Kilwa Kisiwani, in modern Tanzania, was the center of the medieval Kilwa Sultanate. It thrived due to trade, like many of its Swahili Coast counterparts, mainly with the Arabian Peninsula.
When you are looking for a new apartment, you have to pay 1 or 2 brokerage fees equivalent to one month’s rent, a security deposit equivalent to one month’s rent, and first month’s rent at the same time adding up to 3-4 months of rent that you HAVE to account for in your budget. Listings up on websites like craigslist and zillow are too old and have already been claimed. You need to find a well rated real estate agent with reviews on a website like zillow and they have access to databases with the listings popping up every few minutes so that you can get first dibs. Houses become unavailable after a few days. If a real estate agent or company doesn’t have ratings and reviews, even if they have a nice office, they’re a scam artist.
y’all please stop trusting people and moving in with people from tumblr. Tumblr is not a safe space. So many people are pretending to be people of color and are white supremacists, are such huge liars and racists on here acting like activists, allying with other axes of oppression to be racial rapists and colonists of African femmes. It’s a website anyone off the street can use and the safety in the anonymity and intangibility of the networking does not mean that the people behind accounts and in the flesh are safe or anything like what they say they are.
Decolonial urban planning allows for migrant houseless individuals/groups who need space to camp outdoors with their stuff and vehicles, like we had in our empires in Africa and the Americas. Decolonial urban planning allows for Black and Native American people to landscape design, urban design, architect, and congregate anywhere. Trailer parks, solo houseless people, and houseless people’s camps, are targeted by the state and criminalized under colonial government. Decolonial urban planning allows for architectural and urban design networking between indigenous people and locked doors and escape routes from colonial/state & antiBlack sexual violence.
Events and gatherings are not safe spaces. Nazis can show up anywhere, indoors or outdoors, serial rapists and serial killers can show up indoors or outdoors, and having outdoor space or large, open doored, courtyard space where you are not obligated to talk to anyone, but you’re doing your own activity, like doing art, music, dancing, watching a presentation, barbecue style, or doing a ceremony around a fire or a drum, is safer for people who can then leave and escape to locked houses if something bad happens to them. At every “safe space” event for multicultural women or gay people that I’ve been to, where people were obligated to network with each other and talk to each other, and be friends with each other, people have been assaulted, because they’re not based on our indigenous feminist and decolonial culture. Stalkers and white people show up to pow wows and people who get assaulted are victim blamed and called oppressors of the community, just like in indoor “safe spaces”, but there is outdoor free space for people to run away to their locked homes. This is an indigenous African and Native American networking system of creating universities, marketplaces, secret women’s societies, and events.
The international industrialized architecture of African colonialism: slave ports, slave pens, slave ships, slave quarters, deportation centers, penitentiaries, mental institutions, and inner city urban planning are not honored as centers of genocide, or taken down, but held as glorified vacation resorts, or still in operation, disguised as skyscrapers and factories.
Super-colonialism is when Asians and Native Americans are colonized, which includes forced migration and slavery, they think it’s inhumane and replace slaves with Africans that they human traffick to their lands and are galvanized to go colonize Africa. The difference between super-colonialism, which refers to global African colonialism, is that the international industrialized architecture of slave ports, slave pens, penitentiaries, mental institutions, slave ships, slave quarters, deportation centers, which are disproportionately enslaved descended Afro-Latinxs, and inner city white flight/gentrification urban planning profited from global African slavery, got way worse as a trans-Atlantic forced migration than any land-based forced migration reservations.
Doors with locks on them are an important part of indigenous African feminist culture. We know about slave raids and violent mobs and locked rooms protect Black women from dangerous groups of people until they pass. Talismans on our doors, charms, on our doors, that all brings importance to our doors. During the worst western european colonial slave raids in the West Africa, architects changed doors to be harder to enter and easier to escape from.
I honestly thought I knew everything about slavery. Not so.
The owner of this particular plantation had it built by slaves for 3 years. Every brick was handmade. Over 120,000 bricks on 2,000+ acres of land (this place was huge.) The clay used for the bricks came from the Mississippi River. The majority of the slaves are buried under the Levees and water. Some are buried with their Masters. Not allowed to live with them but could be dead with them.
Before you enter the house, there’s a list of slaves who lived here including their age and how much they were purchased for. 124 total. Some slaves were worth as little as $25. As young as 5 years old.
On this particular plantation, the owner was big on punishment…he used noise making neck restraints. Imagine three 4lb balls around your neck with bells inside. Children were restrained by ankle locks that connected between their ankles.
This was a sugar cane plantation, one the worst practices to involve slaves because of its danger. A lot of slaves were decapitated, amputees and killed from the fields and machinery. A lot of kids lost their lives creating sugar. Speaking of children, a child stood in the living room and operated the fan with a string while guests ate dinner. As young as 3 years old.
Here’s what shook me even further: Before the Civil War, a lot of slave owners were going in debt and could not afford their properties and were not producing enough cotton and sugar to maintain their lifestyles. Slaves were used as HUMAN CREDIT CARDS. Slaves were a guaranteed line of credit. You could get HALF of your property’s value depending on how many healthy and able slaves you owned.
My people were human credit cards and lines of credit to BANKS. We were property. We were labeled as equipment and nothing more.
There is no such thing as a good slave owner. They owned my PEOPLE and used them as checks and balances. This cycle continues with prison and brutality. I do not want to hear shit about “Why can only Black people say this or that?” I don’t want to hear shit about “we’re all human.”
And by the way, not one of those slaves are at rest. Those spirits were so alive, you could feel their presence, their pain and someday, their revenge.
The front of the house and yard. This plantation was huge. Just thinking about my ancestors tending to all this land…
SOME of the enslaved names, ages, race and purchase price.
The living room.
Interior.
The dining room. That piece hanging above the table is ORIGINAL to the house. That’s the fan that a slave as young as 3 years old had to operate manually with a string.
The view from the balcony in the main hallway. This is how they looked over the slaves while they worked in the yard.
*sigh* Names of the enslaved that occupied the shacks. Children included. Their names are written inside one of the shacks. I’m not sure if there are other names inside other shacks because I could only handle 2. After I saw the punishment equipment, I left.
Slave Shacks. These are NOT the original shacks. These were built to imitate them.
Slaves for Sale Ads.
The landscape of Slavery throughout the United States in 1860. JUST 1860. Let that sink in.
Note: The last time the home was OWNED by a Louisiana citizen was 1972. This is her original bedroom, her lipstick is STILL on the dresser. This is why the house has been updated since slavery times because it was occupied up until 1972. Regardless, this used to be where house slaves slept.
Haven’t seen anything on here about it so let me write a quick summary.
Grenfell Tower is a high rise block of flats in Kensington - which is a super rich borough. Grenfell Tower is a social housing complex. In other words, poor people live there.
At 1am this morning, Grenfell Tower caught fire. The fire started on the 2nd floor, and spread via the building’s cladding all the way up to the top, the 24th. The fire was still going long into the morning.
6 people are dead. 50 more are in hospital, 18 critical.
For years, residents in Grenfell Tower had been trying to get their landlord to make sure their homes weren’t a fire hazard. In a series of blog posts, they detail their struggle to get the landlord to acknowledge that the building was a fire hazard. Grenfell Tower had no internal fire alarms, no sprinklers, and only one exit. The landlord insisted this was adequate. The residents asked for an independent surveyor - they were refused. Their counsellor made 19 separate complaints - the landlord tried to have her removed from her post. The building had been refurbished, but none of the residents’ concerns were addressed. Instead, the building was covered in new plastic cladding. The contractors said that the cladding would make the 70s social housing block look more attractive from the neighbouring luxury flats. The new cladding also happened to be extremely cheap. And flammable.
Jeremy Corbyn tried to pass a bill that would force landlords to make their properties safe. The tories voted it down. The fire committee told Boris Johnson, the then-mayor of London, that they were worried about fire risks in housing - he told them to get stuffed. Literally. Theresa May’s aide sat in on a meeting about unsafe housing - nothing was done.
In one of their blog posts, the residents of Grenfell Tower say that they’re afraid that their concerns will be dismissed by their landlord until it’s too late. Until something terrible happens. Only then will their landlord think that maybe, MAYBE, the building was unsafe.
The company that built Grenfell Tower has deleted their webpage on the building.
You can donate here: http://just.ly/grenfell-tower-fire-fund Please consider it if you can. These people have just been made homeless and have nothing now. They are unlikely to be insured.
Just to clarify: Kensington is a super-rich Borough, yes but it also has - and this is where things get really frightening - some of the largest social housing estates and buildings. Some people in Kensington are very rich - and that makes private renting in the borough virtually impossible for all but the richest. However, there are large numbers of people who are very, very not rich in the area and that’s who you need to be outraged for right now.
I used to live right near Grenfell tower, in an illegally sublet room in some social housing because I was as dirt poor as it is possible to be in London without actually ending up on the street. I know that area really well and the people in it and - because shitty architecture is my other interest - how close to this so many of the other blocks are. There are multiple blocks that are halfway to condemnation even after the council has spent millions on “renovations” that are backhanders to building companies.
The plastic cladding put on? Supposedly cost £10m - whereas it would have been £300k to put in fucking sprinklers that would have literally prevented this.
The sick thing is when they clear the rubble they will build luxury flats with an ‘affordable percentage’ which will mysteriously disappear during construction, as with the Heywood estate in Elephant.
Funnily enough, the area where Grenfell is is where social housing began, pretty much. And Notting Hill is where residents first hit back at slum landlords like Rachman, after incidents frankly uncannily like this, and forced housing law change.
It is very important to not just be shocked and grieve this - please pressure your MPs, in writing, to ensure that legal changes are made so that a disaster like Grenfell is not repeated. This was not only a man-made disaster but one that was willingly created because they thought no one would care or that it didn’t matter. Don’t say you’re happy for that to be the case with anyone’s life and home, let alone millions of people across the UK.
The flames hadn't even been extinguished from Grenfell Tower before people started screaming that no one should "politicise" this tragedy. As I type this...
The flames hadn’t even been extinguished from Grenfell Tower before people started screaming that no one should “politicise” this tragedy. As I type this, though, at least 12 people are dead, and authorities expect that number to drastically climb. Most of those who perished, or who lost everything in the flames, were Black and Minority Ethnic people, and they were all poor (the nature of living on a council estate).
We are talking about some of the most marginalised and oppressed people in our society dying in a hellish inferno, so the very nature of the discourse around what happened at Grenfell Tower is innately political whether we want it to be or not. The fact is, Grenfell Tower - from the residents’ years of documented complaints about safety to the fact is lies in the richest borough in London - is a stark reminder of whose voices get listened to in modern Britain, whose don’t, and that this dichotomy can have deadly consequences.
We don’t yet know what caused the fire. But what we do know is that tenants had for years being raising concerns about how the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO) - to which the local council had delegated management of the tower - were cutting corners on safety and refusing to listen to tenant concerns.
They did, however, just complete a £10million regeneration project to improve the aesthetic of the building. Planning documents note this was, in part, done to improve the view from surrounding conservation areas and luxury tower blocks. This refurbishment included adding a material to the exterior of the building which may have allowed the blaze to quickly spread throughout the tower instead of being contained to the flat in which it originated, as was supposed to happen.
Despite this, resident concerns about smoke coming from electrical appliances and outlets, the state of fire escapes, and the elimination of a car park - which slowed emergency response vehicles getting to the tower - were ignored in the regeneration. Rather than catering to the actual needs of residents, KCTMO focused on improving the tower block for those who lived around, not in it - who just so happened to be largely white and wealthy individuals.
It’s clear who had the power and privilege here, and it wasn’t the tenants. What happened at Grenfell Tower is part of a larger issue of structural inequality in general, and housing in particular, in which the poor (who are often, though not always, BME) are pushed out of quality housing in favour of regenerating the city for affluent and largely white renters and buyers.
Earlier this year, the Conservative Party voted down a bill that would have required to make landlords provide liveable housing, and it’s easy to understand why. By the Guardian’s reckoning, 39% of Tory MPs were landlords, with nearly a quarter of MPs across all parties owning rental properties. There’s very clearly a disincentive for MPs to vote in favour of this.
Meanwhile, Right-to-Buy has allowed the number of council flats to fall to an all-time low and failed to replace them with adequate social housing. Throughout the capital, from Westminster to Walthamstow, poor people are being pushed to the fringes of Zone 8 and having their very real concerns about safety and quality ignored in favour if profit for buy-to-let landlords and a Tory government that wants to see social housing privatised.
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