Loving in a time of carnage
News from JAH, 17 February 24th 2026
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.
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