Black Lives Matter festival at Friends House
Friends House hosted the first Festival of Collective Liberation organised by Black Lives Matter UK last month
Quakers supported the first Festival of Collective Liberation organised by Black Lives Matter UK last month. The event took place at Friends House in London, with Friends recruited by Quaker Peace & Social Witness as volunteers.
The programme included panel discussions in which Sudanese, Congolese and Palestinian speakers drew links between war, corporate power and colonialism. The event also included workshops, book stalls, art and music.
Lina Dohia led a panel on Sudan’s recent history. According to a report by Tallulah Griffith in the Freedom online journal, the panel discussed ‘the disenfranchisement of people living on the Sudanese peripheries from which the [Rebel Support Forces] recruit, and noted the impact of neoliberalism that has left young people with no option but to sell their bodies as fighters in petrodollar wars’.
Another panel discussed genocide in DR Congo, led by Tatiana Giraud, who spoke about ‘the estimated two million women who have been raped since the start of the second Congo war, and the urgent need to regulate tagging of metals mined in the Congo to identify a paper trail from big corporations to child labour’.
Panellist Luc Kangele, from Genocost, outlined how cobalt, coltan, and uranium mined in DR Congo are vital to the US military and nuclear warfare, and how battery production for electric cars has ‘polluted rivers, destroyed ecosystems, resulted in birth defects, and threatens the Congo Basin, the world’s second largest rainforest… and largest carbon sink’.
The day on 13 July included opening and closing sessions, two nintety-minute slots and a selection of ten sessions that particpants could attend.
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