So Jah seh, yeah

“Not one of my seeds

Shall sit in the sidewalks

And beg your bread”

No, they can’t and you know that they won’t

Bob Marley, So Jah S’eh, Natty Dread (1974)

Soul Rebels,

Humans have gone gaga about the moon again. And for good reason. Artemis II represents the best side of science and human endeavor.

It puts us accidental humans back in perspective.

Or it should.

Artemis’s 10-day trip around the dark side of the moon also coincided with the 58th anniversary of the murder of Martin Luther King. MLK too had something to say about space travel. In his Nobel Peace Prize lecture in 1964 he juxtaposed the progress of science with the regress of equality.

“The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.”

What’s new?

In a 1967 speech, MLK had confessed to suffering from “maladjustment”, a term that in those days was a shoddy euphemism for the mentally ill.

Listen:MLK: Creative Maladjustment (UCLA, 1965; Courtesy of UCLA Communications Studies Department) (from 42.52 mins)

But MLK turned maladjustment on its head. He declared there were “some things within our world and our nation of which I’m proud to be maladjusted”.

He was maladjusted to inequality and injustice.

In the context of the growing militarisation of the Cold War, he called for the creation of an “International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment”.

The Justice and Activism Hub (JAH) is a home for the maladjusted.

News from JAH is a newsletter for the maladjusted.

This issue celebrates the creatively maladjusted.

The dialectic of darkness

Rebecca Solnit has been maladjusted for years. In her 2005 book, Hope in the Dark, she writes: “The future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as the grave.”

Activism is the dark womb of a better world.

Hope in the Dark, republished with a new Foreword in 2015, is her paean to activism. It’s a reminder that, much as the world seems dark today, activism has successfully pushed frontiers.

And must continue to push.

Solnit has a new book: The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change. In an interview with the Guardian on the ‘slow revolution’ the far right cannot tolerate, she continues the birth metaphor:

“A new world is being born, and they’re basically trying to abort it. Which is a little ironic, given their views on abortion.”

Read Rebecca’s newsletter: Meditations in an Emergency

The world progressives must abort

Don’t pretend you are not frightened. A deranged, narcissistic, sociopath rules the White House. A murder of sycophants – the Epstein class – work to enable his abuses. Nazis in suits.

Three hundred+ million people are hungry worldwide. Nearly 100 million Americans cannot afford quality health care. But, as the website of the Cost of War project reveals, when it comes to war money is irrelevant.

This article in the Guardian, breaking the cost down in charts says it all.

• Read: US spending on ‘reckless’ Iran war could have saved 87m lives, says UN

But it gets even more depraved. In the casino economy, insider trading has now spread to betting on war and politics.

• Read: How Anonymous Bettors Cashed In on the Iran Strike, Just Hours Before It Happened;

• ‘Abhorrent’: the inside story of the Polymarket gamblers betting millions on war ;

• The insider trading suspicions looming over Trump’s presidency

Reasons to be cheerful, part 19

But hang on in there, as the late, great Ian Dury sang, there are many reasons to be cheerful:

• The plan to charge Qedani Mahlangu, the politician who ordered the relocation of mental health care users at Life Esidimeni leading to 144 deaths, with culpable homicide is a victory for civil society tenacity: NPA finally pursues justice for Life Esidimeni victims after nine years of delays

• The defeat of Victor Orban, another victory notched up for Gen Z who voted in record numbers against Orban.

• The Short and Ridiculous Trial of a Protester Arrested in an Inflatable Penis Costume

Activist’s Bookshelf:

The Epstein class doesn’t give a shit about the human and environmental cost of war. But, do we? Inoculated to violence by TV, distracted by social media, can we feel the levels of pain being inflicted on people like us?

If we did, wouldn’t more people be out on the streets screaming STOP?

Read my 2025 article: People in pain: How long will you and I be silent?

Trying to feel others’ pain led me to Susan Sontag’s 2003 Regarding the Pain of Others (2003).

I recommend you read it too.

Ostensibly it is a little history of the landmarks of war photography. How paintings and then photography brought distant wars to our dining tables.

How, over a century, these photographs shocked – then numbed – then normalised – and then were co-opted and curated to disconnect us from the pain of others.

Sontag warns that “our culture of spectatorship” has paradoxically contributed to a “deadening of feeling.”

“There is still a reality that exists independent of the attempts to weaken its authority.”

Reading, especially women like Sontag and Solnit, is an exercise we should do to keep our souls alive. A step in reawakening and sustaining our own compassion.

But, warns Susan:

“Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated.”

That’s a question for you too, soul rebel.

Artivism: In memory of Fikile Ntshangase

Theatre is an art form that can bring the maladjusted back to life.

Isitha Sabantu, the latest play produced by Empatheatre, premiered at Jo’burg’s Market Theatre in March 2026. It recreates the real-life conflict brought by a coal mining company to a rural village in KwaZulu Natal. The Somkhele community’s resistance, led by MaFikile Ntshangase, led to her assassination.

• Read: New play honours murdered environmental activist Fikile Ntshangase

• Fikile Ntshangase - Another Environmental Activist Violently Silenced

• Police claim Fikile Ntshangase’s killers are dead, but who paid the hitmen?

South African’s capacity for innovation, imagination, acting and genre-bending never ceases to inspire me. For three hours Isitha Sabantu’s minimal set, use of puppetry, choral song, choreography, poetry tugged at my soul.

There is a scene that defies description. But let me try.

The stage is covered with a green tarpaulin, uneven to capture the rolling hills of KwaZuluNatal, dotted with traditional homesteads. As the play approaches its climax, the land collapses, the tarpaulin sucked into a vortex, disappearing into a hole in the centre of the stage.

This is the moment the Tendele coal mine succeeds in breaking community resistance.

Isitha Sabantu is on its way to Durban and Cape Town. Watch the teaser here.

Maladjusted: Rest in Power, Stephen Lewis

Stephen Lewis, politician, feminist, philanthropist, ACTIVIST, was maladjusted. He is a dear friend and a comrade to me and many other maladjusted persons.

• Read: Stephen Lewis, Canadian politician and social activist, dies aged 88;

• Farewell, Stephen Lewis, the man who shamed the world into seeing Africa’s Aids catastrophe

Some of the words that best capture the meaning of Stephen’s life and death come from Vuyiseka Dubula, one of the young women most instrumental in building and leading the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC):

“He walked with us in Africa, not ahead of us, not above us, but alongside us, in the struggle for equitable access to health, dignity, justice, and life.

He was an ethical leader who understood his privilege as a white male from Canada and chose, consistently and deliberately, to use it in the service of humanity.

He lived a full life, yes, his departure is not a gentle grief to our tender hearts.

His departure reminds me of the moment I met him at a time when the world was in a dark place of AIDS silence. Stephen spoke. When systems failed, he challenged them. He refused comfort when injustice demanded courage. He brought moral clarity into spaces that too often settled for indifference.

He used his position and his voice to lift others, especially women, girls living with HIV like me, grandmothers, and grassroots activists, recognising them not as beneficiaries, but as leaders.”

• Read Vuyiseka’s full tribute here

• Read Sipho Mthathi’s tribute here: Remembering Stephen Lewis means interrogating the world that made him necessary

Settings sons/suns

In 1979 The Jam, an English band led by Paul Weller, released Setting Sons, their fourth album.

Recently, while marveling at the cloud and light play, the wondrous world, as the sun set over the Ukuhlamba Drakensberg mountains, a song slipped from the album into my mind. I remembered Little Boy Soldiers, a song in which the musical accompaniment suddenly halts, and this haunting lyric follows:

Come on outside - I’ll sing you a lullaby

Or tell a tale of how goodness prevailed

We ruled the world, we killed and robbed

The fucking lot - but we don’t feel bad

It was done beneath the flag of democracy

You’ll believe and I do - yes I do, yes I do

Nearly fifty years later the sun still sets in a blaze; astronauts still marvel at the beauty of our planet from afar; writers wonder at our stupidity; and wars, poverty and disease still cut down people in the prime of life. Humans still wrestle with existential issues of love, fairness, peace, dignity which have been our preoccupation since we started to express ourselves in poetry. As old as Gilgamesh or the Bagavad Ghita.

But the times are getting more extreme.

We must all be activists now.

There is work to be done.

Love and Peace,

Mark

Heywood

Written and researched by a human being. No AI involved.

The Justice and Activism Hub is a change tank for a time of change. We are committed to strengthening social justice struggles through connection, collaboration, coordination, convening and catalysing.

News from JAH is also now available here on Substack. The playlist of songs that I feature is available here. If you enjoyed this newsletter please forward it to other soul rebels. You can also contact me at markjamesheywood@gmail.com

Rise up fallen fighters

Rise and take your stance again

Bob Marley, The Heathen, Exodus, 1977

Soul Rebels,

“We have turned our back on the spirit of the depths and live entirely in the spirit of the times. In order to regain our balance, we need to remaster the ability to go deep, to ‘turn away from outer things.’ To face what is in ourselves. This starts with connection and creativity.”

Kae Tempest, On Connection, 2020

Two days ago it was Human Rights Day in South Africa, commemorating 66 years since the Sharpeville massacre.

Soon it will be the 50th anniversary of the June 16th Soweto uprising and murders.

We mark these days on the principle of ‘never forget’. We honor the people who got up on those days not knowing that a simple act of protest would cost their lives.

Yet we forget.

We say “never again”.

Yet we repeat.

Today, suddenly, it seems that every day brings an atrocity. We consume the killings with our breakfast. Then get on with the day.

The atrocitaires (to invent a word), deranged sociopaths like Pete Hegseth, Netanyahu and Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo, aka Hemedti, commit mass murder with gay abandon.

They wear the badge of ‘war criminal’ with pride.

They are confident that justice is as broken as the bodies they obliterate.

Washington’s bullets and bombs fly again.

Faced with this barrage, those of us who are out of physical danger are nonetheless in danger of losing our souls. How do we not allow ourselves to think of this as normal?

Calling them out, as Arundathi Roy did recently, is an act of humanity. It shows we still have human feelings. I stand by the people.

• Watch: Twitter: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

• Read and support: Drop Site News for some of the best reportage on America’s wars.

Solidarity, Memory and (preventing) Impunity

In South Africa too, we are in danger of forgetting.

In June it will be ten years since the deaths of 144 mental health care users evicted from Life Esidimeni commenced.

They were people. With names.

No prosecution.

Read: Vindication of the rights of those with mental illnesses to be people

It’s been eight years since 200 people died of Listeriosis caused by the proven negligence of Tiger Brands.

No accountability. No apology. No compensation.

Read: Tiger Brands has ‘moral responsibility’ to address needs of listeriosis victims urgently: lawyers

It’s now three years since the assassination of Swazi human rights lawyer Thulani Maseko.

No justice.

King Mswati III is still in his castle, now exchanging Mbabane’s dungeons for Washington dollars for poor souls ICED out of the USA.

Read: Who killed Swazi human rights lawyer Thulani Maseko?

As I asked in my keynote memorial lecture to honor Thulani: how do we practice solidarity in a time of impunity?

How do we insulate our souls against the erasure of outrage and emotion?

Paradoxically, it’s by keeping joy alive and present in our lives.

By remembering the value of life.

And what it means to have it taken away.

By being alive to pain.

Thumbs Up:

The South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) hunger hearings started on March 12. So far, eight Ministers have been summoned. Three have pitched.

Big Food, the hungermongers whose excessive pricing denies food to millions, stayed away, in contempt of the Constitution.

But SAHRC has found some mettle. Big Food have been subpoenaed to give evidence and answer pointed questions.

When the retailers do present themselves the Union Against Hunger will be there to greet them.

In international news: Trump is in trouble. But he will go out causing chaos, death and destruction. Deaths are rising. Fuel prices are rising. Food prices are rising.

In this context, it is highly likely that Trump will seek ways to suppress the US mid-term elections in November 2026.

But it’s not all bad news on the elections front. Where democracy survives, and where people organise, it still holds out the hope of putting people with hearts in positions of power.

• In Nepal ex-rapper Balendra Shah is set to be Nepal PM after party’s landslide election win.

• In England, The Economist recently declared ‘Britain’s class politics is back—with a Green twist’; read ‘We defeated the parties of billionaire donors’: Hannah Spencer’s victory speech | Green party

• In Germany too the Green party is on the rise: ‘Bitter result’ for Friedrich Merz as Greens win in German car heartland

Activists bookshelf

“I can’t understand why humans destroy when they can create,” says the ghost of a Leopard to the ghost of Maali Almeida.

Take a trip down carnage lane.

Without design five of the books I have read recently have been about war, civil war and the brutality that comes with it.

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; Human Acts and We Do Not Part by Han Kang; Prophet Song by Paul Lynch (the 2024 Booker prize winner); and The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka (the 2022 Booker prize winner).

The theatres of war may change. So too may the times. But war’s underlying themes do not. The poor always pay.

The war-mongers always get off scot-free;

… and when it’s all over nothing’s resolved anyway.

These books, however, introduce us to the humans living through war. How life and love goes on.

And how it doesn’t.
During the Biafran war in Nigeria in the 1960s (Adichie’s subject) and the civil war in Sri Lanka in 1990 (Karunatilaka’s) the faraway Beatles are a soundtrack in faraway colonies, evidence that whilst colonised societies are torn apart by divisions seeded by the colonisers, life goes on is the in the imperial nations.

What’s changes?

Human Acts and Seven Moons are both told by the dead. Maali Almeida, the main character in Seven Moons, has a wonderful mal de vivre, the gallows humour of the gallowed.

Yet what shines through each book is the indomitable human spirit.

• Listen: Bob Dylan Talkin’ World War III Blues (Live at Carnegie Hall, New York, NY - 1963)

Journalists unusual: Ufrieda Ho

Ufrieda Ho is gone.

But her spirit lingers on and on.

Read: Goodbye Ufrieda Ho, keeper of Jozi and wordsmith of the people

Ufrieda was an activists’ journalists’ journalist. She understood the urgency and often life-threatening nature of the issues we drew to her attention. She worked with speed. But she never sacrificed thoroughness of journalistic ethics and integrity for urgency.

Ufrieda was (com)passionate and principled, but didn’t wear her beliefs in justice on her sleeve. She just practiced them in her craft.

In the South African health sector (you can find many of her articles here), Ufrieda was trusted by the vulnerable people she interviewed. She had empathy. But she always sought to give the transgressors a voice to explain their misdeeds.

Last year I worked with Ufrieda on writing stories about community activism. There I saw a different part of her: her love and joy in community, her free spirit … a bit of her dreams.

• Read one of Ufrieda’s last articles: Three small ideas that had beautiful outcomes

I didn’t know she was ill with cancer.

I’m so sorry now that I didn’t join the monthly ‘full moon walk’ she invited me to in late 2025.

Instead on a cloudy wet night, with the full moon in hiding, Human Rights Day, I joined it with her friends to celebrate her life.

There’s a lesson there. Love your friends, while you can. They may not be here tomorrow.

May the road rise with you - parting thoughts on joy

Talking about joy and where to find it.

Most Saturday mornings along with +- 460,000 other people around the world I do a parkrun.

It invariably offers what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, 200 years ago, termed “inscape”. Rare, sudden, momentary flashes of beauty, seen either in people or nature.

Like this skyscape.

Or, sometimes an idea prized loose and suddenly falling into thought with clarity.

Or, whilst driving to the parkrun, the algorithm that throws up a song that speaks miraculously to the moment. As it did when it put Rise on the turntable, a song by Public Image Limited (PiL), a band led by Johnny Rotten, one of my favourite disruptors and soothsayers:

They put a hot wire to my head

‘Cause of the things I did and said

They made these feelings go away

A model citizen in every way

The chorus of Rise, which according to Lydon is inspired by the murder of Steve Biko, is “Anger is an energy”.

True. But too much anger is an enemy.

Joy is an antidote.

Take joy when it comes. But never forget.

Connect.

Listen: People’s Faces by Kae Tempset.

Read: ‘We want change but not like this’: Iranians describe daily life under air attack.

Pause.

Feel empathy and love for people being rained on by bombs and black rain.

Notice other people’s faces.

Find ways to protest and show solidarity, because – however we express dissent – it’s a sign we are alive.

Love and Peace,

Mark

Heywood

The Justice and Activism Hub is a change tank for a time of change. We are committed to strengthening social justice struggles through connection, collaboration, coordination, convening and catalysing.

News from JAH is also now available here on Substack! The playlist of songs that I feature is available here. If you enjoyed this newsletter please forward it to other soul rebels. You can also contact me at markjamesheywood@gmail.com

We’ve got a mind of our own

So go to hell if what you’re thinking is not right!

Love would never leave us alone

Ay, in the darkness there must come out the light

Bob Marley, Could You Be Loved?, Uprising, 1980

Soul Rebels,

Valentine’s Day may be horribly commercialised, but it’s still worth celebrating.

Love, like hope, is an active force.

Love, like food, is what gives us energy and imagination.

Love is a social force, it’s what drives solidarity, motivates the people who run food kitchens, refugee shelters, schools for children.

Love inspires imagination which creates art. Love requires honesty and accountability and transparency.

Love is political.

Love is not dead.

Read this essay by Vashna Jagarnath Valentine’s Day: A History of Desire, Power and Tenderness

Recently Zeteo’s Mehdi Hasan interviewed Edward Luce, the US Editor of the British Financial Times, about the filth seeping out of the Epstein Files. Luce described the revelations as “an MRI of the establishment … of how things work in a culture where shame has vanished, of shamelessness amongst the elites, all of them”.

Luce asked “How can you restore a culture of shame?”

Love and shame are connected. Love that is selfish and self-centred, can’t expand to people and society. It feels no shame for policies and actions that hurt others.

What Anand Giriharadas calls ‘the Epstein Class’ (in a new series on his substack The Ink), feel no accountability to us, or what we think of them.

Empathy and compassion require love.

Shamelessness is a sign of lovelessness;

• a sign that the wrong type of person has power;

• the mark of a sociopath.

Truth be told, in every country the worst of the elites mimic the worst of this behaviour.

Think of our own shameless Markus Jooste and the Steinhoff scandal. Or Jacob Zuma, who we now know had his own little arrangement with the great procurer, Epstein.

Read: How Jeffrey Epstein used South Africa as his hunting ground

Whatever their sexual peccadilloes and predilections, the loss of shame is something the Epstein Class have in common.

Where was Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi’s shame when he told the media that he showers in a hotel when his home is affected by water cuts caused by his party’s corruption and maladministration?

Where was Gauteng Health MEC Nomantu Nkomo-Ralehoko’s shame when she said some patients in public hospitals “prefer to sleep on floors” after her party is up to its eyeballs in the theft of R2billion from one hospital alone.

Thumbs Up

In South Africa, community activism is on the rise!

Recently Johannesburg was wracked by widespread protests about state failure to supply water.

The Water Community Action Network (WaterCAN) has been playing a sterling role, giving voice and co-ordination to the dissent.

The middle classes came out in numbers.

Because it was middle class anger on display the President listened.

Hey presto! The water crisis is declared a political priority.

But as Thapelo Mohapi, the General-Secretary of Abahali baseMjondolo said to me “Once the middle class is affected by something, it is a crisis but if it affects the poor marginalised it is ignored in this country.”

To be sustainable and influential community social justice activism has to cross classes, join up communities and take control of political power through local government elections, likely to take place in November 2026.

• In 2025 we created a new website and WhatsApp platform called Fixlocal.org.za Visit it. Subscribe to the monthly newsletter for insights and updates on activism around the country.

Thumbs down: Munitions versus Medicines

I don‘t like to be the bearer of bad tidings, but we must square up to the world we are in. News from JAH 16 focussed on the burgeoning arms race. Now I need to alert you to the growing threats to global health.

For half a century the incremental efforts of activists slowly but surely built up the global health architecture. The Epstein class is shamelessly knocking it down. Quacks and vaccine denialists have captured venerable scientific institutions. They hide information and propagate medical disinformation at the cost of lives.

Measles is now resurgent in the USA and parts of Europe.

As these articles attest, the consequences will be as deadly as any war.

• Aid cuts could cause 22m avoidable deaths by 2030, study finds

• ‘Biblical Diseases’ Could Resurge in Africa, Health Officials Fear

• Excruciating tropical disease can now be transmitted in most of Europe, study finds

Health activism has been defunded. People’s power is not what it was 20 years ago, when TAC, Act-Up and others reshaped the trajectory of the AIDS epidemic and saved millions of lives. So what are we going to do?

• Here’s a podcast interview I did on The urgency of a new HIV activism

Activists: Mortal yet Immortal

Another community leader of the shackdwellers movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo, has been assassinated.

Zweli “Khabazela” Mkhize.

The 26th.

A statement issued by the South African Federation of Trade Unions put it starkly:

“A democracy cannot function when community leaders are silenced by bullets.”

“A society cannot call itself free when the poor are murdered for organising themselves.”

Read: Abahlali baseMjondolo — Clinging to life in the shadow of death

US civil rights legend Jesse Jackson has died. Read about his life and campaigns here.

Watch a group of children accompany him in 1972 in his spoken word poem, I am somebody:

“I am Black,

Brown, or white.

I speak a different language

But I must be respected,

Protected,

Never rejected.

I am God’s child!”

Activists Bookshelf

In his book Brutalism Achille Mbembe prophesied that ours is an age in which “there is a becoming object of humanity and a becoming human of objects.”

That’s you. Your phone. Your gadgets. The friendly AI Companion that does your research and thinking for you.

As usual it took the prescient imagination of a novelist to capture the human implications of AI before it happened. Read Ian McEwan’s 2019 novel, Machines Like Me.

AI might be shamelessly filling in during a pandemic of loneliness. But is that a good thing?

Do you too need a steady compass through the bewildering new AI-scape? Do you want to arm yourself against its sea of traps and troubles? Then subscribe to the monthly newsletter of the Campaign on Digital Ethics. Recently, CODE’s founder and ED, Kavisha Pillay, has written a series of great articles exploring some of these issues:

• The Joy of Grappling in the Age that wants to Think for Us (here);

• When machines can sing: Can AI imitate the human soul (part 1, here)?

• When mourning becomes a marketplace: can AI imitate the human soul (part 2, here)?

Activists without borders: Updates from afar

Donald Trump is a callous bastard. He’s trying to starve the people of Cuba into submission. It’s part of the Donroe strategy to impose regime change across Latin America. It’s causing a rapidly escalating humanitarian crisis. In response an international coalition of movements, trade unions, and grassroots organisations are preparing to launch the Nuestra América Flotilla — a seaborne mission carrying food, medicine, and essential supplies across the Caribbean to the Cuban people. Donate here.

The resistance triumphed. ICE is leaving Minneapolis. The Nation, a progressive US newspaper, has nominated the people of that city for the 2026 Nobel Peace prize. Sign this petition.

Not guilty! In response to litigation launched by Huda Ammori, one of the founders of Palestine Action, the UK High Court has found that the British government’s designating it as a ‘terror group’ and banning Palestine Action is unlawful.

Read: ‘Immensely heartened’: Sally Rooney hails Palestine Action high court ruling as victory for UK civil liberties

Artivism Rules, Ok?

In the age of carnage, we need soul food.

Fortunately, that’s one food stuff there’s no shortage of. Artivism (read more about it here) has become one of the most effective ways of subverting narratives of hate and expressing love, solidarity and our common humanity.

Towards Xmas 2025 Banksy gave us another surprise: ‘children stargazing’ appeared on a wall in central London, in an area where many homeless people shelter.

Watch this clip of Ian McKellan, the great Shakespearean actor, reciting The Strangers Case, a monologue believed to be written by Shakespeare 400 years ago to condemn the bigotry of xenophobia.

Take in these great guerrilla performances – the Pedo Bowl and “Resist-dance” – on President’s day in the USA.

And, in case you missed it, find 13 minutes to watch Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance. Big up to Jay-Z who year after year pokes the dragon with his choice of performer at the half-time Super Bowl show and uses music to subvert the hate-nation.

Of course we can debate the politics and contradictions of the “most aggressively commercial sporting event on the planet.” But there’s no taking away from the performance.

This was love. Up an electricity pole.
We shall overcome.

Love and Peace,

Mark

Heywood

The Justice and Activism Hub is a change tank for a time of change. We are committed to strengthening social justice struggles through connection, collaboration, coordination, convening and catalysing.

News from JAH is also now available here on Substack! The playlist is available here. If you enjoyed this newsletter please forward it to other soul rebels. You can also contact me at markjamesheywood@gmail.com

War in the East, War in the West,

War down South, War up North

Bob Marley, War, Rastaman Vibration, 1976

Soul Rebels,

It’s 85 seconds to midnight. Wars are coming.

As a teenager I was frightened of nuclear war.

I still remember words I came across by Bertolt Brecht, in his play The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941):

Don’t yet rejoice in his defeat, you men!

Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard,

The bitch that bore him is in heat again.

Today, the bitch that bore him is indeed in heat again.

In 1984 George Orwell imagined a time of perpetual war over “disputed territories,” between great regional blocks, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia.

Sounds like the world that is being born?

A new arms race is on:

• Global military spending has topped THREE TRILLION DOLLARS per annum - twelve times more than Overseas Development Assistance. In real terms global military spending has risen by 37% in the last decade.

• Militaries are turbocharging the climate crisis. The US military is the largest institutional carbon emitter in the world. Worldwide, carbon emissions from the military place them among the top four emitters if they were countries.

It’s a very, very mad world: confirming an age-old symptom of capitalism in crisis, the New York Times talks about “the new economics of war”: where “Drones worth hundreds or thousands of dollars must be shot down by missiles that cost millions to protect tanks and ships that cost even more.”

Read: In Ukraine, an Arsenal of Killer A.I. Drones Is Being Born in War Against Russia

New Orwellian terms are entering our language: ‘“fire and forget” loitering munitions’; ‘drone-swarms’; ‘AI-assisted killing’; and ‘kill chains’.

AI is the great war-enabler. I prompted ChaptGPT to explain AI’s implications for modern warfare. It told me that it would:

• bring frontlines closer to civilian areas;

• make wars longer and surrender more difficult;

• reduce the ‘cost of entry’ into wars;

• increase risks of accidental war or rapid escalation.

The elites will wage war over water, ice, rare minerals, and agricultural land. But they will also wage wars against their own people. Witness Russia/Ukraine (now close to two million dead) Iran (up to 5,000 protestors shot), the continuing genocide against Palestinians, Venezuela, the UAE, Sudan, the USA.

As Pankaj Mishra has pointed out in The World After Gaza, the live streamed genocide in Gaza is just warming us up for the future.

Stop Killer Robots: The implications of AI-assisted killing and surveillance for social justice activism is something activists need to campaign on.

Please, give peace a chance:

War has always been stupid.

• Listen to Boy George, Frankie Goes to Hollywood or Bob Dylan damning the masters of war.

If we ever needed a mass, global peace movement it’s now.

Read: Right Makes Might: A Declaration of Moral Power.

Thumbs Up:

One of the most effective grassroots campaigns going on in SA at the moment is being led by a coalition including Real Reform for Early Childhood Development (ECD), Ilifa Labantwana, the Equality Collective and others.

Mobilisation is getting results.

In the contested 2025 budget ECD was allocated R10 billion. Late in 2025 the Cabinet approved the National Action Plan to Accelerate Action for Children, which includes specific proposals to guarantee access to basic nutrition (an immediately realizable constitutional right) for young children.

At a Department of Basic Education lekgotla in January President Ramaphosa told activists that he regretted that he had ‘only lately woken up to the full potential of early learning.’ He also committed to extending the National School Nutrition Programme to all children in ECD centres, whilst recognising that all children have a right to nutritional support.

Of course, politicians are full of promises. We must hold them to their words.

More good news:

• In December last year SECTION27 won an important judgment on the duty of the state to remove barriers in access to health care services. Read about it here: Clinic blockades: It is the state’s obligation to remove every barrier to health services

• In late January the state finally did what it ought to have done long ago and charged xenophobes blocking access to a school in Durban with public violence: Read March and March, MK Party and Operation Dudula charged over Addington Primary school clashes

Thumbs down:

Whilst South Africa’s GNU (Government of National Unity) undoubtedly has a handful of hard working cabinet ministers, it also has some outright crooks. Patriotic Front leader Gayton McKenzie is a prime example.

This gung-ho, spendthrift, populist is doing great damage to South Africa’s arts sector. The most recent shame led to a letter from the Campaign for Free Expression and a group of civil society organisations to the President. So far the letter has not even been acknowledged.

Activists bookshelf:

In 2016 Indian writer Amtiv Ghosh lamented in his little book, Uncanny and Improbable Events, that the climate crisis had not yet entered into fiction.

That era is over.

Some of the most beautiful literary meditations now have the climate crisis at their heart.

Think of Samantha Harvey’s Orbital.

Think Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know.

I’ve just finished reading another. Helm by Sarah Hall.

Helm is the wind. Not any wind, but a particular wind – Helm – that has blown off a hill named Cross Fell in the Pennines, a range of hills up the back of England, for the whole of the Holocene.

But today “Helm isn’t feeling Helmself, actually. A bit off colour, a bit under the weather.” Today Helm is threatened by accelerating ecological breakdown and atmospheric changes brought on by global heating.

I won’t describe Helm: it’s too rich in its descriptions, too innovative in its structure, too jovial with its word play, too layered, too poetic …

It ends with a great cathartic exhale:

“Helm doesn’t know when Helm will die.

If it will be soon, in a while, or aeons.

If it will happen suddenly, quietly, or violently.

Whether Helm will simply cease one day, or fail slowly, blow by blow on the mountain….”

The novel took Sarah Hall 20 years to breathe, mold, wrestle to life. After the novel’s last word, “Helm”, there is a blank page. Then on the following page Hall has created a ‘maker’s mark’ that kind of sums it up.

Updates from afar:

• The Palestinian Action in England hunger strikers have called off their hunger after winning some concessions.

• Fuck Off Trump: The Michigan autoworker who heckled Trump gets and was suspended from his job has received an outpouring of donations.

• The on the ground resistance to Donald Trump and ICE is growing and evolving its methods. A General Strike in Minnesota was followed last week by strikes and protests across the USA.

Diving for pearls

I don’t know about you, but I started the year weary. A deep fatigue of the heart.

My friend, Alfred Sibanda was murdered on New Year’s eve. For many years Alfred was a kind face serving behind the bar at the Radium Beer Hall in Orange Grove, Johannesburg (read my 2021 celebration of the Radium here). Support his family here.

Then brave cancer activist Thato Moncho died on January 2nd. I spoke at her funeral. I’d made her a promise I didn’t have time to keep.

It felt like the type of open funeral we used to hold in the darkest days of the HIV epidemic. Open to break the stigma. Solidarity from comrades and cancer survivors.

Crocodile tears from the people who contributed to her death.

It’s dis-spiriting.

At times I doubt my will to keep fighting

Then, out of the blue (or rather out of the algorithm) this article by activist Sipho Mthathi, popped up and put things back in perspective.

Read: Moral injury in an age of unravelling — the challenges facing social justice work

I’m sorry if this newsletter has been heavy. As a salve for your soul, let me leave you with a beautiful anti-war song – Shipbuilding – by Elvis Costello.

It’s a song about rearmament, written in 1982 when Margaret Thatcher decided to go to war against Argentina over islands at the opposite end of the world – the Falklands.

907 young people died.

Listen to it. The melody is haunting. The trumpet is mournful. Build it into your morning meditation.

Then finally back to Brecht:

If we could learn to look instead of gawking,

We’d see the horror in the heart of the farce,

If only we could act instead of talking,

We wouldn’t always end up on our arse.

Until next time.

Love and Peace,

Mark

Heywood

If you enjoyed this newsletter please forward it to other soul rebels. They can subscribe by contacting me at markjamesheywood@gmail.com

News from JAH is also now available here on Substack!

The Justice and Activism Hub is a change tank for a time of change. We are committed to strengthening social justice struggles through connection, collaboration, coordination, convening and catalysing.

Subscribe now

“The stone that the builder refused

Will be the head cornerstone”

Bob Marley, Acoustic Medley, Songs of Freedom, 1992 (recorded 1971)

Soul Rebels,

2026 is upon us.

The year has started as it means to go on. On New Year’s Eve whilst the 99% wished each other love and peace, the warmongers plotted. Trump for Venezuela’s oil and to distract the American electorate again. Xi Jin Ping rubbing his hands with glee at the license he now has to do the same in Taiwan … when he is ready.

We are indeed in The Hour of the Predator, the title of a new book by Giuliano da Empoli.

But extraction and violation is only part of our story.

On January 1, in New York City, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani took over as Mayor. His inauguration was a celebration and a rebuttal of Trumpism, although his name was not mentioned once. A diverse group of school children sang Somewhere Over the Rainbow and Lucy Dacus sang the labour movement anthem, Bread and Roses (as reported on in Rolling Stone):

“Yes, it is bread we fight for, but we fight for roses too.”

Watch the whole inauguration here.

Do not doubt. 2026 is going to test us. How do we prepare?

We have to think as much as we do.

We have to organise inwards as much as we organise outwards.

A sense of existential emergency needs to be balanced with quintessential calmness.

In Africa we need to look more deeply and consistently into our own continent, rather than being distracted by the high jinks of the populist leaders fronting up the collapse of the old world order in a West in crisis.

This article about the civil war in Sudan, putting the ongoing genocide into the context of Sudan’s rich history of civilisation and colonial interference, struck me.

We need to hold onto hope.

There is resistance everywhere and it is taking many forms. Hunger strikes. Protest. Civil disobedience. Satire. Comedy. Revolution.

Here are a few of the inspiring stories I spotted in media reports over the turning of the year:

• In Sudan: ‘You sneak in and hope you make it back’: the Sudanese volunteers risking it all to bring care to millions

• In Israel: The volunteers putting their bodies between Israel settlers and a Palestinian village

• In Canada: Santas and elves rob Montreal grocery store to ‘give food to the needy’

• In the USA: South Park writer buys ‘Trump Kennedy Center’ domain name

• In London Greta Thunberg got arrested for supporting Palestine Action and calling for the release of the hunger strikers. Read this lovely background article: Greta Thunberg came to stay – and my kid may have inadvertently helped her get arrested

Writing is also a form of resistance. Read this powerful essay by Redi Thlabi, The quiet violence of acquiescence and why journalism cannot afford detachment; and this one by Naomi Klein, Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s tweets were wrong, but he is no ‘anti-white Islamist’. Why does the British right want you to believe he is?

As I’ve written previously, we are in a battle to shape the future operating system of the planet. Inequality is rising. The rich, whose wealth grew by $2.2 trillion in 2025 (see these tables from the Financial Times and Bloomberg shared by Adam Tooze is his prolific substack) are getting inconceivably ultra-rich.

Authoritarianism is consolidating. But movements against inequality and poverty are rising too:

• In Brazil: Brazil’s Massive Landless Workers’ Movement Leads the Way

• The USA: Working Families bet on 2026 as the right time for a third US party after a wave of wins

• Iran, where tragically over 500 protesters have already been murdered : National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) | Parliament in Exile

To hope or not to hope

In The Betrayal, a poem he wrote in the 1999s, Liverpool poet Brian Patten recalls the working class community where he grew up, describing:

“…. People whose pockets

Were worn thin by hope. They were

The loose change history spent without caring.”

In the years since then history has not got any kinder. Hope is still a minx. Billions have lost it. To many, hope might seem a middle class luxury.

We must have hope in the gathering resistance, but not romanticise it.

We must be inspired by individual and collective acts of opposition. But not see each new uprising as some sort of turning point. Achille Mbembe explains in his 2020 great book Brutalism “It is true that people are rising up in several countries of the world, and in the process, they are enduring ferocious forms of repression. At the same time, many have stopped believing in genuinely transformative action. They struggle to imagine any break with the existing frameworks of thought and action. They have actually thrown in the towel and turned against the project of human emancipation.”

The truth is that at this moment – despite the resistance – the people are losing. The powers ranged against us are growing.

As the wife of Renee Nicole Good put it: “We had whistles. They had guns.”

Another world is possible. We can win. But winning requires organising.

Winning requires seeding hope amongst billions of people in alternatives.

Emergency

Sign of the times.

It should not be. A Labour government in the UK, led by a human rights lawyer who was once a Trotskyist, has banned Palestine Action, involved in non-violent direct action to protest the genocide of Palestinian people.

To add mortal insult to major injury Starmer and crew are refusing to intervene to meet the demands of a group of young, awaiting trial, Prisoners For Palestine who are on a hunger strike. Heba Muraisi has now been on hunger strike for 71 days.

Listen: The Palestine Action hunger strikers close to death – podcast

UN experts, including Francesca Albanese, who have urged the British government to protect the lives and rights of the hunger strikers, have been ignored. So too have worldwide protests and petitions.

Activists unusual: Malebona Precious Matsoso

Malebona Precious Matsoso is an activist who fills me with hope.

She models a public servant whose priority remained the public and whose ethics remained service. For nearly three decades she held senior positions in South Africa’s public sector, including as the Medicines regulator and then the Director-General of the Health Department.

Yet she remained accessible to activists.

And committed to advancing equality in access to health care.

In recent years, as co-chair of the International Negotiating Board she played a pivotal role in ensuring the WHO’s new Pandemic Agreement was adopted in 2025 despite attempts to sabotage it by the USA, Argentina and Israel.

Although not perfect (what negotiated agreement ever is?) the Agreement is one of the few examples of the power of multilateralism in 2025.

As a result Nature recognised Precious as one of the “top 10 people who shaped science in 2025”.

• Read: The first global pandemic treaty — and the woman who made it happen ; * Nature’s 10 names Witsie for role in global pandemic treaty - Wits University

Thank you Precious.

What a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.

As is my custom, I preface this newsletter with a quote from Bob Marley. The Acoustic Medley, which Bob recorded in 1971, is a beautiful but very hard to find medley of mainly love songs that capture Marley’s voice and versatility. You won’t even find it on Spotify.

It’s my gift to you.

Listen and let it lift your spirits.

At his inauguration Zohran Mamdani told supporters that he had been advised “to lower expectations”. His response:

“I will do no such thing. The only expectation I seek to reset is that of small expectations. Beginning today we will govern expansively and audaciously. We may not always succeed but never will we be accused of lacking the courage to try.”

That’s the spirit with which we should embrace the struggles that await us in 2026: Organise expansively and audaciously. Don’t surrender your dreams. Hold onto your soul.

I wish you joy, compassion, peace, solidarity, courage and energy.

Love and peace,

Mark

Heywood

If you enjoyed this newsletter please forward it to other soul rebels. They can subscribe by contacting me at markjamesheywood@gmail.com

News from JAH is also now available here on Substack!

Subscribe now

The Justice and Activism Hub is a change tank for a time of change. We are committed to strengthening social justice struggles through connection, collaboration, coordination, convening and catalysing.

Satisfy my soul

Oh please don’t you rock my boat

Cause i don’t want my boat to be rockin’

Bob Marley, Satisfy my Soul, Kaya (1978)

Soul rebels,

We are on the runway for another year end. May you have love, safety and some joy over the holidays.

Billions won’t.

At the end of 2025 it’s clear. We are in the early days of an existential battle for the soul of the world. The question: Is our future to be organised on the basis of exclusion, suppression, extraction, inequality; basically, states re-purposed to ensure the survival of the richest?

Or is our world to find synergy between peoples and the planet; commonality in the notion of universal human rights; love in a time of genocides?

Sadly, this is not a battle pitting good states against bad states. With only a few exceptions governments have largely turned against their people.

As Omar El Akkad puts it in One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (an essential read of 2025), we have created:

“a world in which one privileged sliver consumes, insatiable, and the best everyone else can hope for is not to be consumed. It is not without reason that the most powerful nations on earth won’t intervene to stop a genocide but will happily bomb one of the poorest countries on the planet to keep a shipping lane open.”

Today, good people have only ourselves to look to.

We are on our own.

All eight. point. one. billion. of us (that is we, the 99%).

Read: Just 0.001% hold three times the wealth of poorest half of humanity, report finds | Inequality | The Guardian; and the World Inequality Report 2026

Watch: “The Epstein Class”: Anand Giridharadas on the Elite Network Around the Sexual Predator | Democracy Now!

This last edition of News from JAH in 2025 is the love edition. It centres love because love is the power that underlies social justice activism.

Thumbs up: love and the global resistance

People who love may not be winning, but we’re not giving up.

There’s at least twelve million points of resistance to Trump in the USA.

Chinese human rights activists are down but not out.

Putin kills his opponents, but they get back up again.

GenZ is on the march.

The global resistance tracker is ticking up.

Read: We The 99% – a People’s Summit for Global Economic Justice – Declaration

In her 2001 book All About Love, the great activist bell hooks creates nearly 240-pages of writing on the theme of love.

hooks sees love not as a passive state, but a call to arms, to dream, to different ways of living and doing. Hooks said she wrote the book because love required resistance in the USA, a country where “lovelessness had become the order of the day”:

“I write of love to bear witness both to the danger of the moment, and to call for a return to love.”

That was more than 20 years ago.

Love was at work when I attended the last summit of the 2025 of the Joburg Crisis Alliance (JCA). It felt uplifting to see young people and older people, people of all South Africa’s colours and classes, in the same room, listening and learning from each, imagining the city we deserve and planning how to achieve it.

Look at photos of the summit here, you will see what I mean: Summit-8 of the Joburg Crisis Alliance

In the chapter Living by a Love Ethic, hooks writes: “Were a love ethic informing all public policy in cities and towns, individuals would come together and map out programmes that would affect the good of everyone.”

2026 sees local government elections in SA. A moment of democratic opportunity to replace corrupt self-servers with community builders.

This year I helped develop a website to assist local government activists share information about campaigns, organising strategies and stories of success.

Visit it here: www.fixlocal.org.za

Activists bookshop: Love Books

My go-to book shop in Joburg nestles just under Melville Koppies.

Love books, owned by Kate Rogan, was established in 2009.

It’s a small shop that contains great expanses of the mind. It reminds me of something Abdulrazak Gurnah, Africa’s 2021 Nobel Literature prize winner, wrote. In his novel Gravel Heart, a book about exile, alienation and familial love the main character, Salim, ascribes his joy in books to their making him appreciate “the roominess” of the world, despite the ways colonialism had constricted other parts of his life.

I never leave Love Books empty-handed – but not usually with something I planned to buy. I love the way Kate and company select and display new novels, new thinkers. It makes me feel the “roominess” of human civilization – even when the books are about human brutality.

A world brimming over in the small walls of a bookshop.

A familiar place for discovery of the unfamiliar.

My latest purchase (I didn’t think they would have it, but they did) is One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad.

Read it if you can.

El Akkad hails from Egypt, via Qatar and Canada, and is now a citizen of the USA: “I live here because it will always be safer to live on the launching side of the missiles. I live here because I am afraid.”

It’s a brave bleak book of emotional wrestling. But the words are jewelled daggers, the poetry of pain; describing the slow destruction of innocence, as he explores the implications of the hypocrisies of Western democracy, in the wake of the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

The book is induced by love. But there are a few pages where he touches on love directly, questioning how the Empire negates the possibility of recognising love amongst the Brown people whose lives it obliterates. Yet describing how deep, tested and enduring this love is, as in this haunting passage:

“Today I watched footage of a man kissing his son’s foot as he buried the body so torn apart by the missiles that the foot was one of the only pieces the father could find in the rubble. Tell me this man doesn’t know love, hasn’t been made to know it in a way no human being should.”

Loss, the dark side of love.

Where is the love?

Where is the Love? Of Podcasts and pop stars

Talking of love and soul(s).

Roberta Flack died in February this year. She embodied and expressed both. Her catalogue of love songs might obscure awareness of her commitment to social justice.

Her song, Where is the Love? covered by the Black Eyed Peas is an anthem for this time: The Black Eyed Peas - Where Is The Love? (Official Music Video)

One of my great ‘discoveries’ this year has been the podcasts of Blindboyboatclub. Blindboy is the Irish podcaster who engages in public with a plastic bag over his head and whose face remains unknown even though millions of people revel in his words and hot-takes.

Blindboy researches, writes and then talks from a place of love and wonder at the world, its people, science, human idiosyncrasy.

Want to find out what I mean?

Listen to this recent episode – Zen and the Art of repairing the testicle bicycle – where he seamlessly connects a snail, his broken bicycle, the housing crisis as “indicator species” of the social crisis caused by neo-liberalism.

For you: Sounds like activism: musicians who fight for change – in pictures

Love Joy: Of parkruns, mountains and bikes

El Akkad cries out “What is wrong with me that I can’t keep living as normal? What is wrong with all those people who can?”

I know that feeling.

‘What would you like to watch tonight? Live stream of the genocide or a Premier League match?’

In a pre-genocide context in The Book of Joy Archbishop Tutu responds to a question from a young South African about “how can we help the world heal and still find joy in our own life.”

The Arch’s response is telling:

“It helps no one if you sacrifice your joy because others are suffering. We people who care must be attractive, must be filled with joy, so that others recognize that caring, that helping and being generous are not a burden, they are a joy. Give the world your love, your service, your healing, but you can also give it your joy.”

I can’t live a normal life in an abnormal society. But I can still find joy and love and hold them. This year I ran 43 out of 52 possible parkruns, most of them in Gauteng. Each one brought a small amount of joy in the people, the place and the few moments of synchronicity between mind, body and nature.

When the work year is over, I will head to the mountains. Or I get on my bike.

Here’s two pieces that will tell you why:

• Drakensberg: Bury my heart above the Grindstone Caves

• ‘Kinship with the nonhuman’ — reflections on bike riding and being

Thank you for staying until the end of this newsletter (actually, more of a letter than news).

Let me finish by explaining why I lead each edition of News from JAH with a quote from Bob Marley.

It’s simple, he satisfies my soul.

Bob and I have been fellow travellers for 45 years. I’ve written about my visit to his birthplace (Reflections on heritage: The road to Nine Mile, Jamaica). One of my sons acquired his middle name “Nesta”.

Bob’s blending of music, insight, rebellion, joy, tradition, wisdom has made his music my go-to place for soul restoration.

So, in parting: Omar El Akkad calls on us “to fight against the theft of your soul.”

If, over the next few weeks, you have the privilege of rest and peace, genuflect, immerse yourself in people and places, rediscover and restore your soul.

And get ready to fight like hell.

You are going to need love in 2026.

Love and peace,

Mark

Heywood

If you enjoyed this newsletter please forward it to other soul rebels. They can subscribe by contacting me at markjamesheywood@gmail.com

News from JAH is also now available here on Substack!

Subscribe now

The Justice and Activism Hub is a change tank for a time of change. We are committed to strengthening social justice struggles through connection, collaboration, coordination, convening and catalysing.

A rain a fall, but the dirt it tough

A pot a cook but the food nah nuff

Bob Marley, Them Belly Full, Natty Dread

Soul rebels,

In her 2020 book of essays, Azadi: Freedom * Fascism * Fiction, Arundathi Roy laments what she terms “the great Project of Unseeing.” She is writing about attempts to blind the world to Narenda Modi’s war on seven million people in Kashmir and the rise of fascism in India.

40 years before, Czechoslovakian writer Milan Kundera famously wrote “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

Today, the memory we must struggle to hold on to is not just of the past, but of the present, of yesterday, even a few hours ago. As Arundathi says, it’s a struggle of “seeing against unseeing”, compassion against numbness, and the rewriting, or rather over-writing, of the causes of poverty and inequality.

It’s also the struggle to turn Declarations into action; window-dressing into radical transformation. Genuine commitment to human rights against fake empathy.

Last week G20-Jim came to Jo’burg.

The streets the dignitaries were blue-lighted across were spotless. Multi-storey billboards were the lip-stick on the Joburg metrocentre, abandoned by a corrupt city council.

#G20Joburg was abuzz with talk about Solidarity, Equality and Sustainability.

Declarations declaimed, all the alphabet-20s summited (in) expensive hotels. New reports shot into space – including one on the Inequality Emergency by an ‘extraordinary committee of independent experts’ chaired by Joseph Stiglitz … telling us what a billion poor people already know.

President Cyril Ramaphosa trumped Trump. Viva! But still we must ask, when the circus leaves town, will anything change?

To help G-20 delegates with the act of unseeing, eGoli, the golden medal winner of inequality, was given a multi-billion rand makeover.

But unseen streets, like this one in Kliptown, Soweto, photographed by Felix Dlangamandla, went untouched.

Unsee: reports about massive corruption and municipal maladministration.

Unsee: The homeless people who have been moved off the streets.

Unsee: Young people living with despair and substance addiction - the ‘Nyaope boys and girls’ - who were shunted off to ‘rehabilitation camps’.

We love our city to sparkle.

But none of its underlying inequalities have been sorted. Until visionary leadership emerges, like Zohran Mamdani, now the Mayor-elect of New York City, the hard lives of the majority of people in eGoli will remain unseen and untended.

The local government elections of 2026 offer an opportunity to change this: but can we rise to embrace a new politics to make it happen?

Listen: Redi Tlhabi and Mark Heywood: Confronting power, inequality, and the price of injustice

Thumbs up: the Union Against Hunger

“Give us this day our daily bread.”

These are the words billions of Christians chant in the Lord’s Prayer. But either the Lord’s not listening, or the extremely wealthy amongst his followers are denying their fellow men the very thing they piously pray for.

Because access to sufficient nutritious food has become the most enduring indicator of inequality. According to the G20 Leaders Declaration “up to 720 million people continued to experience hunger in 2024 and 2.6 billion people were unable to afford healthy diets.”

In South Africa 29% of children are stunted by the age of five because of hunger and malnutrition.

And it’s getting worse.

Check out the Global Hunger Index and compare it with the Extreme Wealth Line

Brazilian President Lula made a Global Campaign against Poverty and Hunger the signature Brazil left on the G20 docket they passed on to South Africa.

Recognising this, in South Africa activists have been combining forces to build a new coalition, known as the Union Against Hunger.

In ten months, more than 50 organisations and networks have joined, including the trade union federation SAFTU, the shackdwellers social movement, Abahali baseMjondolo and the campaign for universal early childhood development (Real Reform for ECD).

A petition – sign it here – and protests have been launched to demand that SA’s biggest food retailer, Shoprite, reduces prices on essential food.

Community Hunger Hearings are being held across the country.

On World Food Day activists mobilised in Cape Town and Johannesburg marching to hand over a memorandum calling for President Ramaphosa to take action.

For the first time, Ramaphosa spoke explicitly about the hunger crisis, in particular making a call on big food retailers – Shoprite, Pick N Pay, Woolworths - to drop their prices.

They aren’t listening – yet!

Profits still come before people. Shareholders before consumers.

Thumbs down: Shoprite? ShopWrong

Food sovereignty demands more than just lower food prices. Food systems require fundamental transformation.

But at this moment, high food prices contribute enormously to hunger, malnutrition and the escalating inequality called out in the Stiglitz report.

In South Africa, in the midst of a hunger epidemic, four big food retail companies, tot-up profits of over TWENTY BILLION RAND a year. Much of it is made off the back of excessive pricing on the basic food stuffs bought from the social grants of the poor and unemployed.

This way social grants become a wealth transfer to the rich.

CEOs, like Pieter Engelbrecht of Shoprite, reportedly earn over R80 million a year. Roy Baggatini of Woolworths gets a cool R100 million.

Read: Shoprite CEO is SA’s best-paid retail boss as package hits R83m ;

Listen: The price of leadership: Woolworths’ remuneration debate

In contrast, according to Just Share the average CEO in the retail sector earns 597 times the salary of the lowest paid worker.

Inequality is not abstract. If there’s one place to start getting real about inequality, it’s in access to our daily bread.

Recommended reading: Hunger is a crime. Who are the criminals?

Recommended listening: Evan Onos talking about his new book the wonderfully titled: The Haves and the Have Yachts, Dispatches on the Ultra Rich

Activists bookshelf: Battles for the soul of humanity

English writer Ian McEwan’s latest novel is titled What We Can Know. It’s a dystopian portrait of the world a century from now, after climate and nuclear catastrophes.

It’s 2119 and two university professors, researching the period 1990 to 2030 (now!) are in search of a lost poem.

They call the time we are living in ‘the Great Derangement’.

In a passage that captures the truth of our self-destructive and oblivious behaviors as only fiction can, McEwan celebrates the ingenuity, imagination, and vivacity of now.

But he also points to its sheer idiocy:

“... as decades sped by and the Derangement gathered pace, the weapons proliferated and they did little, even as they knew what was coming and what was needed. Such liberty and abandon, such fearful defiance. They were brilliant in their avarice, quarrelsome beyond imagining, ready to die for good and bad ideas alike. As science extended its domain, religious and conspiracy theories swelled. They were big and brave, superb scholars and scientists, actors and athletes, and they were idiots who were throwing it all away, even as their high culture lamented or roared in pain. We thrill in horror at their feistiness. They were loud, hungry, reckless and free, except for the hundreds of millions they left behind.”

There you go; Inequality again.

Literature has a poetry that in Arundathi Roy’s words “cannot be flattened into news”.

As we watch the swarming of corporate lobbyists over Belém, as another climate COP-out unfolds, full of impotent fury and discarded science, What We Can Know will bump you back to reality.

It compels us to ask what actions will change this catastrophic trajectory - and what will not.

Activists Unusual: Umhlaba, Izindlu, Isithunzi (Land, Housing, Dignity)

In October 2025, the shackdwellers movement Abahlali baseMjondolo celebrated its 20th birthday. Abahali is ‘activism unusual’. It has survived as a social movement, despite the assasination of 24 of its leaders. But it has also survived co-option, politically or materially.

It has remained true to principles of solidarity, care and grass-roots mobilizing.

Recently, when an NGO, the Socio-Economic Rights Institute (SERI), was targeted with a march by Operation Dudula, Abahlali mobilised a bigger counter demonstration.

When informal traders were targeted by the ANC in Jo’burg Abahlali spoke up for them.

Abahlali is an applicants in the precedent setting judgement that has just pronounced mobilisations by xenophobes that prevent migrants from accessing schools and clinics to be unconstitutional.

Return the solidarity! Abahlali has launched a solidarity appeal to provide food to 70 elderly families who are members of the movement. Make a donation!

Dying Time

I keep a note book for poems and observations. A few months ago I scrawled the words ‘Dying Time.’

I’m not sure what I was thinking, but sadly those two words became an apt description of recent personal experience. A number of friends and comrades have died, some in ripe old age.

Some, not so ripe.

Liverpool poet Brian Patten died at 79. Patten’s poetry had been one of my first entry points into modern poetry. His poem, So Many Different Lengths of Time, was what I read at my father’s funeral.

David Hemson, life-long socialist, trade unionist, thinker, good man, died a few weeks later. I worked with Dave between 1985 and 1990 when he was in exile in London.

Then my friend and relative Sharmaine died of cancer on 2 November 2025. Sharmaine was 64, the age Paul McCartney celebrated in When I’m Sixty-Four, a song he wrote when he was 14, jocularly imagining love and life in older age.

Many people are not so lucky.

There will be no more “summers” after 64 for Sharmaine or for tens of millions of other people who die of preventable disease, treatable disease, war or just exhaustion with hard life.

Inequality intrudes even into this most fundamental aspect of being.

Sharmaine died in peace and surrounded by love. Lou Reed’s Perfect Day played just before the Last Rites were administered.

It was Jacaranda time in Joburg, the skies opened up and the rain poured down.

At her eclectic funeral a peacock called out repeatedly and Mandla Mlangeni, a jazz trumpeter, played Amazing Grace.

Later in the afternoon I came across a posse of Jacaranda blossoms huddling after the rain like bedraggled children sheltering at a bus stop.

The flowers whispered a reminder of what Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote on his deathbed: “Life is beautiful. Let future generations rid it of all evil, oppression and violence and live it to the full.”

Or, as Jimmy Cliff (Rest In Music), put it in his anthem, Wonderful World, Beautiful People:

Take a look at the world

And the state that it’s in today

I am sure you’ll agree

We all could make it a better way

With our love put together

Everybody learn to love each other

Instead of fussing and fighting

Cheating, backbiting

Scandalizing and hating

There is a better way. That’s why we are still trying to bend the arc towards justice.

Love and peace,

Mark

Heywood

The Justice and Activism Hub is a change tank for a time of change. We are committed to strengthening social justice struggles through connection, collaboration, coordination, convening and catalysing.

We no know how we and dem a-go work it out

But someone will have to pay

For the innocent blood

That they shed every day

Bob Marley, We and Dem, Uprising, 1980

Soul Rebels,

We live in an age of convulsion.

Social convulsion.

Political convulsion.

Natural convulsions.

Every elite-enabled convulsion shatters the bodies, minds, and hopes of ordinary out-of-sight people.

Call this the inverse butterfly effect: big people make ‘little’ decisions that ripple over the world and affect millions of ‘small’ people, denting their ability to live with/in dignity.

According to Edouard Louis, a young French writer whose harsh working class upbringing has shaped his acclaimed novels, “political decisions” made by people you have no connection with “ … are part of your physically intimate history.”

“It’s as intimate as when you first kiss someone”,

Except this is the intimacy of pain.

Because of pain, billions of people have become disaffected and alienated from formal politics. By not voting they think they are opting out of a system that harms them. But as Louis points out, poor people remain “completely subjected to politics” in myriad intimate ways.

• Health systems are disabled, poor people die.

• Carbon emissions are enabled, poor - people die.

• Food prices rise, poor people die.

• Bombs and bullets are enabled, people are disabled and demolished.

The cruelty of the 1%.

The elites grab more power and unprecedented wealth (Elon just hit $500 billion). The rest of us live in growing social and environmental precarity.

Ready yourself. Ready your community. An era of relatively peaceful human and economic expansion is over.

‘Peace what peace?’ Millions might ask.

The SDGs have been shot dead. Hayek’s Bastards are in power.

In The World After Gaza, Pankaj Mishra puts it this way “the phenomenon we confront .. has destroyed the necessary illusion that emerged after the defeat of fascism in 1945 of a common humanity underpinned by respect for human rights and a minimum of legal and political norms.”

Truth be told, we are in an age of war. There will be no peace until humans have found ways to live with each other — and with the sentient and insentient world — in a way that is not exploitative and damaging.

We live in an age of tipping points. We’ve passed the first one.

To use the overquoted words of poor Antonio Gramsci, written in the 1930s whilst he was in his Italian prison, a guest of the fascist Mussolini:

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”.

And, just as in the 1930s, prisons are filling again, this time with prisoners of poverty, politics and war.

Flags up: Hope and revolution ahoy!

But don’t despair!

There’s plenty of evidence that ‘the new’ is fighting for birth.

From Madagascar to Morocco, from Lima to Kathmandu, Gen Z is on the march again.

The unhealthy addiction with all things Trump that dominates the legacy news media, obscures these struggles. You might be forgiven if you think that in People vs the Oligarchs, the people are only losing.

We are not.

For example, in relation to the climate crisis.

In July the International Court of Justice (ICJ) handed down a game-changing ‘Advisory Opinion’ on states’ responsibilities in relation to climate change.

Read about it here: Historic climate change ruling from the International Court of Justice: what it means for Africa

In South Africa, in September, our Constitutional Court heard a vitally important case brought by fisher people of the Wild Coast challenging Shell regarding its offshore drilling and exploration on the Wild Coast.

Read about it here: Wild Coast fishing communities take battle against Shell to ConCourt

On No Kings Day 2.0, 18 October, at least seven million people took to streets across the USA.

Look at some of the photos: No Kings protests across the US: in pictures

To misquote the late Winnie Mandela, “With our human rights and our campaigns we can still liberate the world.”

(Re)thinking rights

If you are a reader of News from JAH you will have gathered that I am a great advocate for the organising power of human rights. I don’t want us to lose the international and domestic legal architecture that has been constructed on their foundation since the UDHR was signed in 1948.

But, much as our fundamental intrinsic rights (dignity, autonomy, life) are “inalienable,” the ’socio-economic rights’ that are meant to protect and empower our intimate selves need to adapt to address the wrongs of the era we live in.

The world of 2025 ain’t the world of 1948.

Consider this.

Nearly two centuries ago Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx’s son-in-law, wrote a little book titled, The Right to be Lazy. In those days capitalism was hungry for labour and cultivated the belief that ‘hard work’ is the natural state of life.

My dad and many generations of working class people believed this.

Today capitalism demands the opposite: Unpaid enforced idleness. An estimated 402 million people worldwide fill the global “jobs gap”.

Meanwhile, two billion people (61% of the global labour force) exist in precarious employment.

Decent employment has become a global scarcity.

The problem is it’s hard to be lazy without money.

This is why, more and more, access to money and income should be a human right.

This is the rationale that underlies the campaign for a Universal Basic Income.

My best friend sleeps in the afternoon when she’s tired.

My dad would have called that “lazy”.

Research overseen by Professor Dale Rae at the University of Cape Town (listen to this interview with her) has found a high prevalence of people whose “Fear around personal safety and the stresses of poverty make it impossible to access restorative sleep.”

“We call this sleep health inequity.” So, says the good Prof, “Sleep is a basic human right, but access to it is not equal.”

The consequences of sleep inequality are higher rates of depression and anxiety; increased risk of hypertension and cardiovascular disease; and daytime fatigue that undermines learning, employment, and quality of life.

If you are privileged like me, think for a moment of what it must be like to be fearful of going to sleep and living with perpetual tiredness.

Once again, …. The intimacy and invisibility of pain ….

Activists unusual: Rogues of the world unite

What is to be done?

Seasoned South African feminist activist Ishtar Lakani has launched Rogue Union. Ishtar calls it a home “Built for the Ones Who Never Fit the Mould.”

According to Ishtar, Rogue Union “began with a pattern we couldn’t unsee—changemakers running on empty, armed with tools that no longer worked.”

She says Rogue Union is a place “Where learning isn’t just brain-deep, but soul-deep.”

“Where training means building real muscles—not just getting a folder of PDFs.”

“Where community isn’t an afterthought, but the very thing that makes the whole thing work.”

It’s where artivism, activism, laughtivism meet, like in this Statue of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein that was erected outside the White House, removed by authorities … and then reappeared.

On another end of the world, in Edinburgh, I’ve been lucky to talk to another re-thinker.

Jen Ang is the founder of Lawmanity.

In her blog, The Long View, Jen has penned a wonderful collection of essays for everyday activists, that will make you feel human, on days when the pressure and responsibility of organising just seems a bit too much.

Her podcast on ways the law is being used to advance social justice in the UK (and everywhere) is also worth a listen.

Activist’s bookshelf: Arundathi Roy: A tonic for the times

What to read if you want something deeply rooted in our sad realities and the struggle to change them but simultaneously beautiful, poetic, unfamiliar and uplifting?

Arundathi Roy’s memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, is a tonic for our times.

It’s a story of two indomitable women: ‘Mrs Roy (Mother Mary)’ - “Dreamer, Warrior, Teacher” - who beat tradition, law, patriarchy and poverty to live life according to her values.

And Arundathi, the daughter Mrs Roy berated and belittled, who fled from her bullying at the age of 18, made her own life, surprised herself when she won the Booker Prize for her first novel, became one of the world’s greatest writers, and eventually came back to love and treasure Mother Mary.

And to be loved by her.

“My shelter and my storm,” Arundathi calls her.

The tapestry to this two-women’s-stories-in-one memoir is India, its activism and great struggles, the rise of Hindu fascism a la Narendra Modi and Arundathi’s refusal to stop loving her country even when its government makes her its enemy.

Let them eat chaos

Although the 2025 Nobel prize for literature has been awarded to Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai, a man, women writers are proving far better at capturing our current human condition.

Reflecting on the writings of Olive Schreiner and Mary Wollstonecraft, Lyndall Gordon puts it like this: their aim went beyond fighting for gender equality. It was to “elicit what is distinctive to a woman’s experience - including womens’ ‘life-dispensing experience’ - with a view to constructing a different world.”

I have just read 2024 Nobel prize winner Han Kang’s We Do Not Part.

I receive Unmapped Storylands, Elif Shafak’s weekly reflection on substack.

Samartha Harvey’s novel Orbital is a paean to a planet in distress.

But in all the pain and suffering there is still poetry to be found in the everyday. Here is the existential contradiction that Han Kang points to in her 2024 Nobel acceptance lecture:

Why is the world so violent and painful?

And yet how can the world be this beautiful?

In a time of violence, the earth’s infinite beauty sustains us and gives us hope. Every day, men, women and children still find spaces and places to eke out joy.

We’re still fishing for the sun.

Love and peace,

Mark

Heywood

If you enjoyed this newsletter please forward it to other soul rebels. They can subscribe by contacting me at markjamesheywood@gmail.com

News from JAH is also now available here on Substack!

The Justice and Activism Hub is a change tank for a time of change. We are committed to strengthening social justice struggles through connection, collaboration, coordination, convening and catalysing.

Subscribe now

You can fool some people sometimes

But you can't fool all the people all the time

So now we see the light

We going to stand up for our rights

Bob Marley and the Wailers, Get Up Stand Up, 1973

Soul Rebels,

I’ve just spent six days in the United States, one of them in New York City. Providence would have it that on my way back from the newly borne Brooklyn Bridge parkrun (a story for another day) I bumped into the 2025 Labour Day Parade going down Fifth Avenue. Or rather, it bumped into me. And what a bump.

The Parade stretched further than the eye could see.

“Get up, get down, New York is a Union Town,” chanted different divisions of Union members. Teachers. Nurses. Stage hands. Journalists. The NYPD. The Fire department.

Floats. Music. Children.

Dogs.

Marching bands.

Defiance.

Dignity.

The march passed the infamous Trump Tower. Some stopped and mocked. Kendrick’s “They Not Like Us” blared out. Most just ignored it. Ostentatious and shiny, it couldn’t compare with real life on the street.

The sense of solidarity was overpowering. Joy in community. All different, but all united.

Miles away at the front of the march were Zohran Mamdani and Bernie Sanders.

As I watched, I felt deep down that Trump can’t win his battle against America.

He can war, but he can’t win.

He can scramble but he can’t unscramble.

The people want peace and freedom and when they realise just how seriously it’s threatened they will respond.

The problem is not the lack of resistance. It’s the lack of brave leadership.

Before I had left for the USA, a friend of mine told me she won’t visit “Trump’s America.” I beg to differ. It’s not Trump’s America. He’s just hijacked it. The Labour Day parade (more photos here) proved my point.

Read my story of my nine hours in New York here.

Human rights don’t live here anymore

“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights” proclaim the opening words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In his 2020 novel, Another Now, Dispatches from an Alternative Present, Greek activist and economist Yanis Varoufakis, juxtaposed these words with a reality check:

“All babies are born naked. Soon afterwards, however, some are dressed in expensive clothes and put on a path to a privileged life while the majority wear rags and must perform miracles to escape from a life of exhaustion, exploitation, servitude and fear. This is the type of inequality that defines Our Now from cradle to grave.”

The danger today is that the oligarchs are waging a war to make ‘Our Now’ the natural and permanent order of things.

Read this important analysis by Adam Tooze: Chartbook 408: After the Last Utopia: China, the US, sustainable development and Hayek's bastards.

Human rights are under attack.

Everywhere.

Under attack: The idea of a world where international law is constructed around human rights.

Under attack: Three hundred years of steely advocacy to build that world.

I’m worried.

Activists are fighting back. Everywhere. All the time. But my question is: are we doing enough to persuade people that a world order that protects human rights to equality, dignity and freedom in law is better than a rightsless world?

I think not.

Otherwise why would millions be voting against equal rights?

The human rights ‘community’, particularly the lawyers, academics and NGOs that fight for human rights, must do much more to actively engage with social movements, and persuade them of the benefits of structuring the world we desire around human rights.

It shocks me how little value appears to be attached to the potential power of human rights systems to advance socio-economic rights by new thinkers, especially by writers who are sketching out alternative economic systems, like Kate Raworth (Doughnut Economics), Ingrid Robeyns (Limitarianism) or Varoufakis himself.

Engage! Show them the architecture that has been steadily built to advance human rights in the UN Human Rights system; the change it has yielded; remind people how in the 1960s the striving for a human rights-based order came from the South, particularly from countries like Jamaica (ever wondered why Bob wrote Get Up, Stand Up?).

Engage! recount the multitude of progressive changes that have come about because of an order built on human rights.

We need a rights-plus world, not a rights-less world.

We need the baseline of the UDHR, rather than the Code of Capital.

Rather pro-poor Constitutions than crack-up capitalism.

Don’t throw the baby of human rights out with the bloody bathwater of neo-liberalism.

Activists bookshelf: Genocide, Chile and the Chagos islands - the necessity for international law

In 2022 I was a writer in The Revolution Will not be Litigated, a fabulous collection of essays penned by lawyers who are activists and activists who use the law.

Its inspiring stories demonstrate how legal frameworks can be used or created to advance social justice. Social mobilization is indispensable.

You can read the essays here.

But knowing human rights law and what it is capable of is important.

Enter Philippe Sands - a writer I recommend you read.

In his 2005 book Lawless World, Sands revealed how the beginning of the unravelling of international law started when, under a Labour government, British PM Tony Blair, ignored legal advice and supported the US invasion of Iraq.

Doing so opened a Pandora’s box that has made it easier for Putin, Netanyahu, Bolsonaro, Orban, Modi and now Trump.

Today another Labour leader, PM Keir Starmer, is up to it again.

Read: Starmer v Starmer: why is the former human rights lawyer so cautious about defending human rights?

Maybe we need a book about what happens to human rights lawyers when they gain power?

But let’s stick with Sands, a great legal historian whose books bring to life the people and struggles behind crucial human rights treaties, such as the Genocide Convention, the recognition of Crimes Against Humanity (read East West Street) and the struggle to free the Chagos Islands from British colonialism (read The Last Colony) .

Sands’ latest book, 38 Londres Street, is about the arrest of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in London in 1998 for genocide.

You need to know these stories.

Human rights law will only work for us if we understand its history and then use it!

Artists unusual: Poetry in a time of Genocide

Across the world, a growing number of artists are singing-up their rights to freedom of expression, particularly to signal solidarity with the people of Palestine.

Kneecap and Bob Vylan grabbed the headlines earlier this year.

Now they’ve been joined by British singer, Billy Bragg, one of the voices of resistance under Margaret Thatcher. In the 1980s he wrote beautiful ballads like ‘Which side are you on?’ and ‘There is power in a Union’.

To support the Global Sumud Flotilla Bragg has just released Hundred Year Hunger, with the refrain “existence is resistance”,

And the legendary Neil Young has just released Big Crime, an anti-Trump song:

Don’t need no fascist rules

Don't want no fascist schools

Don’t want soldiers walking on our streets

Got big crime in DC at the White House

I love Sally Rooney’s novels.

A few weeks before 900 people were arrested in London for acts of civil disobedience (exercising their rights to freedom of expression), Rooney, wrote an op-ed titled I support Palestine Action. If this makes me a ‘supporter of terror’ under UK law, so be it.

Read: Literature as empathy: A call for stories that bridge divides, ignite understanding

Imagination refuses reality

A few years ago I celebrated the fusion of poetry and activism in a love letter to social justice activists.

Read: It’s Time to Riot: Putting Poetry back into Activism.

South African cartoonist Carlos Amato created “Uncage”, the cartoon above,” to illustrate my article.

Great political cartoons never die, so I asked Carlos to explain his “nod to Magritte” for those less versed in art history (me!).

With the caveat that he doesn't normally title or explain his cartoons Carlos replied that it’s “a 2020 tweak on Rene Magritte’s series of paintings called The Human Condition, in which a landscape canvas on an easel merges with the source scene behind it.”

“Magritte was concerned with the indivisibility of perception and reality between painter and subject. This update is about a more interventionist / rejectionist creativity; in which the imagination refuses reality in order to remake it.”

Talking about art: Banksy’s take on the prohibition of freedom of expression in England (opposite) was left on the walls of the Royal Courts of Justice in London - and quickly washed away.

However. As much as some artists are speaking out, I wonder about the silence of some of my favourite writers and singers.

Bob Dylan, where art thou?

You were right to damn the masters of war but your silence on the genocide being carried out by the “neighbourhood bully” emasculates your reputation as a freedom singer.

Now is not the time for silence.

Imagine

When I’m in New York I always visit Strawberry Fields, the memorial Yoko Ono created for John Lennon, in Central Park. It’s opposite Dakota Mansions, their home where John was assassinated in December 1980.

Changing/Unchanging: Images from Strawberry Fields

Strawberry Fields is like the concourse of Grand Central Station. A never-ending river of people runs through it, pausing, pondering, kow-towing before the Imagine mural. A single busker is always there to sing Lennon’s songs. This time it was Liz Chidester singing mostly love songs.

I sat there people-watching for an hour until Liz finished with the poignant Golden Slumbers (a Lennon and McCartney song):

“Once there was a way to get back home again … sleep pretty darling, do not cry and I will sing a lullaby.”

But I did feel like crying.

Being maladjusted to inhumanity. “Refusing reality in order to remake it ...” isn't that what all social justice and human rights activists are trying to do? Don’t give up.

Until next time.

Love and peace,

Mark

Heywood

If you enjoyed this newsletter please forward it to other soul rebels. They can subscribe by contacting me at markjamesheywood@gmail.com

News from JAH is also now available here on Substack!

The Justice and Activism Hub is a change tank for a time of change. We are committed to strengthening social justice struggles through connection, collaboration, coordination, convening and catalysing.

Let's get together to fight this Holy Armagiddyon,

• Bob Marley, One Love/People Get Ready, Exodus, 1977

Soul Rebels,

“Who run this mutha? Girls …”

Run the World is a song on ’s 2011 album 4. It’s a defiant celebration of woman power, not pleading or petitioning for equality, but declaiming and defying; not in the staid language of (men’s) politics, but in the movement of eclectic dance and electropop; not yielding up easy to quote lyrics ... Punk pop. Nefertiti meets Tofo Tofo. 

Says Beyoncé:

“Who are we 

What do we want?

… The world”

And why not? The rule of men has gone on for too long. Women deserve to run the world. 

In South Africa August 9th is Women’s Day. In the political calendar of lip-service-to-really-important-issues-that-on-every-other-day-government-ignores August is women’s month.

It’s tokenistic bullshit, yes. But don’t be lulled into passivity. It’s a good time to dig. To discover. To remember. To revive. To rage.

Women’s Day recalls and celebrates that winter day in 1956 when 20,000 women of all races and classes marched to the apartheid Union Buildings to protest against the extension of pass laws to women.

69 years ago.

Women’s month celebrates women’s power and women’s sacrifice. It reminds us of women like Phila Portia Ndwandwe, abducted and murdered by the apartheid security police in October 1988, and the subject of a painting that hangs in the Constitutional Court.

31 years ago, through the resilience of women’s resistance, apartheid came to an end. Women won freedom … in the eyes of the law.  Why then, in 2025, are so few women truly free?

There is gender unfreedom in unemployment.

Unfreedom in murder rates. Unfreedom in hunger.

Unfreedom in pay (if you get it). In education. In respect.

As the state and the formal economy flounders, a parallel economy – the “care economy” – is held up by women. But, as explained in this 2020 report from Oxfam, the women who work in it are not paid for their labour. Dr Basani Baloyi said in a recent speech Making Care Count: A Vision for Inclusive Care Economies Through G20 Leadership: “The care economy is … the foundation upon which all economic activity rests.”

There’s little to celebrate. Yes, important gains that have been made in formal gender equality. Each one fought for. But they are not enough. And now there is global stagnation and erosion in substantive equality.

There is a regime of gender apartheid against women in Afghanistan and Iran. In Gaza women bear the brunt of Israel’s genocide. In the USA, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth approvingly retweets an evangelical Christian group that thinks women’s vote should be managed by their husbands. 

It’s time for a fight.

Watch: Performance colectivo Las Tesis "Un violador en tu camino", a protest song that in 2019 helped inspire a mass movement of women against femicide in Chile.

Thumbs up: Who runs the social justice world?

Every social justice issue is a women’s issue.

Every social justice activist ought to be a feminist.

Women’s equality, dignity and safety is not a woman’s issue. 

Read the profiles of sixty of the women who organised the 1956 march.

Their passion did not die.

In recent years a transformation has taken place in social justice organising in South Africa. Now it is overwhelmingly led by women. Women outnumber men three to one in the leadership of civil society.

We salute you: Clotilde Angelucci (Youth Capital), Ferrial Adam (WaterCAN), Basani Baloyi (IEJ), Rachel Bukasa (Black Sash), Tessa Dooms (Rivonia Circle), Sharon Ekambaram (Lawyers for Human Rights), Nicole Fritz (Campaign for Free Expression), Adv Adila Hassim, Fatima Hassan (the Health Justice Initiative), Janet Jobson (Desmond and Leah Tutu Foundation), Ishtar Lakani (strategist), Matshidiso Lencoasa (Budget Justice Coalition), Noncedo Madubedube (Equal Education), Thoko Madonko (economist), Nonhle Mbuthuma (Amadiba Crisis Committee), Koketso Moeti, Salome Meyer (Cancer Alliance), Mbali Ntuli (Ground Work Collective), Karabo Ozah (Centre for Child Law), Tess Peacock (the Equality Collective), Tshekofatso Phala (Equal Education Law Centre), Zuki Pikoli (editor), Kavisha Pillay (CODE),  Kaajal Ramjathan-Keogh (International Commission of Jurists), Marlise Richter (all rounder),  Lotti Rutter (Ritshidze), Sasha Stevenson (Section27), Sibongile Tshabalala (TAC), Lwando Xaso (lawyer and writer).

And many many more...

Forgive me for leaders I have not named. This is just a sample. We have women leaders in poetry, in journalism, in thought and knowledge production. It would take more words than this short newsletter has space for.

When I asked why a similar revolution has not taken place in the leadership of most other parts of society one activist replied simply: “Men are responsible for upholding a broken capitalist system 😉”

Touché.

Thumbs Down: Nature’s revenge

In women’s month let’s elevate our understanding of the disproportionate destructive impact the climate crisis is exacting on the lives of women and girls. 

The madness of King Donald is real. But it’s also a distraction from the real crises facing the world. The climate crisis in particular. Nature is not being stunned into silence by his antics. The opposite.

Join the dots … Record temperatures are being experienced across Europe. Floods in Beijing. Unprecedented wildfires in Canada. Searing days above 50°C in Iran and across the Middle East. A rain bomb in Pakistan killed over 200 people. 

And Africa’s under the climate cosh.

The sixth mass extinction is loading.

Activists Unusual: “Ubuntu as a philosophy of revolution”

The lineage of women’s resistance and leadership in South Africa runs long and deep.   

Justice Yvonne Mokgoro was only five at the time of the 1956 women's march. An encounter with PAC leader Robert Sobukwe inspired her to legal practice as an instrument to advance equality. 

In 1995 she was one of the first two women appointed to South Africa’s brand new Constitutional Court. After a life of unblemished service Yvonne died tragically in 2024. 

Listen to this rare interview: Justice Yvonne Mokgoro, African Women in Law Legacy Project 

Last week I spent several intellectually rich and beautiful days at the Kromdraai Hub in the cradle of humankind with her children, grandchildren, judges and former judges, artists and activists fathoming out how to ensure her spirit and convictions shape the rest of the 21st century. The Yvonne Mokgoro Foundation is being founded to do that. 

One of the philosophies Yvonne injected into constitutional jurisprudence in the first judgment of the Constitutional Court was of Ubuntu, “I am because we are.”  

As we deconstructed Ubuntu and its relevance for now, I had an epiphany. Ubuntu is not a fusty, musty, harking back to old times philosophy but an active instruction for community living, solidarity and a home-grown anti-dote to inequality.

We need to reimagine Ubuntu. 

Activists bookshelf: Imagine!

Talking about imagination. 

A few weeks ago I joined a conversation with the staff of the Trevor Noah Foundation in Johannesburg. 

My topic: Making Advocacy effective.

At the end I was given a copy of Into the Uncut Grass (beautifully illustrated by Sabina Hahn), a “picture book, but not a children’s book .. a book for kids to share with their parents and for parents to share with their kids.”

It’s about one of my favourite topics. Imagination. 

Writes Trevor in the introduction:

“Imagining has always been one of my greatest joys. It’s the one thing we can all do, no matter where we are from or who we are. It allows us to explore worlds we’ve never seen and live as people we’ve never been. 

Imagining … is crucial for conflict resolution. When faced with seemingly insurmountable challenges, it is our ability to envision possibilities beyond the immediate and obvious that paves the way for solutions.”

As South Africa embarks on its National Dialogue, there’s a scene in the story, where a clutch of coins explain to the boy and Walter, his teddy bear, why they always arrive at a consensus when they have different ideas:

“.. we decided we’d rather compromise together than get what we want all alone,” the smaller coin said. “After all, we’re coins! We need one another to add up to anything at all!” 

Ubuntu?

“And though the last lights off the black West went” -- Dusk over the Cradle of Humankind

Don’t miss

Finally on the subject of women and media, here’s a few newish publications/podcasts you shouldn’t miss:  

• The great Redi Thlabi interviewed outstanding writer Michela Wrong to understand what’s at stake in the ‘peace agreement’ between Rwanda and the DRC. There’s more than meets the eye in the scramble for Africa’s mineral resources … (Read my 2021 interview with Michela here) 

• In 1982 Ruth First was cruelly blown up by a letter bomb sent by Craig Williamson, the apartheid assassin. Her life blended brilliant journalism, research and activism. Research and Activism: Ruth First and Activist Research, a collection of essays, has just been published and is available free online.

• If you are a contemporary leader in activism and want a better understanding of  the shoulders we stand on read Lydia, Anthem to the Unity of Women by Kally Forrest. It’s the life story, meticulously researched and beautifully told of Lydia Komape (1935-2023), a woman, a trade unionist, an organiser of rural women and a member of the democratic Parliament, whose life spanned the whole of apartheid to the demise of the democratic era. 

• On 23 August 2021, four years ago, Babita Deokoran was murdered for uncovering massive corruption. We haven’t forgotten her or muted our cries for truth and justice. Look out for Jeff Wicks’ new book Shadow State, Why Babita Deokoran had to die.  

I hope you are inspired by this women’s power themed newsletter. Sorry if it’s a little longer than usual.

I will end by harking back more than a century to one of South Africa’s earliest women activists and writers, Olive Schreiner. Schreiner is the subject of a hard to find biography by Ruth First and Ann Scott. Another ought-to-be-read.

You see how all the dots join?

Predictably Schreiner is mainly remembered for her great novel, The Story of an African Farm, rather than for her radical feminism and anti-capitalism.

What you should know, however, is that in 1911 she published Woman and Labour, a book based on decades of research and thought about the position of women in society. The full text is well worth the read.

Schreiner speaks out strongly against women’s unpaid labour (she calls it “sex parasitism”) and war (“Men’s bodies are our women’s works of art”).Her introduction ends with a few sentences reaching across time to address you, me and the doubt we may sometimes feel about our ability to change the world.

I should like to say to the men and women of the generations which will come after us –" You will look back at us with astonishment! You will wonder at passionate struggles that accomplished so little; at the, to you, obvious paths to attain our ends which we did not take; at the intolerable evils before which it will seem to you we sat down passive; at the great truths staring us in the face, which we failed to see; at the truths we grasped at, but could never quite get our fingers round. You will marvel at the labour that ended in so little – but, what you will never know is how it was thinking of you and for you, that we struggled as we did and accomplished the little which we have done; that it was in the thought of your larger realisation and fuller life, that we found consolation for the futilities of our own."

"What I aspired to be, and was not, comforts me."

I started this Newsletter invoking Beyoncé. I sign off with the 1979 song by Elvis Costello that gives this edition of News from JAH its title; What’s so funny ‘bout peace, love and understanding?

So where are the strong, and who are the trusted?

And where is the harmony, sweet harmony?

Good question.  

And yes. Women. Should. Run. The. World.

Love and peace,

Mark

Heywood

If you enjoyed this newsletter please forward it to other soul rebels.

The Justice and Activism Hub is a change tank for a time of change. We are committed to strengthening social justice struggles through connection, collaboration, coordination, convening and catalysing.    

That until the basic human rights

Are equally guaranteed to all

Without regard to race

Dis a war

Bob Marley, War, Amandla festival, 1979

Soul rebels,

“The world today is hard to look at, let alone think of.”

These words were written 20 years ago in a letter to John Berger. John quoted them in an essay titled Let Us Think About Fear, commenting, “All of us can recognise ourselves in that crie de coeur (cry from the heart) - yet let’s think.”

At a time when independent thinking is being punished and social media discombobulates our capacity for thought, yes, let’s think.

Think of floods, apocalyptic fires, famine, wars present and future, heat domes, rainbombs and real bombs.

Think of the implications of ‘nuclear tripolarity’.

Think of elites watching gentleman’s tennis at Wimbledon, $100 million ‘tourist’ trips into space, deep dives under the sea.

Think of those making money from genocide when we could be spending money on meeting needs and human rights.

Yes, let’s think.

60 years after Karl Polanyi coined the term, the “great transformation,” another one is underway. This is a time of reckoning, The elites are pushing everything to breaking point. And making no bones about their intentions. Think about Gaza. Watch Gaza: doctors under attack, the film the BBC refused to air - even though it commissioned it.

• Read: As mass starvation spreads across Gaza, our colleagues and those we serve are wasting away a petition signed by over 100 organisations calling for aid to be ‘allowed’ into Gaza.

Yes, let’s think.

As inequality exploded across the planet, in a lewd birthday message to Jeffrey Epstein, his partner in sex-crimes, Donald Trump wrote “there must be more to life than having everything.” 🤮But whilst Trump and 3,000 billionaires worldwide have everything the World Bank reports that over 800,000,000 (million) people worldwide have literally nothing. 🤔

The case for wealth control has never been stronger.

Yes, let's think.

Everywhere. All the time. People are in revolt. But are we resisting in the best way, are we amassing power, are our protests working, are we changing culture? Or are we like hamsters in a wheel, running faster and faster, over the same ground. Eventually exhausting ourselves, by getting nowhere?

Yes, let’s think.

The opposite of resistance is not apathy. It’s fighting for something. What do we want our activism to achieve? And what would it take to get there?

Activists who are beginning to resist differently are the subjects of this newsletter.

Thumbs Up: You can’t fool the youth

Let’s think about the forces for good.

In civil society in South Africa there is a changing of the guard. Those of us who built social movements and NGOs post-1994 are being succeeded by a younger generation. There has also been a demographic and gender shift in the leadership. Young women to the fore!

Some examples that inspire me with hope are, The Ahmed Kathrada Foundation Youth Clubs and Youth Capital who are reaching out to engage young people; and the Equality Collective, based in Nqileni village in the Eastern Cape, addressing community needs, honing activism and spreading ideas outwards from a community base.

Two weeks ago Equal Education, a movement of school learners set up in 2008, successfully held its fifth Congress and elected a new leadership.

Then there are new organizations embracing the new era’s challenges, like the Campaign on Digital Ethics (CODE), whose latest ‘Grifty Gang’ video is a classic:

Watch it here: The Grifty Gang | Episode 4: The Other Signal Chat

After the fire, green shoots of solidarity are reappearing.

In the last News from JAH I celebrated the work of SERI in standing up against xenophobia.

Little did I know that a few weeks later the sinister organisation, Operation Dudula (who have joined forces with the equally sinister MK Party) would march to SERI’s offices to protest their defence of the human rights of African migrants.

However, what this thug battalion hadn’t planned for was a peaceful solidarity counter-demonstration by Abahlali baseMjondlo (ABM), the 125,000 people strong shackdwellers movement:

• Read: Civil society groups stand firm with rights institute against Operation Dudula protest

• Evil doesn’t wait for language: We must name xenophobia for what it is

• Listen to ABM President, S’bu Zikode here: SABC Lehae | Ukufumaneka kwempilo eMzantsi Afrika

On the international front, South Africa quietly resists intimidation to give up our denunciation of the genocide being perpetrated by Israel. We were one of the convenors of a coalition of brave countries trying to take measures to stop the wanton killing. After their meeting in Columbia they issued a Joint Statement from Bogotá. And, in a victory for climate activists, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has issued a ground-breaking opinion on states’ duties on climate change.

But, time is against us. To misquote Andrew Marvell's 17th century classic love poem,

“At my back I always hear

the climate crisis hurrying near.”

Collapse is outpacing incremental change. As a new study says “we have only 3 years left … to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.” I said as much myself in this 2022 article, How much time have we really got – five years?

Activists Unusual: “Tales from Southern Africa’s climate tipping points.”

Leo Joubert is a veteran science journalist who knows the clock is ticking. She is doing journalism differently. In the foreword to her passionate book about the climate crisis, Invisible Ink, she says it's time to “get shouty and frank” and to “reclaim agency and action.”

Resplendent winter wonderland: Photo Mark Heywood

So, in October 2024, accompanied by a cat called Mouse, in a vehicle she has converted into a home and office, Leonie set off on a three-year journey to investigate and experience the effects of climate change on the communities that mostly don’t make it into the news – to write what she calls “immersive story-telling.”

Leonie’s been on the road for 10 months now. She calls her website Story Ark “because it draws on the importance of storytelling and how we can use it to create a Noah’s ark for ecological, cultural and social conservation.”

Her tales are about wonder and the degradation; beauty and how we have despoiled it. Her most recent articles offer yet another example of how big corporations externalise the costs their products cause to society, and expect the poorest and weakest to clean up their mess.

• Piles of sh*t (Part 1) — Communal farmers tackle nappy waste, and the climate crisis

• Piles of sh*t (Part 2) — Corporates are at odds with our constitutional right to a healthy, safe environment

My worry is that under a rain bomb of bullshit most people are too “busy” doomscrolling to read great journalism like this. We need a system that allows us to filter the noise.

“Bless the Bold Future”: Kae Tempest and Blindboy Boatman

Kae Tempest and Blindboy are two artists who are living and creating differently.

Kae (then Kate) first came to my attention with her award-winning 2013 poem, Brand New Ancients, a mythical poem of modernity, that finds the ancient heroes in the modern poor and sees in their odyssey through modern life the same tragedy, dignity and heroism that is the stuff of Greek mythology. He’s come a long way since then.

Bless the Bold Future is one of 12 poems in his latest album, Self Titled. In it Kae writes:

This is a time of great change

But the habits are deeply ingrained

And we don’t have the strength to rip up the old fabric

The illusion is heavy

And it takes a maverick

To stand in the crosshairs and say, I won’t have it

Coming from the same country that brought us Kneecap, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, Blindboy is one such maverick.

The reflections of a masked Irishman may not be your thing. But I challenge you to listen to The Mythology of Rain Smell on a hot day and not be moved.

Then wonder at how a narrative can seamlessly segue between petrichor, torrential rain, climate change, dogs’ olfactory sensibilities, Greek mythology, and the murmurations of Starlings and weave it all into one lyrical commentary.

Maybe you’ll find it as thought-provoking and strangely calming as I do.

If you find you like Blindboy and want to listen to more traditional forms of podcasting, there’s always his excellent interview with Jeremy Corbyn, who with Zarah Sultana is now in the process of forming a new pro-poor political party in Britain that he says is recruiting 500 people a minute.

Thank you for reaching this point in my newsletter. It’s written for love. My aim is to inform, inspire, introduce, alert, celebrate and mobilise. I look for the poetry in politics and the politics in poetry. I celebrate the good, and highlight the bad and the f@#*&%$ evil.

The links I provide are as important as the words that I overlay them with and I hope my research is your resource.

In case you missed it I’m leaving you with the brave performance of US comedian Jon Stewart, whose outrage at the cancellation of fellow satirist Stephen Colbert, led him to put his own job on the line. It’s performances like this that will make it impossible for the Trump-enablers and appeasers to ever deny that he was a fascist hiding in plain sight.

• Watch: Jon Stewart Reacts to Colbert's Cancellation & Trump's "Bawdy" Epstein Doodles | The Daily Show

Speaking out in a time of genocide and war-induced starvation is when speaking out matters. It’s time we all spoke out.

Love and peace,

Mark

Heywood

If you enjoyed this newsletter please forward it to other soul rebels. They can subscribe by contacting me at markjamesheywood@gmail.com

The Justice and Activism Hub is a change tank for a time of change. We are committed to strengthening social justice struggles through connection, collaboration, coordination, convening and catalysing.

If you are the big tree

We are the small axe

Sharpened to cut you down

Ready to cut you down

- Bob Marley and the Wailers, Small Axe, Burnin’, 1973

Soul Rebels,

Now is the season of our discontent.

Or, as Queen Bey puts it in her American Requiem, “Now is the time to face the wind”.

For all the lawlessness of Autocracy Inc (a name coined by journalist Anne Appelbaum), for all the pain, suffering and death they are now inflicting on millions, the light of freedom will not be quenched.

Trump licenses attacks immigrants. Obersturmbannführer Stephen Miller executes. The Nazi punks in ICE implement. Timothy Snyder warns of “concentration camp labour.”

Ordinary people resist.

Everywhere.

So isn’t it a delicious irony when Zohran Mamdani, son of Mahmood Mamdani, a famous philosopher of post-colonialism and Mira Nair, a great director of Indian cinema, gets elected as the Democratic Party’s Mayoral candidate for New York City!

“I’m an alien, I’m a legal alien … I’m a socialist in New York”, to misquote Sting.

Mamdani’s victory came a day after I gave a lecture to Fellows of the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity (AFSEE), on ‘Political Parties, Democracy and Social Movements’. I argued that, to put activists closer to inside-power, we need to develop innovative strategies to enter the party political arena, whilst maintaining our ideals, independence and accountability. The proof of the pudding came in the voting.

• Background reading: Adam Tooze, Chartbook (394), dug up the data on the levels of wealth inequality in New York. Read his analysis here). The Meidastouch Network shared this post from UNFTR.

Meanwhile, in Hungary an estimated 200,000 people defied Victor Orban to participate in Pride. Over in Venice, activists used laughtivism to scorn Jeff Bezos’ wedding. Across Kenya, on June 25th, Gen Z took to the streets, again; and were met with murderous police brutality, again.

• Watch The Explosive Facts About Kenya's Protests That Change Everything

Thumbs Up: For peace and community

Organised xenophobia is rearing its cruel head again in South Africa, driven by Operation Dudula and political parties like ActionSA and the Patriotic Alliance.

These populists, pretending to care for the poor, incite poor people to attack other poor people, blaming them for conditions that have more to do with rich people’s tax evasion and corruption, than immigration.

Who’s really behind overcrowding in hospitals, crime and unemployment; African immigrants or austerity budgets and the ultra-rich who hoard wealth and evade taxes?

As usual, government, business and even the churches abdicate moral responsibility. But civil society is on hand.

Two years ago, during another bout of hatred, Kopanang Africa Against Xenophobia (KAAX), represented by the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of SA (SERI), initiated litigation to stop illegal intimidation and evictions by Dudula and seeking a court order that the police and other government departments to do their job and protect people.

• SERI’s rich trove of court papers are here.

The case was argued in court two weeks ago

The following week SERI and Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) had to close their offices because of online threats by Operation Dudula targeting staff at LHR and SERI.

KAAX will win in court. But court orders don’t often change minds. And these days the state often ignores them.

So, as I argued on this panel discussion on ENCA recently, there's a need to go back to communities to talk about xenophobia and to support local struggles for socio-economic rights like access to basic education, work, health care, food and water.

Thumbs down: The end of (US)aid

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) closed its doors on 30 June 2025. According to a study by The Lancet, reported in The Washington Post, USAID cuts may cause 14 million more deaths in the next five years.

Pause here and absorb that number. 🤔

Now the Global Fund on AIDS, TB and Malaria has announced cuts for over 100 countries, including a further R1,4bn for South Africa.

In Southern Africa excellent journalism by GroundUp and Spotlight, is showing the evidence that disruption to health services and death is mounting.

• Mozambique: These are the children the United States left to die;

• Death in Mozambique: After US funding cuts, a health system crumbles.

In South Africa our Minister of Health, Dr Aaron Motsoaledi, continues to downplay the impact of the cuts which, he says “only accounted for 17% of spending on HIV”.

Six months after the cuts were instituted activists claim that Government still has no plan to replace US HIV funding. They are demanding action and that the government make public its plans (if they exist).

Activists’ bookshelf: Books, books, everywhere …

I’ve just spent a few days in Oxford, England, the home of Oxford University. 40 years ago I studied there as an undergraduate. Because I’m no longer a student, I couldn’t go into the wondrous Bodelian library, a magnificent 17th century shrine for knowledge, with 13 million printed items.

Instead I worked from the cafe in Blackwells, opposite “the Bod”, one of the biggest bookshops in the world, with 250,000 different titles on its shelves.

Inside Blackwells: Spotted: new non-fiction books by Philippe Sands (38 Londres Street: on Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia) and Quinn Slobodian (aptly titled, Hayek’s Bastards); coming-soon novels from Ian McEwan and Irvine Welsh, who has finally written a sequel to Trainspotting; and a book of Poetry for the Many, a collection compiled by Jeremy Corbyn.

As I wandered through the book forests, the depth and diversity of human knowledge and expression jumped out from the shelves. As novelist Elif Shafak never tires of explaining in Unmapped Storylands, her weekly newsletter, literature is perhaps the most miraculous and enduring of human inventions.

What struck me is the richness, quantity and quality of contemporary writing across the world; how relevant much of it is; how full of ideas, insights and power.

Going into Blackwells felt like entering a grotto of social solutions. A museum of the magical idea-potions that politicians and policy-makers mostly overlook. When elite humans have destroyed our species, aliens who discover the digital libraries that store all we wrote, will wonder at how much knowledge humans accumulated about their own civilization.

But how little they acted on their knowledge. “They wrote a lot in the End Times”, they will say.

I couldn’t help myself.

One of the books I bought is Limitarianism, a meticulously researched and referenced book on extreme wealth, where it comes from, why it’s mostly dirty money and its “corrosive effect on democracy”.

It’s full of facts, analysis and dot-joining. It makes a convincing case about why activists must focus as much on wealth as we do on poverty. It’s time for a measured evidence-based campaign against extreme wealth that helps make people aware of what is going on.

Ingrid Robeyns dedicates Limitarianism to “all activists who are fighting against injustice.” In this regard, I am troubled by how few social movement activists are abreast of this intellectual ferment, the ideas and evidence it is generating.

Writers of the world! Pay more attention to integrating your ideas into social justice movements.

Activists of the world! Pay more attention to ideas and solutions.

Saying “No” is not enough!

Activists Unusual: “Oh you pretty things”

Still on the theme of books.

Whilst in London I met Duncan Green, whose recently established blog, Activism, Influence and Change I recommend to social justice activists.

I wanted to talk to Duncan because although the world is rising in revolt against poverty and inequality, although the fightback against authoritarianism is on, although we win important battles, we are NOT winning the war. We need to rethink activism to win and hold power.

Duncan, with decades of hands-on experience all over the world, is a practitioner of informed activism. His book How Change Happens (available online, thank you), is a dialogue between practice and reflections, what Duncan says is his frustration at “seeing activists take steps that seem destined to fail.”

It’s about ‘Rethinking Our Approach to Change’ (the title of part 1 of the book).

After our chat in Brixton Market, Duncan walked me down Electric Avenue, the street that gave its name to the song by Eddy Grant. Grant successfully sued Trump for violating his copyright on the song when he used it in his 2020 election campaign.

Isn’t it wonderful how roads of resistance literally and metaphorically connect and intersect?

“We can be heroes”

Our walk ended at the beautiful mural of David Bowie who had spent a few of his childhood years in Brixton. After his death in 2012 the mural became a temporary shrine.

Bowie was not a seeker of social justice. But his alter ego, Ziggy Stardust, helped to free young people from the prison of class and gender, to dream, dress and be different, to escape. His lyrics have a timeless prescience.

“And these children that you spit on

As they try to change their worlds

Are immune to your consultations

They're quite aware of what they're goin' through…”

Brixton, in South London, is still a predominantly black Afro-Caribbean suburb. It’s famous for its uprisings and home to activists like Linton Kwesi Johnson (LKJ), whose poetry celebrated the rebellion of black youth.

I met LKJ briefly when he read his poetry at the Arts Alive festival in South Africa in the early 2000s.

LKJ had the rare distinction of breaking into the establishment with a collection of Selected Poems published by Penguin. The BBC Sounds retrospective on his life and writing, on the series This Cultural Life, is beautiful listening.

So, in honour of connections – people, revolt, poetry, learning and migrants – this edition of News from JAH signs off by encouraging you to listen to ‘If I Was a Tap Natch Poet’, a poem by LKJ, that celebrates people’s power and poetry and the South African revolution.

Love and peace,

Mark

Heywood

If you enjoyed this newsletter please forward it to other soul rebels. They can subscribe by contacting me at markjamesheywood@gmail.com

The Justice and Activism Hub is a change tank for a time of change. We are committed to strengthening social justice struggles through connection, collaboration, coordination, convening and catalysing.

These are the big fish

Who always try to eat down the small fish,

just the small fish.

I tell you what: they would do anything

To materialize their every wish.

Say: Woe to the downpressors:

They'll eat the bread of sorrow!

Bob Marley, Guiltiness, Exodus, 1977

Soul Rebels,

We are in a new order.

We are in a new age.

Some leaders of the richest and most powerful countries in the world have flipped the script on AI by showing that human beings can evolve without conscience, ethics, morality, shame and the capacity for introspection. The struggle for justice is up against a new species of ‘leader’ entirely, one devoid of compassion, entirely self-interested.

It is a dangerous time.

Greta Thunberg – who is joining the dots between militarism, genocide and climate crisis – points out that ‘The Silence of the World’s Leaders Is Deadly’.

But dangerous times spawn brave people. All over the world there are acts of opposition, big and small, public and personal. In London demonstrations against the genocide have drawn half a million people. On June 14 ‘No Kings Day’ protests across the US, organised by Indivisible, drew millions of people.

The unlawful seizure of the Madleen by Israel is being followed by the Global March to Gaza.

Writer Abraham Verghese, once an immigrant from Ethiopia, gently mocked Trump in a powerful speech at the Harvard Commencement. Over 400 writers signed a joint letter condemning the genocide.

Pep Guardiola, manager of Manchester City FC, used the award of an honorary degree to speak out. So do Liverpool FC. Brilliant Irish rap group, Kneecap, have been unapologetic in their support for Palestinians, and drawn bigger audiences as a result. The exiled Russian punk band Pussy Riot mercilessly ridicule Vladimir Putin in Mama, Don’t Watch TV, a song denouncing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The people are speaking louder and louder. As the Progressive International says in its latest Briefing “this grotesque violence … is generating unprecedented resistance from citizens worldwide who refuse to stand by.”

Check this out: Global Protest Tracker | Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

But is protest enough?

News from JAH believes that protests against the new world (dis)order must be stepped up and sustained. But protests - however big - are rarely enough on their own. They have to turn into conversation, conversation into persuasion, persuasion into organization, and organisation into people’s power.

It’s June 16th again in South Africa – the 49th anniversary of the protests that became the Soweto Uprising. One lesson of June 16th is that what started as a school students’ protest inspired renewed organisation. It lit a fire that led to the forming of the UDF and COSATU, mass organisations whose sustained organization of popular anger throughout the 1980s eventually made apartheid unworkable.

As Ezra Levin, one of the founders of Indivisible puts it: “The way we think of [the No King’s Day protest] is, we’re building a muscle. We’re doing quite a big workout on Saturday. But it is a tactic in an extended strategy to safeguard American democracy.”

Rethinking activism: Now or never?

But “rethinking activism” also requires Rethinking Organization.

Organisation is the alchemy of change.

As I explained in an interview on Power FM the Justice and Activism Hub (JAH) aims to hurry along conversations and demonstrate new forms of practice.

My November 2024 essay Rethinking activism in a time of desperation and despair poses the questions. Rethink, Renew, Rebuild: Building People’s Power in an Era of Crisis published in Protest suggests some solutions.

Suddenly it would seem there is near universal recognition that people who believe in human rights and social justice (most of us) need to work more smartly. The question, however, is ‘is this turning into practice?’

I don’t see enough evidence. Yet. We also need to articulate a new vision.

… or we will lose again.

There’s a lot of work to be done!

Activists Bookshelf: The importance of being earnest

A book I dig into frequently for inspiration is Alicia Garza’s The Purpose of Power: How to Build Social Movements For the 21st century. In a telling biography of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, which Garza co-founded, it’s a joyful celebration of building and exercising people’s power. But it also offers a critique of where we’ve gone wrong.

Garza’s arguments are reinforced in another book I would recommend, Anand Giridhardas’s The Persuaders: Winning Hearts and Minds in a Divided Age. Through embedded research amongst a group of “activists, organisers, politicians, educators … seeking to reinvigorate the idea of persuasion” (Alicia Garza being one of them. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez another) Giriharadas distills a set of issues about activist practice and tactics. One of my favourite quotes: “Voters aren’t stirred to reduce harm, …. They’re motivated to create good. “As many have remarked, Martin Luther King did not get famous for saying, ‘I have a complaint.’ He certainly did not get famous for saying ‘I have a multi-bulleted list of policy proposals.’ There has to be a dream.” Another mantra: “You’ve got to sell people the beautiful tomorrow.”

● Watch Alicia Garza: The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart

● Want to listen to a podcast that explores these ideas? I stumbled on an excellent seven-part series Practical Radicals, based on a book of the same name.

Both books I have referenced above are written by US activists. Their learnings are universal. But African activists have our own ideas and voice …. Read on!

Activists Unusual: “We mustn't fear our fire!”

Imagination!

According to the late Leon Trotsky (although God knows where and even whether he said this!) the capacity for imagination is what distinguishes humans from other animal species. It's great having an idea, seeing it emerge and become corporeal.

Rethinking Activism in Africa is a joint project of the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance at the University of Cape Town and the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity (AFSEE) at London School of Economics.

We started imagining the project in September 2024. At that time we knew the world was in the throes of rapid change. But we did not know not how rapidly the polycrisis would accelerate after the coup by Donald Trump, the Heritage Foundation and the Tech Bros. We started by publishing a provocation essay, which I penned, and then through an open application process, 14 activists from all over Africa were selected to write essays that will become a book on Rethinking Activism in Africa. Our hope is that the essays will provide raw material and polished thought for a much wider discussion that is now taking place on how to rearm progressive activism globally.

In late May we held a writing retreat in the shadow of mountains outside Stellenbosch. The fabulous 14 came from all corners and regions of Africa, from authoritarian states, war zones and states where democracy still has a tenuous hold. They embodied a diversity of issues and experience from practice as dancers, lawyers, doctors, social media fundis, growers and people living with disabilities.

All brought an openness to rethinking about change. As one participant put it “An individual story is often a shared story.” Over the months ahead ideas will turn into essays, essays into a book, a book into debate, and debate into action.

Musician unusual: “We are all islands until the day we cross the burning water.”

Johnny Clegg and I share June 7th as our birthday. It would have been Johnny's 72nd. I was lucky. I got to know Johnny when he volunteered to help raise awareness of Tuberculosis and performed to raise money for the Treatment Action Campaign in 2016. This was even though he had just been diagnosed with cancer.

In Asimbonanga Johnny captures Africa’s eternal strivings for freedom. Watch the video of this performance and – spoiler alert - look out for Madiba’s surprise appearance telling the audience: ”It is music and dancing that makes me at peace with the world and at peace with myself.”

Recall too, how Bob Marley said, “We free the people with music.” See you on the streets. Stand up for love and peace. Our lives depend on it.

Mark

Heywood

If you enjoyed this newsletter please forward it to other soul rebels. They can subscribe by contacting me at markjamesheywood@gmail.com

The Justice and Activism Hub is a change tank for a time of change. We are committed to strengthening social justice struggles through connection, collaboration, coordination, convening and catalysing.

Here comes the conman

Coming with his con plan

We won't take no bribe

We've got to stay alive

We gonna chase those crazy baldheads

Out of the town

- Bob Marley, Crazy Baldheads, Rastaman Vibration, 1974

Soul Rebels,

News from JAH Six marks Africa Day 2025.

It comes at the end of a week in which we have been treated with the spectacle of a crazy baldhead (with a head of fake hair) peddling white (house) lies before Cyril Ramaphosa, an African leader, who met the madness of King Trump with stoic dignity. Big up! This edition was written during a retreat with activists from the four corners of Africa. We gathered to work on a book on Rethinking Activism in Africa which will be published late 2025. A week ago, I was in the ancient city of Marrakech, Morocco, at a Summit of medicine activists, this time from the four corners of the world.

So, Africa and activism is on my mind.

We have been beaten, enslaved, raped, roped, ridiculed. But still we rise. I am inspired by our power.

We will need it in the time ahead.

On all issues, against all indicators, Africa is once again in agony.

Thumbs Up

The #Justice4Swaziland campaign has been at the heart of organising an Africa Day Solidarity Walk in Johannesburg. The campaign is driven by activists like Qhawekazi Khumalo who refuse to walk away from the unsolved assasination of Thulani Maseko; the muder of at least 80 pro-democracy protestors in June 2021; evidence of torture, or the two elected MPs – Mduduzi Bacede Mabuza and Mthandeni Dube – still in Swaziland’s dungeons. For freedom to reign Africa’s last absolute monarch, Mswati III, must fall.

But Swaziland is not alone in bearing the brunt of trigger-happy governments. The Centre for Democracy and Human Rights in Mozambique continues to campaign for justice for the at least 348 people killed by police and army in protests following the rigged 2024 elections.

In Kenya, this brave piece of MUST WATCH journalism by the BBC’s Africa Eye, Blood Parliament - BBC Africa Eye Documentary, has identified the soldiers behind at least two of the murders of anti-tax protesters in June 2024. The Kenyan government has responded by trying to suppress the film: Kenya’s pact of silence with its military is breaking | Protests | Al Jazeera. But GenZ knows the truth will out.

Thumbs down: Africa is not poor

If Africa’s governments had courage, instead of falling over themselves in Trump’s tariffs war, they would say:

“Yes, Mr Trump, let’s talk about fair trade and let’s talk about unfair tax evasion. We’ll pay your tariffs if you pay our taxes.”

“Africa is not poor, it’s just that it is robbed of an estimated $89 billion per annum in illicit financial transactions and tax evasion.”

For example, a recent report by The Investigate Desk finds a 9.6 billion Kenyan shillings ($93 million) discrepancy in British American Tobacco (BAT) revenue statements for 2017-2018, “which could indicate potential tax avoidance or evasion of up to $28 million in profit tax.” (Read this statement by the Tax Justice Network Africa)

It’s time we stood up for rights. We don’t because most of our governments are in on the plunder party. But the people will not stay silent.

Activists’ bookshelf:

I bought The Rebel’s Clinic, The Revolutionary Lives of Franz Fanon, by accident - proof that sometimes ‘must read’ books have a way of finding their way to you. Fanon is Africa’s Che. Black Skins, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth are still essential reading.

But how many people really know the man from whence those ideas came?

Adam Shatz’s rigorous political biography will change that. It’s not hagiography. It takes us back to the intellectual and political ferment in which Pan-Africanism and anticolonialism was forged, the divisions over ideology, the different strands of thought and action. The Algerian civil war, in which Fanon was a freedom fighter, was a definitive point in the twentieth century struggle against colonialism. The film, The Battle of Algiers, is still considered outstanding cinematography.

The Rebel’s Clinic helps us to understand the intellectual work that must underlie activism and how it intersects with art, culture and medicine. Whether by rebound or embrace, Fanon was a product of Léopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Jean Paul Sartre, Amilcar Cabral and others. Like Marley, Fanon was only 36 when he died of leukemia.

JAH recommends: The idiot King Trump and the all too slavish media that follows his every stupidity fills the news to the detriment of covering the real issues happening in Africa and elsewhere in the world. Read: ‘Refugee’ pageant Trumps mass murder and people with Aids. To keep up with what’s happening across our continent read This Week in Africa a weekly compilation of articles from across Africa. Africa is a Country and The Continent are also excellent sources of news and analysis.

HEALTH EMERGENCY! FOUR MILLION LIVES AT RISK

Last week’s meeting of the Make Medicines Affordable Campaign in Marrakech heard sad stories of the disruption of health systems and medicines supplies as a result of the closure of USAID and the PEPFAR programme. UNAIDS calculates that an additional four million people could die by 2029, mostly in Africa “due to the permanent discontinuation of HIV prevention and treatment programmes that are currently supported by PEPFAR”.

Think about that number.

It’s not over. The axe still hovers over whether the USA will continue to fund the Global Fund on AIDS TB and Malaria (GFATM).

“It’s a fucking catastrophe,” a leading HIV clinician in South Africa told me. But we are not out of solutions. The Summit declared that developing countries have power under international law to issue compulsory licenses for generic medicine production to counter the health emergency created by Trump. Local medicine production is possible in countries like India, Brazil and Thailand.

But unfortunately, the responses of our governments has been a whimper of complaint rather than a bang of resistance.

Closed: “Last chance for freedom of speech”

Civic space really is closing down.

But we will keep our assets.

Human rights activists face growing threats to their freedom and safety across Africa and the world. At the Rethinking Activism in Africa retreat four out of our group of 14 have recently been forced to leave their countries. Another two did not attend the meeting in person -- they were afraid to leave the country where they currently reside for fear that they might not be allowed to return.

And still, we will dance!

“Everywhere it’s war”

When Bob Marley was invited to the new Zimbabwe’s independence ceremony in 1980, he used his own money to fly The Wailers and the I Threes there to perform. The year before he had released his most political album, Survival, which includes the song Zimbabwe, where he forewarned:

“Soon we’ll find out who are

the real revolutionaries

cause I don’t want my people to be

tricked by mercenaries.”

The concert (watch Bob Marley - Live In Zimbabwe) proved a harbinger of things to come. Ordinary Zimbabweans trying to get into the stadium were tear gassed. As a result, Bob performed a free concert the next night.

26 years after Zimbabwean independence, 44 years after the launch of the OAU a new freedom struggle is necessary. Today, Africa is mostly governed by geriatric kleptocrats, propping each other up, pawning our people and natural resources to Russia, China, the United Arab Emirates and the United States.

But the resistance is growing, particularly of young people. From Maputo to Mbabane, from Nairobi to Nigeria, from Khartoum to Khayelitsha, the fire hasn’t gone out. But it needs to be better organised and burn towards a new vision of freedom.

As Marley’s sang in Ride Natty Ride: “We’ve got something they can never take away … It’s the fire”.

We shall overcome!

On Africa Day 2025 let us not forget that Africa is a continent of great artists, musicians and culture. Listen to Richard Mwamba’s weekly programme, This is Africa, every Saturday night on Radio 702.

Africa is a continent of great athletes like Eliud Kipchoge and Kgothatso Montjane. Africa is a continent of great activists, great intellectuals, great writers and great philosophers. As Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe explains in this podcast with Hlonipha Mokoena:

“We are the oldest continent and the youngest. We are a reserve of power and a power in reserve, both at the same time.

Because of our capacity or resilience over centuries there must be something in our deep archive which speaks to some of the key challenges of our time.

Therefore, it becomes absolutely important to engineer the African moment - in the humanities, in the social sciences, in modes of organisation of life.”

According to Mbembe, Africa is now called upon “not just to save itself, but to help save human civilization and reshape it on an equitable, sustainable and fair basis.”

Can we rise to the challenge?

Stay safe. Keep dreaming. Another world is possible.

Mark

Heywood

If you enjoyed this newsletter, please forward it to other soul rebels. They can subscribe by contacting me at markjamesheywood@gmail.com

The Justice and Activism Hub is a change tank for a time of change. We are committed to strengthening social justice struggles through connection, collaboration, coordination, convening and catalysing.

Today they say that we are free

Only to be chained in poverty …

Slave driver

The tables will turn

Catch a fire

You’re going to get burned.

Bob Marley, Slave Driver, Album: Catch a Fire, 1973

Souls Rebels,

Today is International Workers Day, celebrated on May 1st every year since 1889. In South Africa it comes shortly after Freedom Day, April 27th. 136 years later it’s reason to reflect on the connections between freedom, the falling numbers of people across the world who still have formal employment and the power of the trade union movement. Neo-liberalism has stigmatised, delegitimized, marginalised and even criminalised trade union organization. By doing so it has purposefully robbed progressives of one of the most powerful, democratic and effective agencies of change.

But whilst the unions may be weaker than ever before, there are still more than 200 million trade union members worldwide. And the raison d'etre for trade unionism is greater than ever. As British poet Linton Kwesi Johnson put it way back in 1984: Wat About Di Working Class? (found on the album Making History):

From di east to di west in di land I love di best

Di ruling classes dem is in a mess, oh yes!

Crisis is di order of di day

Di workers dem demanding more pay everyday …

There’s a lot of people cryin out fi change now a day

So on May Day 2025 JAH News gives recognition and praise to activists at companies like Amazon who are trying to rebuild trade unions as vehicles for social justice and freedom! The fight is on.

Thumbs up: Sifuna Konke!

2025 marks 40 years since the founding of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). Truth be told, as you can see from the spirit of this collection of posters from the 1980s it was worker strikes and stay-aways organised by COSATU that made apartheid South Africa ungovernable and hastened political freedom.

In South Africa the heroic tradition of trade unionism stretches back to 1922 and larger than life activists like “Pickhandle” Mary Fitzgerald. Its spirit is captured in this moving Radio 702 interview with SAFTU General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi about his life. Vavi has been a trade unionist for 41 years. He says he started marching in 1977, protesting the murder of Steve Biko and “has been marching ever since up to this moment”.

This rich vein of resistance makes the divisions, corruption and decline of the trade union movement even more painful. But activists would be playing into the hands of the oligarchs to write-off trade union power. Despite mass unemployment, millions are still being exploited in precarious low paid jobs. Last night, when I wished a woman worker at Woolworths happy workers day, she sighed and responded “what workers day? The workers will be working.” Decent work and an income should be a human right. That is why there is a need for convergence between trade unions, civil society and social movements.

Taking on the Tech Bros

In the mid-1980s when Margaret Thatcher launched her assault on trade union power, one of her first targets was the British print worker unions. In 1986 I was present at the famous Battle of Wapping where unions tried to stop Rupert Murdoch from moving his newspapers to a new plant – “fortress Wapping” – away from Fleet Street.

Sadly, they were defeated.

30 years later journalism is being decimated all over the world.

On one front, though, it does appear that the campaign against abusive corporate power, in this instance the power of Big Tech, is gaining ground. Whilst Donald Trump and the techbros might be entwined in a mutually parasitic relationship, mocked mercilessly by US comedian Jon Stewart, Big Tech is being challenged in courts in the USA, Europe, Ghana … indeed over the world.

In South Africa a Media and Digital Platform Market Inquiry by the Competition Commission (CC) (find the TOR here) led to a provisional report, published in February 2025, that made far reaching findings against Meta, Google, X and YouTube. Amongst other things it recommended that Google pay 500 million Rands a year into a South African media fund. The ghouls at Google will fight these recommendations tooth and nail.

That’s no surprise.

Like Trump, the Tech Bros want unfettered power. South Africa’s Campaign for Digital Ethics (CODE) points out in a submission to the CC that predatory behavior by the tech companies is built into their DNA:

“... surveillance capitalism underpins the competitive distortions observed in digital markets, including those harming the South African news media. Identifying this mechanism clarifies that unethical data extraction is not a series of discrete practices but a singular, core driver behind entrenched monopolies. This empowers policymakers to implement structural remedies rather than limiting themselves to isolated, but necessary fixes, only.”

MPs wake up! Reforms that curtail big tech’s power are urgent and will be welcome. But not enough.

“Be Afraid”:

Watch: This Is What a Digital Coup Looks Like by Carole Cadwalladr the British journalist who exposed Facebook in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. If anyone knows the threat posed to democracy by Big Tech she does.

Activists bookshelf

It is just over a year since the death of the great South African sociologist and labour movement researcher Eddie Webster. Eddie’s last book Recasting Workers’ Power was published months before his death. Recognising that “the labour movement worldwide is no longer the social force it was in the twentieth century,” it calls for a rethinking of the labour question in the digital age.

Webster’s meticulous analysis and searching questions still concludes that “if by the labour movement we mean not just the traditional trade union movement … , but this wider movement where self-defined workers organise, there is no doubt that the labour movement retains the power to drive processes of social change.”

Hear, hear! As a student activist I was fortunate to participate in the great British mineworkers strike (1984-85). Later, I spent time with trade union veteran Nimrod Sejake, one of the leaders of the South African Council of Trade Unions (SACTU) in the 1950s (seen on the cover page of the history of SACTU opposite).

Younger activists today have grown up in a period where the labour movement has been in disarray. However, to overlook the potential power of organised workers ignores a vital power for transformation. As Billy Bragg sings “There is power in a Union!”

Every civil society activist should be a trade union recruiter!

Tool up on trade unionism! Here are some great resources:

• Listen: DJ, journalist, musicologist and podcaster Charles Leonard has turned his hand to producing Buwa Basebetsi, a series of podcasts on workers rights for the Casual Workers Advice Office (CWAO).

• Read: The International Labour Research and Information Group (ILRIG) Workers World News.

• Watch: Pride, a tear-jerker of a film about how a gay and lesbian support group threw its support behind the British miners strike.

Activism unusual: Bob Nameng

The father of Kliptown, Soweto, Bob Nameng (1 July 1970 - 19 April 2025) is no more. I got to know Bob because of his lifetime of community activism, particularly inspiring and uplifting children, and his love of Bob Marley.

The first time I entered his house, on Union street, it was like entering a magical grotto, adorned with murals, Bob Marley regalia, rastafarian colours and the bric-a-brac of everyday life. Bob’s garage-cum living room was an open community space, where elders and children always gathered.

Bob’s memorial last week took place at the Kliptown Youth Project, an offshootof Soweto Kliptown Youth (SKY), which Bob had created many years ago. As I listened to speaker after speaker, watched the rapturous dance and song of young people, I felt his spirit.

It was like a family reunion. Bob had grown his community, through a mixture of conversation, sport, inspiration, love and helping people mired in poverty to find the riches in themselves. Bob had never left his community. He realised that power lies at home. He lived in the community and the community lived in him. As one speaker said, “Bob didn’t die, he multiplied.” Jah Bless.

Bob Nameng lives:

• Read my tribute here: Another world is possible — Bob Nameng, the Soul Rebel of Kliptown

• Watch What's Going On, Bob’s song about Kliptown;

• Listen to him explain his work with children in the Kliptown community here.

Solidarity forever

Abahlali baseMjondolo, the shack dwellers movement, always opens its meetings and marches by singing The Internationale. It felt revitalizing to sing it again, when I joined their Unfreedom Day march in the pouring rain in Durban.

Scenes from the Abahlali baseMjondolo march, 25th April 2025

Reds, the great biopic of the 1917 Russian Revolution, is a film that has inspired me throughout my life. So, I sign off JAH News with a link to a beautiful rendition of The Internationale in a scene from Reds that depicts the day of overthrow of the old order. No apologies for the way it infuses the romance between radical journalists Jack Reed and Louise Bryant into the story of the revolution! Revolution should be love.

See you on the picket line!

Mark

Heywood

If you enjoyed this newsletter please forward it to other soul rebels. They can subscribe by contacting me at markjamesheywood@gmail.com

The Justice and Activism Hub is a change tank for a time of change. We are committed to strengthening social justice struggles through connection, collaboration, coordination, convening and catalysing

You see men sailing on their ego trips

Blast off on their spaceships

Million miles from reality

No care for you, no care for me

- So Much Trouble in the World, Bob Marley, Survival, 1979

Soul Rebels,

It was the worst of times. It was the worst of times. But oftentimes the worst of times brings out the best.

Donald Trump, aided by apartheid-denialist Elon Musk, has continued to target a part of his cruelty on South Africans. Trump justifies his actions on disinformation. But the real reason is that Project Trump fears what South Africa stands for: human rights, non-racialism, solidarity, community, international law.

Our challenge is to live up to his fears.

Trump’s zest for harm has ignited global solidarity with South Africa not seen since the campaign for access to AIDS treatment and the anti-apartheid movement. 100-plus MPs from across the world declared "We stand with South Africa" and called on their own governments “to pursue new mechanisms to support South Africa’s public health programs and to expand new avenues for international trade to bolster its economy against efforts to exclude it.” Then, the Global Coalition for Tech Justice, made up of 250 organizations in 55 counties, issued a statement condemning Elon Musk and his disinformation campaign against South Africa. And an American living in South Africa, author of the Get Gone Primer, appealed that SA offer itself as a sanctuary to people fleeing white minority rule in the USA.

The question is: can South Africans live by the values we entrenched in our Constitution?

Thumbs up: Doors of learning and culture re-open

Johannesburg Library is a national treasure. It’s a precious, quiet space for learners from poor backgrounds. Read why here. Its care is entrusted to the Joburg City Council. Mayor Morero won’t admit it, but it took an activist campaign by the Johannesburg Heritage Foundation and the Johannesburg Crisis Alliance to force the Council to re-open it after five years.

Now that these doors are open again, we need to fight for the reopening of other local libraries. Jo’burg Library is part of the Johannesburg Literary District, a downtown area that activists like Griffin Shea are dreaming to revive.

With a bunch of holidays coming up, if you want to be inspired then book a spot on Griffin’s Underground Booksellers Walking Tour.

Fighting for life: How the poor die

In 1946 George Orwell wrote How the Poor Die, an essay about his experience in a Paris hospital in 1928. At around the same time Frantz Fanon was fulminating about how Algerian migrants were maltreated by racist doctors in Southern France. Health care has advanced in leaps and bounds since then. But the conditions in which poor people receive care are not much better.

Activists continue to shine a light for health rights.

On 27 March judgement was handed down on the Cancer Alliance’s High Court application to demand that the Gauteng government provide radiology treatment to hundreds of cancer patients and save lives. The right to health won.

The judge called the provincial government “insensitive and dismissive of the actual harm that has been - and is being - suffered by the cancer patients on the backlog list, to whom they owe (undisputed) constitutional obligations”, declaring that “rights had been trampled on” and that people have died as a result.

He ordered the Gauteng Health department “to take all steps necessary to provide radiation oncology services to backlog list patients … at Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital and Steve Biko Academic Hospital at a public and/or private facility” and to provide a progress report within three months.

The bad news is that the Gauteng health department, which has limitless money for lawyers to defend its errant officials – but no money for posts and doctors’ overtime – is appealing.

Talking about Gauteng Health … and the law.

In July 2024 judgement was delivered in the arduous, painful inquest into the Life Esidimeni disaster, which cost the lives of 144 mental health care users. Former Member of the Executive Council (MEC) for Health in Gauteng, Qedani Mahlangu, and one of her henchwomen, were found to have “negligently caused the deaths” of nine Life Esidimeni patients. Their lawyers cost the taxpayer more than R75 million in legal costs.

The judgement was immediately sent to the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) who need to take a decision on charging and prosecuting Mahlangu. After both an Arbitration (judgment here) and the Inquest the NPA has detailed and damning evidence. But eight months later it still hasn’t made a decision. Lest we forget (in case you don’t know what happened at Life Esidimeni or who died), visit the Life Esidmeni online memorial here: Life Esidimeni.

Finally, let us never forgive Israel for its ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, now emboldened by Trump’s culture of impunity to execute paramedics.

Read: Red Crescent Worker Who Survived Israeli Massacre Recounts Horror. There really are no words.

Activists’ bookshelf

Hurrah! Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has a new novel, Dream Count.

In her new job as an anchor for Al Jazeera’s UpFront programme my friend Redi Tlhabi interviewed Chimamanda about her novel, life in the USA, Trump, Gaza and the left. Two African women writers talking literature and politics makes for an uplifting interview.

With echoes of Achille Mbembe, Redi asks: “Watching what’s happening here in the United States I wonder whether Africa has something to teach America about

… the mental, emotional, psychological toll of having to rebuild what you are breaking?”

In her response Adichie expresses puzzlement about “the unnecessary recklessness” of “the gleeful confederacy of dunces” and the “wilful incompetence” that has been embraced by the Trump administration.

“The cruelty is the point.”

Asked by Redi about her statement that “fiction is our last frontier,” Adichie expands on the importance of reading literature and poetry at this moment and concludes “I think one of the ways to cope is to open a book.”

Reading is one of my coping strategies too. As I explain in The anguish of literature and the unexpected links between the stories we read, literature canvasses all that has gone wrong in human society, but it also captures our resilience. The act of reading a book disconnects us from digital algorithms that are subverting our emotions. It gives us the shelter and stillness to make sense of the world, to regroup and work out how to resist.

Activists unusual: Invisible organisers

My friend George Mohala, a devoted Kliptown community activist, has died. In the shadow of the famous Freedom Square George spent his whole life fighting for a forgotten community, one that still lives in squalor. There was something about George that made you love him. We were due to meet again.

Too many activists from poor backgrounds die too young.

Sukoluhle Moyo is a name you won't know. But we owe it to her to read Jo’burg activist Nigel Branken’s poignant tribute to her: The City of Johannesburg let her down — remembering Sukoluhle Moyo. In Branken’s words:

“Sukoluhle never made the news. But she made history. And if justice means anything in this country, her name deserves to be remembered – not only by those she walked with, but by all of us. Her life, lived mostly in obscurity, will never make headlines. But it should.

“Because Sukoluhle Moyo taught us how to see.

“She taught us to see injustice. To see one another. To see what really matters.”

Strangely, the tribute triggered memories of a 1744 English nursery rhyme, Who Killed Cock Robin? and then of a 1968 Bob Dylan song, Who Killed Davey Moore?

“Not I”.

Three hundred years later we are still displacing responsibility for the loss of opportunity, dignity and life of the wretched of the earth.

Who killed Sukoluhle Moyo and her children?

We all did.

Circles of life

Miracles Nestled in the Ordinary

Last weekend I travelled to Durban to address the shack-dwellers movement Abahlali baseMjondolo’s General Assembly about the Union Against Hunger and the struggle for the right to food. Shortly after dawn, before the meeting, I went running along North Beach hoping to catch some poetry. I wasn’t disappointed.

It’s autumn in South Africa. So I’ll sign out with a song by Damian Marley, Marley’s youngest son.

Autumn Leaves, is a song of hope:

Life is full of ups and downs

The carousels of love

Good times, bad times, smiles, and frowns

Don't give up on me

Watch the video of the song, it’s a work of art and imagination.

Until next time,

Mark

Heywood

If you enjoyed this newsletter please forward it to other soul rebels. They can subscribe by contacting me at markjamesheywood@gmail.com

The Justice and Activism Hub is a change tank for a time of change. We are committed to strengthening social justice struggles through connection, collaboration, coordination, convening and catalysing.

We refuse to be

What they wanted us to be

We are what we are

That’s the way, it’s going to be

Bob Marley, Babylon System, 1979

Soul Rebels,

Greetings. Welcome to JAH’s third newsletter.

The right to poetry: World Poetry Day falls on March 21, the same day as South Africa’s human rights day, memorialising the 1960 Sharpeville massacre by celebrating the right to life and equality. Poetry and human rights are connected. The right to poetry is the right to love without fear, to dream without bombs and hunger, to grow up, to see beauty and feel joy. Writing poetry can be an act of reclaiming our power over words and using words to insist on our humanity and rights. Poetry is resistance, resilience and redemption. It’s the essence of us.

JAH News looks for poetry in our day-to-day struggles, as a sign of life.

I have no words for the pain and cruelty being inflicted on the people of Gaza. But poems and photographs from within Gaza will fill the void of my speechlessness showing that not even a genocide can quash hope and resilience. I recommend you visit We Are Not Numbers to read these poems or just read If I must die by Refaat Alareer.

The photo above is by Mohamed Salem and is part of a project called Gaza Habibti, where you can find many more photos of the humans who live and die under the bombs.

Civil society campaigns that count

"Hunger is the manufacturing house of poverty":

The Union Against Hunger is growing. On Human Rights Day a mini-Indaba of members was held to refine the UAH’s vision and demands, listen to and learn from each other and discuss building the campaign between now and World Hunger Day on May 28th. It was attended by representatives from the South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU), Real Reform for ECD (with a big delegation of community ECD practitioners), the SA Council of Churches and the Centre for Faith and Community, inner city food activists from Tshwane, Jo'burg, Alex, Orange Farm and academics researching food and development.

Did you know? Thirteen million children live in poverty in South Africa; 27.4% of children are stunted by the time they are five; the government’s Early Childhood Development (ECD) subsidy of R24 per day, includes only R6.80 per day for nutrition. Sufficient? Go figure … As Bob Marley sang “This train is bound for glory”: Get on board! Write to Busiso Moyo at: info@unionagainsthunger.org

Most people agree that in Gauteng Province, the provincial health department which has an annual budget of R67 Billion, is still captured by thieves.

As a result, corruption and maladministration take a terrible toll on life and the prospect of relief from treatable illness.

One example is care for cancer, where the waiting list runs to thousands. This is despite a campaign by civil society organisations that led the National Treasury to make a special provision of R784 million in 2022/23 - money that then wasn’t spent.

Civil society to the rescue: Eventually, in November 2024, the Cancer Alliance, representing more than 30 patients’ organisations, and represented by SECTION27, took the issue to court in an urgent application.

It shouldn’t take four months for a judgement in a life and death urgent matter to be handed down. Judgement was meant to be delivered today. This newsletter was on hold for it! But the judge delayed again. Watch this space in the next JAH News.

And cross your fingers.

Thumbs down

The late Palestinian psychiatrist Dr Eyad el-Sarraj is quoted as having said:

‘For Israel peace is the most dangerous thing, not war.’

The end of the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas was inevitable. Peace requires accountability and Prime M******* Netanyahu cannot afford accountability. With friends like Trump he’s banking on this being the age of impunity.

Nonetheless, on the night of 18 March 2025, at 2am, when bombs and bullets rained down on people trying to sleep in Gaza – killing over 400, 174 of them children - it was still enormously painful.

The words of English spoken word poet Kae Tempest in her 2017 book of poetry, Let them Eat Chaos, came to mind with the morning news:

She’s screaming, she’s screaming

The drones

Turned her beautiful boy into a pile of bones

No body to bury

Nobody is home

South African journalist Redi Thlabi is breaking new ground as an anchor on a new weekly Al Jazeera programme, Up Front. Recently she interviewed Craig Mokhiber, the former director of the New York Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Mokhiber resigned in October 2023 in protest at the UN’s failures over Palestine, setting out his reasons in this letter. In the interview Thlabi gets to why international law - and bodies such as the ICJ and ICC - remain so important, even if they feel impotent before the masters of war.

Activists bookshelf: books you need to read

There’s cruel reason in the madness of the Heritage Foundation/Project 2025 and Trumpism. It’s captured in a book by Canadian historian Quinn Slobodian, called Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy.

I’ve mentioned Slobodian’s first book Globalists before. It is a meticulously researched piecing together of a hitherto unknown and untold history of how neo-liberal ideas and organisation developed. Crack-Up Capitalism (2024) is a more up to date accounting of how the current generation of oligarchs are trying to fill the wreckage left by neo-liberals.

Beware.

Be aware.

Know thy enemy!

Activists are indebted to historians like Slobodian who unearth threads of history, join dots and monitor conservative thought and publications. We should return the debt by reading their books!

Primer: Quinn Slobodian recently did an interview on Democracy Now where he set out his analysis. He’s also just published an article, ‘Speed Up the Breakdown’, in the New York Review of Books.

Compassion, Connection, Culture: Not Like Us!

Trump may be successfully “flooding the zone with shit” and racist MAGA types may be polluting our newsfeeds, but they do not represent the majority of Americans. The real America is still being expressed in its cultures and artistry.

If you need an antidote that will inspire you that another America is still possible listen to/watch/watch and listen to the amazing Super Bowl performance by Kendrik Lamar (in the presence of Donald Trump nogal, but calling out Trumpism in a poetic language that He Who Shall Not be Named couldn't hope to understand); Childish Gambino’s (Donald Glover), This is America; or the songs on Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter, particularly her prescient anthem Ameriican Requiem.

Activism Unusual: “Laughtivism”

As civic space closes all over the world soul rebels are going to have to learn or relearn how to resist in closed authoritarian spaces.

Recently a friend told me about a podcast called ‘Laughing at Power’ featuring Srdja Popovic, who as a young activist helped overthrow Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic. Listening to it made me aware how laughter can be a form of poetic justice, but also of its power to draw non political people into political resistance.

Using examples which made me LMAO Popovic explains:

“If you do something witty and you hit the right target then eventually your opponent will respond and they will become part of the show .. they will have only two bad choices, react to your prank and do something inappropriate or do nothing. By being creative you are making your opponent's strength work against him or herself and making them look ridiculous.”

JAH recommends: Popovic is one of the founders of a website Tactics for Change and the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS).

Laughing at Power is one episode of a podcast series called Your Undivided Attention hosted by the Centre for Humane Technology.

Drop in for some ideas.

Finally, Dr Costa Gazi is a name that I doubt will be known to most of you. In the late 1990s and early 2000s I got to know him when he played a brave outspoken role as a doctor and activist advocating for access to AIDS treatment. Costa was eccentric and larger than life. He died in London last week. Thank you Costa, we remember you with love and boundless respect.

Until next time,

Mark Heywood

If you enjoyed this newsletter please forward it to other soul rebels. They can subscribe by contacting me at markjamesheywood@gmail.com

The Justice and Activism Hub is a change tank for a time of change. We are committed to strengthening social justice struggles through connection, collaboration, coordination, convening and catalysing.

Oh, just read the paper, turn on your TV

You see folks demonstrating about equality

But maybe folks wouldn't have to suffer

If there was more love for your brother

But these are tryin' times

Roberta Flack, Tryin' Times, 1969

Rest In Power

Soul Rebels,

Greetings. Welcome to JAH’s second newsletter.

Before I go any further let me briefly explain the purpose and structure of this newsletter. Scientific research shows the average attention span on screen has dropped to just seven seconds! Understanding this – but whilst recognising that JAH’s readership is not average – I am going to try to compose JAH News according to the principles of what Axios calls Smart Brevity. I will communicate information I think you need to know; join dots you may have missed; provide extensive use of links to valuable articles that should be read in your own time … and try to inspire and lift your spirits a bit!

Hold me to this standard and let me know when you think I’m failing.

Thumbs Up

The saga of South Africa’s 2025/26 budget will reach a denouement when budget 2.0 is presented to Parliament tomorrow.

Disastrous VAT increase aside, one of the big steps forward in the withdrawn budget was an unprecedented allocation of an additional R10 billion to the Early Childhood Development (ECD) subsidy.

This recognition of young children’s rights is the result of excellent campaigns by ECD activists, marshalling evidence and making the argument for ECD. Organisations like Real Reform for ECD, Ilifa Labantwana and the Centre for Early Childhood Development. The question now is whether ECD will survive in budget 2.0. The Finance Minister pretends the cupboard is bare without a VAT rise. Many well-informed activists disagree, pointing out how whilst protesting poverty the Treasury conveniently ignores the stocked cupboards of resources hidden outside the current macroeconomic framework straightjacket.

My recommendation: Watch economist Duma Gqubule discuss this with Sizwe Mpofu Walsh.

Thumbs down

Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Project 2025 are a clear and present danger to the world. But if you follow the mainstream media you might make two mistakes.

First mistake: thinking there is little resistance to Trumpism.

Second mistake: thinking that there’s not much else happening globally whilst Trump “floods the zone,” as Steve Bannon says.

First, there is a growing resistance.

It may not have a figurehead (yet), but whether it’s a torrent of legal action against the Executive Orders, daily street protests across the USA, resistance within US government departments, Bernie Sanders’ Tour to Fight Oligarchy and the big crowds he is drawing or economic boycotts and declining sales of Tesla Electric Vehicles (sales have declined by 76 percent in Germany); it’s growing by the day.

My recommendation: Public interest news station, Democracy Now, offers a good daily summary of people-centered news. Often uncomfortable to watch, but essential. Also check out MeidasTouch, Medhi Hassan’s Zeteo or read The Intercept, investigative journalists who are monitoring every step of the coup: We Found Elon Musk’s DOGE Email Address and We’re Fighting to Reveal His Messages

Secondly, don't be blinded by the madness of King Donald. “Flooding the zone” is intended to dizzy, distract and disorganise. Meanwhile, enormous challenges like the climate crisis aren’t on pause.

They are intensifying.

● Read this visual article in the Guardian: Two-thirds of the Earth’s surface experienced record heat in 2024. See where and by how much.

● Study this scary new report from the University of Essex: Current climate policies risk catastrophic societal and economic impacts

I’m still hoping for more global leadership from international trade unions and international civil society. Between them they have millions of supporters spread across tens of countries. In my view the climate crisis and peace/anti-war movements need to merge. Now is the time to resist and dream in step with each other.

It’s not the time for silos.

Activists bookshelf

“Today, we need a new generation of strategy hubs - formations that bring key movement leaders together to make sense of the conjuncture and develop a shared analysis and long-term plans. If we don’t devote resources to this work, the urgent and defensive action will always trump important and offensive ones.”

Solidarity: The Past, Present and Future of a World Changing Idea and Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World, are two books published in 2024 that dissect the challenge of Rethinking Activism.

Both are written by seasoned United States activists-cum-academics. Solidarity is a sweeping overview of the history, theory and practice of solidarity. It reminds us that dog-eat-dog and dog-eat-planet, is actually not the natural order of human society.

Practical Radicals - which also has a podcast - is much more action-oriented. Their message is the same: “today’s movements will have to change - a lot - to rise to this moment in history. Some of these changes will require making uncomfortable and unfamiliar shifts.”

Unfortunately, both books are expensive and not available in most book shops. Activists should think about how we can establish progressive lending libraries and book clubs.

Connection, Compassion and Culture

I started this newsletter writing about the downside of the United States, its oligarchs and elites, I should get to the end by saying something about its upside - its social movements.

At the beginning of 2025 I came across Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution on Netflix. Crip Camp is an inspiring documentary recording how people with physical and intellectual disabilities became activists and how, through protest and imaginative action, they forced the US government to introduce the most progressive laws in the world on disability. Watch it! It will revive your belief in people’s power and the beauty of rebellion.

Incidentally, no social movement is an island. The disability movement overlapped with and inspired the formation of ACT-UP in the USA, which in turn inspired the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa, which inspired movements like Equal Education …. It’s why Donald Trump and the fascists behind him won’t succeed. Freedom is too deeply entrenched in the USA. That’s a big difference from Russia or China. It’s why activists should fight to protect the civic space offered by liberal human-rights based democracy.

ACTIVISM UNUSUAL: “Miracles Nestled in the Ordinary”: Beekeeping in Bosmont

Bosmont on the west of Jo’burg is not a place you associate with nature. Because of poverty it’s become a gangland, squashed between a highway and a pollution-spewing industrial area. Yet every community has its heroes.

Moegamat Jones is the founder of Jones Urban Farm and a lifelong resident of Bosmont. Since 2015 he has worked to turn a dumping ground into a local paradise.

“I started clearing the back of my house in the field in 2015. I did this because of crime and house breaking …. I moved into our property around Feb 2015 and started shortly after. My love for nature as a kid really played a big part in motivating me to start farming on the land.” Now the area has been cleared and rehabilitated through the efforts of local volunteers. Today it’s a farm that grows vegetables, herbs and fruits using sustainable practices such as composting, rainwater harvesting, and organic pest control.

On a Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago I attended a ‘Bees and Trees’ afternoon there. In the midst of urban decay there was something very special in watching young children being inducted into the wonders of bees and beekeeping.

Want to help or visit? Contact the Bosmont Green Community Project (GCP), which is a partner of Jones Urban Farm.

In my next JAH News I’ll update you on burgeoning support for the Union Against Hunger! Until then,

Mark Heywood

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The Justice and Activism Hub is a change tank for a time of change. We are committed to strengthening social justice struggles through connection, collaboration, coordination, convening and catalysing.

“It takes a revolution

To make a solution”

- Bob Marley, Revolution, Natty Dread, 1974

Soul rebels,

Thank you all for your positive response to my announcement about forming the Justice and Activism Hub (JAH) and for asking to be signed up to the newsletter. I was inspired by your messages of support and concurrence on the need to rethink activism.

The JAH newsletter aims to embody what I call eclectic materialism. It will bring you news of campaigns, ideas, resources, important reports and pioneering activists, with the aim of further empowering you and others to make the world better, fairer, equal and sustainable. It aims to be a hub that draws in useful information and then shunts it out again to those who can benefit from it. It will endeavor to avoid civil-society jargon, improve as I go along, soon have an innovative new logo (I hope) and be available on Substack.

Thumbs up! South African activism

#Budget 2025 brought out an excellent showing of South African activism. Marches to Parliament, a People’s Assembly and co-ordinated civil society response felt like a mini-uprising against austerity budgeting – that is against a decade of destructive cuts to funding health, basic education and social services. The Budget Justice Coalition (BJC) did great work panel-beating an evidence-informed critique, that in all probability the Treasury will unlawfully ignore. The question is what will civil society do when it does?

It’s a time of irony when the DA finds common cause with civil society to block a 2% VAT hike proposed by the ANC. It makes no economic or moral sense to impose further hardship on the poor when it would have raised the relatively small additional amount of R58 billion (according to the Minister of Finance’s now canned budget speech). It’s also against the law as a great judgement won by the Institute for Economic Justice (IEJ) and #PayTheGrants on the issue of the Social Relief of Distress Grant makes clear.

If we are really so desperately short of money that we can’t meet the fundamental human rights obligations set out in the Constitution, and some well informed activists contest whether it is in fact true that we have no “available resources”, then why not now seriously consider a wealth tax or other feasible alternatives put forward by the IEJ in this excellent statement?

Thumbs down! Trump’s mission against the poorest of the poor.

On the other hand though it was a painful week.

The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) had to ask over 150 activists involved in community-led-clinic monitoring to “cease-work” as a result of Trump’s cruel Executive Order prohibiting foreign aid. The withdrawal of funding to TAC by UNAIDS, which is itself under attack from the US administration, threatens the survival of TAC. TAC has helped save millions of lives. It’s been one of the most effective civil society organizations in post-apartheid SA. At a time when 1,1 million people have been “lost to treatment” this is not the moment to close the TAC. If you think you might be able to help TAC contact our General Secretary, Anele Yawa: anele@tac.org.za.

But this is not just a TAC or South African -issue. Many other developing countries are much worse affected. It’s a roll-back of many of the victories that we won at the height of global AIDS activism twenty years ago. It’s a global threat to human rights and life.

Talking of civil society: Did you know the Daily Maverick publishes a Civil Society Watch every Monday. Here’s this week’s edition: The fight for peace in Ukraine, unpacking the true state of student aid, Deep dive into right-wing politics and other events in civil society

Activists’ bookshelf

I’ve recently read George Monbiot and Peter Hutchinson’s 2024 book, The Invisible Doctrine, The Secret History of Neoliberalism and How It Came to Control Your Life. It’s a concise, non-doctrinaire history of neoliberalism, highly recommended if you want an overview of the life and death of this malicious ideology. It seems that neoliberalism is a story of how the right stole the left’s clothing. After reading it, I added a new slide to my deck on Rethinking Activism (below).

Talking about Monbiot: I recommend reading one of his latest columns in the Guardian. Make your own mind up whether what Monbiot paints is a possible worst case scenario arising from the Trump/Musk/Bannon/Project25 coup: There are many ways Trump could trigger a global collapse. Here’s how to survive if that happens | George Monbiot | The Guardian

Connection, Compassion and Culture

This week I attended the launch of Malika Lueen Ndlovu’s new book of poetry, Griefseed, at Love Books in Johannesburg. In a time of genocide and ecocide, understanding grief - not suppressing or denying it - is incumbent on all of us if we are to stay sane and mentally healthy. Malika’s journey through grief started with the stillbirth of her daughter, Iman Bongiwe Ndlovu, on January 3 2003. Since then her grief has grown inwards and outwards to encompass all humanity. Malika writes:

“We are all grieving, carriers of sorrow. To be human, to be authentically and wholly alive here, means being with all the various ways in which dying and loss are an integral embroidery of all our lives. Grief exists in all our stories, our epic and even unknown lineages. Once we begin to get a grasp of its pervasiveness, this paradox of how pain makes you acutely appreciative of life, we can come to know the light and liberation that grief brings.”

Iman Rappetti describes the book as "one of the rarest kind.” I agree. It’s moving, deep thought-provoking and one I will write on before long.

Whilst on the subject of literature, I’ve already written a couple of pieces about books this year. One is a review of Ingrid De Kok’s fantastic new poetry collection Poetry as antidote: A journey through grief, love and the transformative power of language; the other a reflection on how literature helps build empathy, compassion and solidarity and why we need it in our lives more than ever right now: Literature as empathy: A call for stories that bridge divides, ignite understanding.

Podcasts for better informed progressives: Mark’s choice

Adam Tooze is a progressive, prolific economic historian, author of Crashed, How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World. I’ve found his weekly podcast, Ones and Tooze, and his several times weekly newsletter, Chartbook, available on substack incredibly informative and thought-provoking. What I like about Tooze is that he always offers a lot of facts and a little opinion, compared with many podcasters and writers who are a lot of opinion and not much fact!

“Miracles nestled in the ordinary”

Return of the ubiquitous Cosmos. I spotted the first Cosmos flowers whilst parkrunning in Delta Park in Johannesburg a week ago. Early? They usually bloom in mid-March. Climate change? You tell me. The Cosmos is a flower for our times, an emblem of migration. It originally came to South Africa from Mexico and Argentina in bales of hay imported to feed horses of British troops during the Anglo-Boer war.

As well as beauty it also brings sadness to me. Our first two children, Joe and Caitlin, died at birth during the Cosmos season three decades ago. Every year the return of the pink and white flowers bring back their spirits and remind me of two people who never had the chance of life. But, as Malika says in her poem Letting, “Let the wound weep”.

End Hunger Now

This Wednesday 26 February sees the launch of the Union Against Hunger (UAH) in Johannesburg. According to Busiso Moyo, a young activist and researcher co-ordinating the campaign, UAH’s mission is “to eradicate hunger and malnutrition by holding those in power accountable, empowering communities with practical solutions, and advocating for equitable food policies through rights-based frameworks. The alliance operates at the intersection of high-level advocacy and grassroots action, serving as a vital link between policy change and community-driven solutions. If you want to find out more or join contact Busiso at busiso.moyo@gmail.com

Finally, look out for a webinar I will be organising soon on Rethinking Activism in the era of the Oligarchs.

Mark

Heywood

If you enjoyed this newsletter please forward to other soul rebels.

The Justice and Activism Hub is a change tank for a time of change. We are committed to strengthening social justice struggles through connection, collaboration, coordination, convening and catalysing.