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The Church Land Programme (CLP) is an independent non-profit organisation that works through a process of animation with groups of poor people to create unique responses to their unique situations.

Padkos Event: Extractive Industries: the current state of play

PADKOS

A discussion with Jasper Finkeldy on 2 March at CLP

Since at least 2015, the Church Land Programme (CLP) has been struck by the growing number of communities dealing with the prospects of fracking for natural gas and expanded mining of untapped coal reserves in parts of KwaZulu-Natal. We’ve asked Jasper Finkeldy to help paint a picture of the dynamics, interests, trajectories of the current situation to help us think through particular struggles and locate them in that broader context. Jasper is a PhD Researcher at the University of Essex and currently a Visiting Scholar at University of KwaZulu-Natal.

Please do join us for this critical discussion on Thursday, 2 March. Come at about 1:30 for a light lunch and we’ll get going at 2pm.

Please see attached some intro comments from CLP as well as a recent paper by Finkeldy.

Trade School – Decommodifying Learning and Teaching

PADKOS

The destructive and competitive values that sustain capitalism and that legitimate hierarchy – and which are relentlessly pushed throughout society – often undermine the work we try to take forward with people in so much of the work we do in the broader community. It’s so important to challenge these, and to articulate an alternate value set, not only in what we say, but also in what we do. The “Trade School” initiative in our home-town of Pietermaritzburg is a great practical example of “solidarity practices that reinforce values of mutualism, cooperation, social justice, democracy, and ecological sustainability”.

The Pietermaritzburg -based collective that runs Trade School 2016 has created an accessible platform where “anyone can be a teacher and anyone can be a student”. Those who want to teach offer to run a class; & those who want to learn sign up for what the session/s they want– no money changes hands, but learners bring things the teachers ask for as barter, because learning and knowledge has value after all!

Read the full padkos serving here

Padkos Event: John Langdon “Learning in Movements” 25 April at 16.30 at Centre for Visual Arts Gallery, UKZN

PADKOS

For a number of us, Jonathan Langdon has been a key intellectual thinking the connections between social movements, learning, and praxis. Padkos and the Paulo Freire Institute are really excited that he will be with us in Maritzburg soon. Join us for a discussion that will draw on 15 years’ work with Ghanaian social movements. In “‘E yeo ngo’ (Does s/he eat salt?): Learning in Movement”, Langdon shares insight from a 5-year participatory study of the Ada Songor Advocacy Forum, a social movement in Ghana. We’re returning to the Centre for Visual Arts Gallery on Ridge Rd (UKZN) for this one – so be there on Monday, 25thApril @ 4.30pm to hear the presentation, engage Jon, and share some drinks and snacks together.

Read more here

 

Nomponjwana Women’s Group

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The Nomponjwana women started a gardening project as part of elevating poverty. They call themselves Sekwanele, which means ‘enough!‘, Women’s group.

The group was started after a number of unsolved cases that were reported to the South African Police Services (SAPS) and traditional headsmen concerning women being abused and killed in the area, were not dealt with. Read more here

Alt. Rock and Punk Music against Racism in November “Beats and Boundaries”

PADKOS

We’re heading back to Durban on the 14th November for another exciting “Beats and Boundaries” collaboration! This time we feature two more fantastic documentary movies during the afternoon, and follow that with a live gig that night with some of Durban’s finest bands. Once again, it’s all happening at The Winston Pub in Clark Road, Durban: doors open from 2pm; movies kick off at 4pm; and live bands, Deadpandoll, Roachy and the Rock Coaches, and Matt Vend and the Tender Ten, take the stage from 9pm on. See here for more.

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School of Thought: Part 4: Firoze Manji- What’s Left in Africa? Friday 6 November at 10.30am at CLP

PADKOS

And be sure to join us after for lunch, drinks and live music to follow at Pizzology.
Firoze Manji is Director of Pan-African Baraza in Nairobi, Kenya. During September last year he led a fantastic Padkos session on Amilcar Cabral, and it’s great to have him return to CLP in 2015. In this November discussion, titled “What’s Left in Africa?”, we can anticipate Firoze’s typical combination of insight, passion, thoughtfulness and humour as he shares some ‘reflections on the failure of left, working class movements to take root in most of Africa’. DO NOT MISS OUT! Read the full notice here

School of Thought: Part 3: Lewis R. Gordon – What Fanon Said. Wednesday 7 October at 10.30am

PADKOS

Lewis R. Gordon returns as the next in our remarkable series of radical padkos visitors for CLP’s 2015 “School of Thought”. We’re so grateful and humbled to have had Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar address and engage us in the previous session. It was profoundly insightful, and very productive in relation to our own thinking of emancipatory struggle here. The “School of Thought” continues to be a brilliant space of critical engagement for CLP’s padkos comrades and colleagues. In our ongoing work at CLP, the critical thinking of grassroots militants remains our principal point of entry and departure for emancipatory politics and thought. And there’s no question that this work benefits, and benefits from, mutual dialogue with other emancipatory thinkers and theorists who also take the real thought and practice of liberatory praxis in other places around the world seriously.

Read the full serving here