Brixton’s Original Bushman, who has sold his street food here since 1989, joined speakers at a rally yesterday (28 August) that linked Extinction Rebellion protests in London with similar events around the world.
It took place in Brixton at the same time as the launch in Ghana of the Global Citizens Assembly of Accra in the palace of Mantse Nii Awuley Ahiaku VI, chief of the indigenous Ga community there.
Organisers said the rally highlighted connections between the “Impossible Rebellion” of XR in London and and campaign events in Ghana as well as Haiti, Nigeria, Colombia, India, Bangladesh and elsewhere.
Bushman enthralled the crowd with a powerful poem he composed when he visited one of the “slave castles” on Ghana’s Cape Coast and saw the door through which enslaved people left Africa for ever.
Esther Stanford-Xosei of the Stop The Maangamizi campaign and XR Internationalist Solidarity Network told the rally in Brixton Station Road that climate migrants and refugees had to “take back what is ours, and our rightful place on this planet if we are to survive”.
She asked people at the rally “Where will you stand?” when ordinary people are shot at as they try to protect their land – “Will you stand with them?”
