Oct 22, 2020
In this episode we interview Amandla Thomas-Johnson, about his new book, Becoming Kwame Ture. Amandla Thomas-Johnson is a British-born writer of African-Caribbean descent. He is based in Dakar, Senegal, from where he covers West Africa.
He has reported from a dozen countries, and has covered social movements from Trinidad and Tobago to Chile to Mauritania. He has worked for the BBC, The Guardian, Al-jazeera, and Channel 4, among others.
Amandla discusses the myopic historical view US historiography has of Kwame Ture (who the US generally remembers as SNCC activist Stokely Carmichael), limiting his life’s work predominantly to the 16 years he lived in the US rather than looking at it from a wholistic and international perspective.
In the conversation, we cover Ture’s Pan Africanism, his relationship to Sékou Touré and Kwame Nkrumah, and the development of the All African People’s Revolutionary Party (AAPRP). We talk about his commitment to Palestinian solidarity and support for social movements around the world. We also discuss Ture's involvement in attempts to return Kwame Nkrumah to power in Ghana, and his involvement in the Democratic Party of Guinea (PDG).
Along the way Amandla tells fascinating stories, including Ture’s connections to the lives of figures such as Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro and Amilcar Cabral. This conversation and the book, reveal pats of the life, politics and organizing of Kwame Ture that have largely been neglected by most biographers operating from a US centric lens.