The ‘Stop the Maangamizi!’ Campaign is the official campaign partner of the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March Committee (AEDRMC) together we co-facilitate the organisation of the Pan-Afrikan Reparations Rebellion Groundings (PARRG)on the 1st Mosiah (August) Afrikan Emancipation Day. The PARRG are also supported by the Extinction Rebellion Internationalist Solidarity Network (XRISN), co-founded by Stop The Maangamizi Team Members Kofi Mawuli Klu & Esther Stanford-XoseI and other leading figures within Extinction Rebellion. Between the years 2015-2019, the 1st Mosiah Commemorations took the form of the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March. View the following video to find out more about the rationale for evolving the March to the PARRG.

The main purpose of the PARRG is to showcase our Afrikan Heritage Communities Self-Repairs Initiatives locally, nationally and internationally and to demonstrate that the achievement of Planet Repairs (the nexus of reparatory, environmental and cognitive justice) epitomised by the building of MAATUBUNTUMAN in UBUNTUDUNIA as the overarching strategic goal of our Pan-Afrikan Reparations for Global Justice organising efforts is possible. Indeed, the PARRGs are our Afrikan Heritage Communities demonstration of the fact that a Post-Afrikan Reparations World Order is being prefigured through our acts of everyday resistance to the Maangamizi and organsing to restore to ourselves forms of Afrikan autonomy where we can exercise Self-determination in effecting and securing more enduring forms of holistic Reparatory Justice for our Ancestors, Ourselves and Future Generations.

See the following link for the videos from the PARRG 2021:
https://stopthemaangamizi.com/2021/09/23/videos-from-the-pan-afrikan-reparations-rebellion-groundings-parrg-2021/

Find out more about the PARRG 2022 here.

What are Groundings?

The meaning of Groundings as popularised by Afrikan Guyanese scholar-activist historian, Dr Walter Rodney is explained as follows:

‘Groundings’ are popular education sessions with grassroots forces, including socially marginalised groups, workers, women, youth (including those in street organisations) for organising cells of resistance and action towards the concrete struggle for a new society and Another World. Groundings are highlighted in Dr Walter Rodney’s classic work ‘The Groundings with my Brothers’ chronicling first-hand reports of his mass movement organising, public lectures and reasonings in Jamaica and Canada; which was published by the London-based Bogle-L’Ouverture independent Black publishing house in 1969. These reasonings offered a powerful corrective to Eurocentric assumptions regarding what it meant to be ‘educated’ by breaking down the division between teachers and students (as co-producers of knowledge), at the heart of educational hierarchies.

Rodney’s ideas and way of life were deemed so dangerous by the Jamaican government that they declared him persona non-grata and he was immediately dismissed from his position at the University of the West Indies in 1968. Both acts sparked violent protests in Jamaica in support of Rodney. Rodney took the view that institutional based scholars had to not only challenge the status quo of establishment academia, but also engage in the mutual exchange of knowledge with those struggling on the ground.

To truly ‘ground’, Rodney’s praxis demonstrated that the revolutionary intellectual must go anywhere to reason with their people. This, of course, included going to places that most intellectuals of his stature would not have set foot in. Rodney, considered study and struggle inseparable; he exemplified how to bridge the gap between theory and praxis in a People’s quest for Liberation, hence the notion of ‘Guerrilla Intellectualism‘ and warrior-scholarship in movement-building). So, with Groundings, the mutual production and dissemination of emancipatory ideas, has to also be accompanied by mass movement organising, led from the grassroots, in furtherance of building the capacity to usher in a new World, by our own People’s Power! ‘

Groundings’ are therefore a revolutionary praxis because of the commitment to anti-imperialist, Afrikan communitarian orientated mass-action which is geared towards bringing about the revolutionising of society and the transformation of class, race and gender based people stratification systems; which necessarily involves challenging exploitative and oppressive Systems of Power.