Satisfy my soul
News from JAH, 14 December 15, 2025
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
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:
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!
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.
