Life and Debt is a just-completed feature-length documentary which addresses the impact of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and current globalization policies on a developing country such as Jamaica.
This methodically rabble-rousing film can be read two ways: face-on as a laser-sighted exposé of Jamaica's economic strangulation by an IMF hell-bent on fomenting chaos and dependency in the name of slave-wage sweatshops and the almighty Mickey Dee's, or, from a slightly more askew angle, as the grimmest Black science-fiction movie of all time. A tale of one very small Black planet's near hopeless struggle against a technologically superior alien adversary more malevolent than anybody's Borg.
We learn of Jamaican farmers, food producers, and policy makers coerced by the IMF to dismantle their own prodigious food industries so that subsidized foreign competitors can crush them in the local market.
We're reminded of the Clinton-led suit against Jamaica's banana industry on behalf of Chiquita and Dole, which ensured that those brand names now controlling 95 percent of the world's banana trade can scarf up JA's minuscule portion too.
We hear of offshore poultry wholesalers who demand the return of their impounded caches of 20-year-old chicken, blithely claiming their poison meat was really intended for Haiti.
The film also gives an inhuman face to the IMF in the form of the devil incarnate, deputy director Stanley Fischer, who plays the smug villain with mustache-twirling relish.
The director confesses that "the film is supposed to make you mad," and hopes that editing it in her bedroom aided in transferring her sense of mission to the viewer.
Theme music written & performed by Willie James Abner.
Interviewer: Denis Mueller.
An informative and thought provoking look at the FBI's Cointelpro (Counter Intelligence Program) operations.
Contains rare footage of the influential black leaders of the times, such as: Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Fred Hampton.
What a treasure! This program manages to capture the intensity of the sixties, yet have the objectivity and historical distance of time.
How many people know about how in the 1960's, the US Government attempted to interfere with the rights of the nation's citizenry?
That is if you were black.
Through a secret program called the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), there was a concerted effort to subvert the will of the people to avoid the rise "of a black Messiah" that would mobilize the African-American community into a meaningful political force.
Were the assassinations of Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, and Martin Luther King Jr. the result of this concerted effort to avoid "a black Messiah"?
This video is a good start for all new students of Afrocentric Studies.
The video gives a basic overveiw of information that has been researched by master teachers such as Dr. John Henrik Clarke, Dr.Ben, Gerald Massey, John G.Jackson, G.M. James, and many others.
I would highly recommend this video to the high school student as well as the freshman of college.
I would also recommend this video as a refresher for the advance student of African Studies.
Dr. Ivan Van Sertima is a literary critic, linguist, anthropologist, and writer.
In 1977 he wrote They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America, for which he won the Clarence L. Holte Prize for excellence in literature and the humanities relating to the cultural heritage of Africa.
He is the editor of the Journal of African Civilizations, and has edited numerous recent books including African Presence in Early America, Great African Thinkers, and Great Black Leaders: Ancient and Modern.
An author and editor, his prize-winning They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America is in its twenty-first printing;
He has defended this highly controversial thesis before the Smithsonian, which has recently published his address.
The Haitian Revolution was the first successful revolt by Afrikans in the Western hemisphere.
It caused a shockwave in America and changed world history.
