None of Us Is Free Until All of Us Are Free
New Book Calls for Global Solidarity
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Editor´s Note
Africa World Press is proud to announce the publication of None of Us Is Free Until All of Us Are Free: New Perspectives on Global Solidarity, edited by William Minter in collaboration with Imani Countess, with a foreword by Graça Machel.
It is particularly appropriate that this book is being announced on April 7. Today is the 54th anniversary of the death of Josina Machel of cancer at the age of 25. Josina founded the women´s detachment of the FRELIMO (Mozambique Liberation Front) in 1967. Samora Machel and Josina Muthemba were married in May 1969.
When I first met her in 1966, however, she was the administrative assistant to Janet Mondlane at the Mozambique Institute in Dar es Salaam, where the FRELIMO secondary school in exile was located and where I was one of the non-Mozambican teachers from October 1966 to December 1968. One of FRELIMO´s core convictions, exemplified by Josina, was that building a movement requires prosaic tasks, such as running a mimeograph machine, as well as the more visible roles of movement leaders.
This book is a unique hybrid digital/print publication. The original content was born digital, on the websites of AfricaFocus Bulletin (http://africafocus.org) and the US-Africa Bridge Building Project (https://www.us-africabridgebuilding.org). It was shaped into a full-color book by the design firm GoCreative (https://go-creative.net) and printed on high-quality paper stock. Purchase of the book includes access to a PDF of the full book with multiple links and embedded videos.
Buy the book from Africa World Press! (It will available later this month).
A free 10-page preview is available on Google Drive.
The expression “None of Us Is Free Until All of Us Are Free” is attributed, with slight variations in wording, to many sources. These include Emma Lazarus, Fannie Lou Hamer, Maya Angelou, and singers Ray Charles, Eric Clapton, and Solomon Burke.
Among the embedded videos in the PDF of the book is the one by Solomon Burke and the Blind Boys of Alabama.
This is my third and most ambitious book to be published by Africa World Press, after Operation Timber: Pages from the Savimbi Dossier (1988), and No Easy Victories: African Liberation and American Activists over a Half-Century, 1950-2000, co-edited with Gail Hovey and Charles Cobb Jr. (2007).
I am deeply grateful to my friend and comrade Kassahun Checole, who founded Africa World Press in 1983 and has shepherded more than 600 books on Africa and the African diaspora since then, keeping all in print through use of print-on-demand. I particularly appreciate Kassahun´s professionalism and patience with impatient authors such as me.