Tag Archives: colonialism

Howard French THE SECOND EMANCIPATION: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide

Joining us once again is journalist, author and professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Howard French. He has been a decades long New York Times reporter, serving as its bureau chief for the Caribbean and Central America from 1990 to 1994, covering Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and other countries. He was one of the Times’ first black foreign correspondents, and from 1994 to 1998 he covered West and Central Africa, reporting on wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Central Africa, with particular attention to the fall of the longtime dictator of Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko. From 1998 to 2008 he served as the Times bureau chief for Japan, Korea and Shanghai, from which experiences he wrote Everything Under the Heavens: How China’s Past Helps Shape its Push for Global Power; and China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa.

His latest book, THE SECOND EMANCIPATION: NKRUMAH, PAN-AFRICANISM, AND GLOBAL BLACKNESS AT HIGH TIDE, is being released on August 26, 2025 by Liveright. The link to our earlier interview when his book, BORN IN BLACKNESS: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War, was published is below.

His very well documented books are packed full of information and insights rarely seen outside the academic world. Best of all, his writing style is lucid, fluid and a pleasure to read.

We spoke with Howard French via FaceTime on August 19, 2025.

Links to articles, etc. pertinent to this interview:

The Man Who Saw the Future of Africa https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/opinion/africa-future-kwame-nkrumah.html

Mali’s junta arrests generals and French national over alleged coup plot https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/15/mali-junta-arrests-generals-and-french-national-over-suspected-coup-plot

Howard French BORN IN BLACKNESS: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War https://forthright.media/2022/12/22/howard-french-born-in-blackness-africa-africans-and-the-making-of-the-modern-world-1471-to-the-second-world-war/

Stuart Reid THE LUMUMBA PLOT: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination https://forthright.media/2023/12/08/stuart-reid-the-lumumba-plot-the-secret-history-of-the-cia-and-a-cold-war-assassination/

Adam Shatz THE REBEL’S CLINIC: THE REVOLUTIONARY LIVES OF FRANTZ FANON https://forthright.media/2024/03/12/adam-shatz-the-rebels-clinic-the-revolutionary-lives-of-frantz-fanon/

Birth of Ghana Lord Kitchener https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=057BmLQ9MfU&list=RD057BmLQ9MfU&start_radio=1

E.T. Mensah-Ghana Freedom https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sivj_40ZaHc&list=RDSivj_40ZaHc&start_radio=1

Why Trump’s ‘anti-woke’ attack on the Smithsonian matters https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/27/why-trumps-attack-on-the-smithsonian-matters

The Guardian view on Africa and maps: drawn true, its scale and promise can’t be ignored https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/22/the-guardian-view-on-africa-and-maps-drawn-true-its-scale-and-promise-cant-be-ignored

Equal Earth • Political Wall Map https://equal-earth.com/equal-earth-projection.html

Adam Shatz THE REBEL’S CLINIC: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

Adam Shatz‘s latest book, The Rebel’s Clinic: the Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, examines the intersections of the African diaspora in the Caribbean Islands, WWII France and it’s aftermath, and the inevitable violence that colonialism creates and requires to maintain itself. He is the US editor of The London Review of Books and a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and other publications. He is also a visiting professor at Bard College and the host of the podcast “Myself with Others.” He is the author of two earlier books: Prophets Outcast: A Century of Dissident Jewish Writing about Zionism and Israel and Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination.

Perhaps like me, you were aware of Frantz Fanon. You saw his books, particularly THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH, in the bookshelves of people your respected, but you didn’t really know too much about him.

Frantz Fanon was born on the Caribbean island of Martinique in 1925. He was educated to identify as a French man, and as he wrote in his book, BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASK, it was a shock to serve in WWII, be wounded, receive a medal and still be seen as an African, an object of fear. He studied in Lyon, France, and became a psychiatrist in the post-war intellectual ferment of existentialism and the rise of decolonization movements.

He was a playwright, a practicing psychiatrist, the author of numerous articles in scientific journals, a teacher, a diplomat, a journalist, the editor of an anti-colonial newspaper, the author of three books, and a major Pan-Africanist and internationalist, who became a political militant as France efforts to suppress the Algerian independence movement became more violent and vicious. But unlike most militants, he had the training and intellectual capacity to analyze and articulate the processes internal to the individual and external to the culture that lead to the point of violence, and whether violence can be justified or even dis-intoxicating.

Like Ernesto “Che” Guevara–another revolutionary who valued the poetic and was a committed internationalist, doctor, soldier, teacher, and theorist–Fanon’s life has much to inform our understanding of where we find ourselves in struggle today.

Thanks to David Rovics for permission to post his song, “As the Bombs Rain Down” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQbx5zPxGAk&list=OLAK5uy_lNIlbd6R0lC4TICKXq2ylk9-CrjXHDcc4

The World May Be Entering a Much Bloodier Era https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/opinion/international-world/coups-climate-change-africa-sahel.html

Dossier no. 26: Frantz Fanon: The brightness of metal https://mronline.org/2020/03/04/dossier-no-26-frantz-fanon-the-brightness-of-metal/

Alfred McCoy – IN THE SHADOWS OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY: THE RISE AND DECLINE OF US GLOBAL POWER

This edition of Forthright Radio was originally broadcast on October 4, 2017, the 60th anniversary of the launching by the Soviet Union of Sputnik 1, the first artificial Earth satellite, which triggered the Space Race.

Our guest today, Professor Alfred McCoy, writes of this and much more about the history for global dominance in his latest book, IN THE SHADOWS OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY: THE RISE AND DECLINE OF US GLOBAL POWER, just published by Haymarket Books.

Alfred McCoy, who holds the Harrington Chair in History at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, has been shaking up our understanding and beliefs about the role of the United States in the world since 1970, when he co-edited LAOS: WAR AND REVOLUTION .

His research led him to publish THE POLITICS OF HEROIN IN SOUTHEAST ASIA, in 1972, which led to his testifying before the foreign operations subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee in June of that year about the role of the CIA in the production and distribution of heroin. Among his numerous other books are POLICING AMERICA’S EMPIRE: THE UNITED STATES, THE PHILIPINES AND THE RISE OF THE SURVEILLANCE STATE; A QUESTION OF TORTURE: CIA INTERROGATION, FROM THE COLD WAR TO THE WAR ON TERROR. In 2012 Yale University awarded him the Wilbur Cross Medal for work as “one of the world’s leading historians of Southeast Asia and an expert on … international political surveillance.”

In this interview, we discuss the geopolitics of global dominance; the covert netherworld of U.S. government agencies colluding with international drug cartels at the same time the military ineffectively attempts to eradicate opium production in Afghanistan; the rapid rise of China as a dominant force; cyberwarfare; the vulnerability of our and much more.