
Horn of Africa Leftists42,028 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
🔴How the Myth of Ethiopia as “Africa’s First Christian Nation” Erases the History of Christian Nubia in Sudan This Popular Mechanics article on Old Dongola matters because it forces Sudan’s buried Christian history back into view. Archaeologists uncovered a late 16th- or early 17th-century document tied to King Qashqash at Old Dongola, the former capital of Makuria, one of the major Christian Nubian kingdoms. That find matters not because it proves Sudan was simply “first,” but because it exposes how thoroughly Sudan’s Christian Nubian past has been minimized, sidelined, and often erased from the way African Christian history is publicly remembered. Christian Nubia was not a footnote. It was one of the major centers of African Christian civilization, with its own kingdoms, political institutions, religious life, and historical depth. Yet in popular memory, and even in many Black and African political spaces, that history is too often pushed into the background or ignored altogether. Ancient Aksum Empire (c. 1st century CE–8th century CE) ≠ Abyssinian Kingdom (c. 1270–19th century) Abyssinian Kingdom (c. 1270–19th century) ≠ Modern Ethiopia (late 19th century–present) That erasure is reinforced by the slogan that “Ethiopia is Africa’s first Christian country,” repeated across the Black diaspora and the continent as if the history were simple, settled, and politically innocent. The facts are more complicated. Aksum did adopt Christianity in the 4th century under Ezana, and that should not be denied. But Orthodox or Coptic Christianity in Africa should not be reduced to a triumphalist modern Ethiopian nationalist slogan. Orthodox Christianity in Africa is not reducible to Ethiopia, nor is it the exclusive property of any later Ethiopian nationalist narrative. It is part of a much wider African Christian history that includes indigenous African communities and long-standing Christian traditions spread across North Africa and the Nile Valley, including Christian Nubia in what is now Sudan. Aksum was an ancient empire centered in present-day Eritrea and Tigray, not a modern Ethiopian nation-state, while Christian Nubia was also a major, long-lasting, and historically consequential center of African Christian civilization. Once the entire story is filtered through the slogan of “first Christian country,” the wider regional record is distorted, Sudan’s place in that history is pushed aside, and indigenous African ties to Orthodox and eastern Christian traditions are erased in favor of a much narrower nationalist narrative. The deeper problem is that this timeline, terminology, and historical memory have been hijacked by pro-feudal Abyssinian propaganda and later nationalist storytelling. Aksum was not “Ethiopia” in the modern nation-state sense. Ancient “Aithiopia” was a shifting label, not the exclusive historical property of the modern Ethiopian state, and certainly not something that can be retroactively monopolized as a seamless inheritance. Later traditions turned that unstable and contested name into a much more exclusive continuity claim than the evidence can support. In the process, they swallowed up histories that were never theirs alone to monopolize, folded distinct political formations into one myth of uninterrupted continuity, and elevated one later narrative at the expense of others. That is how Sudan’s Christian Nubian past gets pushed into the background while a broader regional inheritance is recast as the sole legacy of one later political project. The serious historical point, then, is not to deny Aksum’s Christianity, but to reject the political use of that fact to obscure other African Christian histories. Aksum’s conversion is real, but so is the long Christian history of Nubia. Sudan’s Makuria and other Nubian Christian formations should be studied in their own right, on their own historical terms, not left permanently overshadowed by a modern slogan that compresses distinct histories into one nationalist myth. A more honest account of African Christian history would place Sudan’s Christian Nubian past back into the picture, not as an afterthought, but as one of its central chapters.
Horn of Africa Leftists55,133 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
🔴British-Installed Museveni of Uganda’s Suspicious Links to the Assassination of Revolutionary John Garang of Sudan The rise to power of Museveni has long been linked to British intelligence networks and later received Washington’s approval in his installation in Uganda. Based on this context, Museveni has been viewed as a long-standing, successful asset and client regime, implementing various destabilizing activities in Sudan. Recent developments are therefore not surprising, including alleged indirect support aligned with Washington and London interests, reportedly involving channels through the UAE and Israel in relation to the RSF.
Horn of Africa Leftists57,850 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
🔴Black America and 1970s South Africa: A Shared Diasporic Connection in Janet Jackson’s Got ’Til It’s Gone Music Video By staging apartheid-era South Africa through the lens of Black America musical production, Janet Jackson’s Got ’Til It’s Gone music video draws a visual and historical connection between Jim Crow segregation in the United States and apartheid in South Africa. Through its re-creation of 1950/60/70s South African social spaces, fashion, and photographic traditions, the video situates these two systems of legalized racial segregation within a shared diasporic narrative. In doing so, it highlights parallel histories of statesanctioned racial oppression while also foregrounding the cultural resilience, creativity, and self-representation that emerged within Black communities across the Atlantic.
Horn of Africa Leftists57,627 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
🔴Unity as a Weapon: The Popular Cartoon "Static Shock" on Pan-Africanism and the Contribution of Africans Living in America "Static in Africa" is the third episode of the third season of Static Shock. It first aired on February 8, 2003. On a vacation to Ghana, Static and family from America meets the African hero Anansi.
Horn of Africa Leftists58,331 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
🔴Legendary Sudanese Singer Sayed Khalifa Delivers a Pan-African Message of Unity to Eritrea, Somalia, and Ethiopia Sudanese legendary singer and composer Sayed Khalifa performs Ezzayakom (“How Are You?”) at a solidarity event in the 1980s. Singing in Amharic, Tigrinya, and Oromo, he affirms a Pan-African spirit of unity, expressing the shared histories, cultures, and struggles that bind Sudan to the peoples of the Horn of Africa and the wider continent.
Horn of Africa Leftists41,064 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
🔴Boyz II Men Neutralized: How Capitalism Appropriated Black Artistic Momentum to Build the Late-1990s White Boy Band Era Black America created jazz. Black America created rock and roll. Black America created rap/hiphop. These genres were born from the lived experience, spiritual traditions, rhythmic innovation, and cultural resistance of Black communities in the United States whose ancestry comes from West Africa. The polyrhythms, call and response structures, tonalities, and communal performance traditions carried across the Atlantic survived slavery, segregation, and systemic exclusion, transforming into distinctly American art forms forged through struggle and survival. Yet at pivotal moments in American history, the commercial breakthrough of these genres flowed disproportionately through white performers positioned as more marketable to mass audiences. The rise of Elvis Presley followed the foundational work of Black rhythm and blues artists who had already defined rock and roll. The global dominance of The Beatles and the Rolling Stones drew directly from Black American blues traditions they studied and replicated. Time and again, original Black artistic expression generated the cultural momentum, while corporate systems elevated white performers as the primary vehicles of large scale profit and distribution. The pattern is structural: Black innovation establishes the sound, and capitalist industry redirects its mass commercialization. Boyz II Men stood within that lineage of Black creative power. Their harmonies, phrasing, and emotional depth carried forward a tradition shaped by gospel, soul, and doo-wop. When they achieved massive crossover success in the early 1990s, they demonstrated once again that Black artistry defined the center of American popular music. Yet following the 1996 Telecommunications Act and the consolidation of radio ownership, corporate control over playlists and promotion intensified. In the same historical rhythm seen with rock and blues, the late 1990s white boy band explosion rose through a commercial system that adopted R and B vocal structures and performance aesthetics while redirecting scale and capital toward acts framed as universally marketable. The result reflects a recurring American reality: Black communities create the cultural foundation, and capitalist expansion transforms that foundation into mass profit streams often detached from its original creators.
Horn of Africa Leftists45,908 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
🔴Jamaica Was Already Caught in Washington’s Debt Trap Before Michael Manley, and It Remained Trapped Afterward Clip From the 2001 Classic Documentary: Life and Debt Michael Manley did not invent Jamaica’s crisis; Jamaica was already a neocolonial dependent state, tied to foreign capital, foreign markets, and foreign lenders long before he took office. The real center of the problem was Washington: power, international finance, and IMF-style discipline kept Jamaica trapped in debt and dependency well before Manley, and tightened that trap afterward. You can criticize Manley’s government, but blaming him alone erases the deeper truth that Jamaica had already been structured to serve external interests, not its own people. What Manley confronted was not a healthy independent economy, but a debt-ridden neocolonial order, and every attempt to move beyond it was met with pressure from Washington and the institutions it dominated.
Horn of Africa Leftists35,550 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
🔴Marlon Brando Donated To The Black Panther Party and Was An Ally Of Black America Struggle Brando was a donor to the Black Panther Party and gave the eulogy at the funeral of Bobby Hutton, a 17-year-old Black Panther member who was killed by Oakland police while trying to surrender in April 1968.
Horn of Africa Leftists104,310 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
🔴Kwame Ture on Why Karl Marx Did Not Invent Socialism and the Myth That African Liberation Must Be Separated from It Kwame Ture explains here that Karl Marx did not invent socialism and that socialism emerges from material conditions, not Europe. Marx did not create socialism any more than Newton created gravity. He observed, analyzed, and systematized laws that exist independently of him. This directly challenges the claim that scientific socialism is a Western imposition on African liberation because it “came after” Marx. The issue is not chronology, but development. African peoples did not need Marx to recognize exploitation, struggle against domination, or arrive at socialist conclusions. As Ture explains, wherever capital seeks to dominate labor, struggle emerges as a material fact. African resistance to slavery, colonialism, and wage exploitation demonstrates this historically. The clip makes clear that socialism is not “a white thing,” not a European invention, and not alien to African struggle. What Marx contributed was a scientific method for understanding these realities, not the realities themselves. African liberation movements independently developed socialist conclusions as colonial domination matured into capitalism. This affirms African autonomy rather than denying it. Separating Pan-Africanism from scientific socialism on the basis that it predates Marx is not a defense of African history; it is a misunderstanding of how revolutionary struggle develops under material conditions.
Horn of Africa Leftists39,171 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten
