It takes a revolution to make a solution
News from JAH, 22 July 28, 2026
How can you be sitting there
Telling me that you care
That you care
When every time I look around
The people suffer in the suffering
In every way, in everywhere
Bob Marley and the Wailers, Survival, 1979
Soul Rebels,
“What are you doing to save my fucking life?”
This was the title of a speech by AIDS activist Larry Kramer and in the early 1990s (published in his book Reports from the Holocaust). Kramer died in 2020 aged 85. Benefitting from the fruits of his own activism, he had survived the ‘plague’ of AIDS.
Kramer was angry. We should be too. Today ‘what are you doing to save my fucking life?’ is a question hundreds of millions of people dying from preventable diseases can STILL justifiably ask, including:
Ten million people dying of cancers a year.
600,000 people still dying of AIDS. That’s ‘down’ from two million a year 20 years ago. But it’s rising again.
One and a half million people, mostly children dying of preventable illness caused by unsafe commercially produced food..
1,000 dead and counting, due to the latest Ebola outbreak in the DRC.
Where’s the outrage?
What are you doing to save my fucking life?
The rising risk of disease is a sign of our times: it’s connected to the commercialisation of health (and everything else) and the whittling away of public health systems. It is also linked to war and global heating, as explained in this comment in The Lancet.
Read: Open Secrets; Who Owns South Africa? - Private Health
Read: Trump’s HIV funding cuts having ‘severe and devastating’ impact around the world
That’s why it worries me so much that during this dying time health activism is in a recession.
The International AIDS Conference is taking place in Rio De Janeiro this week.
Its theme is Rethink. Rebuild. Rise.
Rebuild!
Ten years ago I predicted the demise of HIV activism in this essay in Frontline AIDS.
I wrote about it again in 2021: Activism and Civil society: what it is and what it’s not. I spoke about it in this 2025 podcast.
Health activists have shifted from angry protest to performative protest; from organising communities to participating in conferences; from confrontation to co-option; moral and actual corruption has decapitated the AIDS movement.
Most of civil society has been bought and tamed.
INGOs are good at travel, tourism and passing resolutions.
But not at fighting for them.
Rethink!
2026 presents multiple challenges to health that were not present 20 years ago.
The world is moving from funding medicines to funding munitions. Health is being sacrificed on the altar of politics and ideology, as we will soon see with the election of a far-right President in Colombia.
Which is not to say that all is lost.
At a global level several serious initiatives are underway to rethink health: the WHO’s Pandemic Treaty Agreement (being stymied by big pharma and big capital); the Accra Reset Initiative’s high level panel on global health reform; the resolutions of the WHO Civil Society Commission.
Rise!
But none of these will succeed if they are not backed up by organised, effective, social and political mobilisation.
Something the health experts overlook, at their peril.
The impact of activism is evident in our track record(s). It is recognised by The Lancet, who point out that “Many health advances that are taken for granted were hard-won through activism,” and are now establishing a Commission on health and activism.
In their words:
“Has society forgotten that the dream for better health is the same as the dream for social justice?”
Bottom line: angry, organised, informed, strategic activism is a social determinant of health and health systems.
Organise or die.
Reasons to be cheerful, part 22
A second round of hearings by the SA Human Rights Commission into food systems and hunger took place in early July.
Read: Agrochemical and beef giants avoid SAHRC food system inquiry as hearings resume
The Union Against Hunger (UAH) picketed outside the hearings condemning the de facto boycott of big retailers, Shoprite in particular, whose written submission was read into the record in their absence.
Read: SAHRC food inquiry — some ministers engage, most retailers evade
We have written to the SAHRC demanding that the retailers be subpoenaed to attend. Watch this space.
Viva Rule of Human Rights law! Two great SA Constitutional Court judgments
South Africa has one of the finest and most pro-poor constitutions in the world. Period. Two recent judgements, and the legal thinking behind them, are a ray of reason and rationality that continue to centre human rights in good governance, at least on paper.
On the right to seek asylum: Almost in the same week that the captured SCOTUS ripped up the rights of desperate asylum seekers, and migrants from Syria and Haiti, the Scalabrini Centre and Lawyers for Human Rights won a landmark judgment protecting the right to seek asylum. More grist to the ANC’s sad attempt to blame civil society for uncontrolled migration.
On access to housing: Meanwhile whilst digital migrants and Airbnb combine forces to make quality housing in Cape Town unaffordable for all but the richest, a new ruling on a contested property sale strikes a major blow for equitable access to land and spatial justice.
But it will take organising to turn legal victories into bread and mortar.
And there’s the rub ….
Activists behind bars
20 years ago I foolishly thought that the era of political prisoners was behind us. I was so wrong.
After a relapse of a few decades imprisonment, torture and execution of writers, organisers and even independent booksellers is back in vogue.
It’s time Amnesty International went back to its founding mission. We should be doing much more to protect our comrades in prison. Please read these stories, it’s the least we can do:
In prison in Iran: Iranian Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi on the torture of solitary confinement
Imprisoned in the USA: ‘This is injustice’: how leftist zines were used to sentence anti-ICE protesters to decades in prison
Dungeoned in India: ‘Humanity is a privilege’: Umar Khalid on his six years in an Indian jail without trial
On trial in Turkey: ‘This process has turned into a form of torture’: inside the trial of Erdoğan’s challenger
Elected and imprisoned in Eswatini: free Mduduzi Bacede Mabuza - Wikipedia
Raped by Israel.
By the way, the men, women and children who now occupy the ICE concentration camps, Europe’s refugee detention centers and the spawning repatriation camp on SA’s border with Zimbabwe, should also be treated as prisoners of politics.
They are stateless … and increasingly rightsless as well.
What are we doing to save their fucking lives?
Activists bookshelf
I do not have the mind of a mathematician or mechanic. So, reading a book about the rapid evolution of digital technology required reading against my grain.
However, This is for Everyone by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, is essential for activists trying to understand our world and where it’s going.
It’s an account of a profound technological revolution that took place while we were looking elsewhere; how a system invented for a public purpose became the basis for “a revolting for-profit bonanza”; then, how a technological breakthrough that could have exponentially expanded human rights, is now used to take them away.
But it’s also a joyful read about creativity, imagination, collaboration and insight.
By contrast reading Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit defamiliarised the familiar. It was one of those books that demanded to be written about.
Read my review: Orwell’s Roses: A beautiful meditation on writing and truth
We won’t get fooled again?
I’ll finish this newsletter at the intersection of music, writing, loss and life. We live in devastating times. For a month the world was fixated on a football competition. It represented the best and worst of us. George Orwell described competitive sports like football as “war minus the shooting” (thanks for the tip, Elif Shafak).
But, whilst we feasted on football, the shooting didn’t stop.
Genocides rumbled on.
Wars rumbled on. Trump could sit in a VIP box for the Final and launch missiles at the same time.
Ecocide rumbled on. Global heating offered up ever fiercer heatwaves.
And now the fires.
If you are feeling discombobulated, out of joint, helpless, you are not alone.
We are in uncharted territory.
How do we manage our solastalgia? As this article argues, We know how to mourn other humans – but what about ecological grief?
But do we know how to mourn other humans?
In this context, somehow some beautiful words by the singer/writer Nick Cave found their way to me. Cave connects with strangers through a blog called The Red Hand files. A few years ago one correspondent lamented how:
“I feel impotent, completely ineffectual and that nothing I do is of any consequence whatsoever.”
Cave’s advice will do for all of us:
“All action provokes change. Nothing is ineffectual. Nothing. …
“You are anything but impotent, you are, in fact, exquisitely and frighteningly dynamic, as are we all, and with all respect you have an obligation to stand up and take responsibility for that potential. It is your most ordinary and urgent duty.”
But in case Cave’s words need sensory reinforcement, here’s a handful of pick-me-up songs from the 1970s (mostly) that speak to our times, even though they were written decades ago.
They combine sound, riff, rhythm with words of revolution; beat with and prophesy; agitation with reflection and philosophy.
“Why did you try to hurt me?” by The Specials.
If everyone was listening by Supertramp;
and finally Bob Marley’s “it takes a Revolution to make a solution.”
Quite right.
Go out and save some fucking lives!
Love and Peace,
Mark
Heywood
PS. As I was finishing this month’s newsletter after days of massive protests the Cockroach Janta Party won a historic victory against Narendra Modi in India. Read Arundathi Roy’s latest essay: Cockroach Democracy: Unarmed and Dangerous.
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