Geert Wilders, the rightwing Dutch politician was in New York last week to lend support to his American counterparts at a rally in lower Manhattan near the site of the 2001 terrorist attacks. Then this happened:

On a packed block of demonstrators between Murray and Warren streets, Wilder’s words were drowned out when a slim woman with brown curly hair blew one of those long plastic horns that blared throughout the South African soccer games in June. A big man with a bald head tried to grab it. There was pushing and shoving. A row or two behind, a man in shorts and a red polo shirt bellowed for police. “Get her out!” he screamed. “Grab her by the neck and force her out!” A pair of cops, both African-American women, eventually unhinged the metal pens and escorted the woman with the vuvuzela and two of her friends away. “Pull your bushels over your head and go home,” yelled the man.

The Village Voice.

Further Reading

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.

Energy for whom?

Behind the fanfare of the Africa Climate Summit, the East African Crude Oil Pipeline shows how neocolonial extraction still drives Africa’s energy future.