Welcome to the School of Resistance Edition number eight, the Paranoia of the Western Mind. The School of Resistance is a bi-weekly think tank produced by IFPM and Ante Gent in cooperation with the Academy of the Arts, the Bundeskulturstiftung, Medico International and others. Today's edition is a co-production with Steilischer Herbst, curated by the wonderful Ekaterina Diego and David Riff. The School of Resistance live stream was created during the first lockdown last May and perhaps it's due to this moment only some weeks after the oil price felt under zero for the first time in human history because of the cut of the global supply chains that one question became central in all our debates. What comes after the oil, war and exploitation driven western age, the so-called capitalism or now neoliberalism? What comes after the European-centered capitalist universalism? What are alternatives to make the world habitable again, to construct and tell different new stories about our future and our common past? Non-euro-centered stories, perhaps even non-antropocentric stories. Since May we had very interesting and also very different philosophers and intellectuals from all over the world with us. For example, the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera or the South African performer Noura Chippaumire, the Indian philosopher, ecologist and activist Vandana Shiva and the Ugandan activist Vanessa Nakata, the Croatian philosopher Sejko Horvat or 10 days ago, the Canadian philosopher Alexis Shotwell and the founder of Extinction Rebellion, Gail Bradbrook. Today we have with us the historian and philosopher Ashwin Bembe. Bonjour, Agile. Thanks for being here with us today. It's a big honor and pleasure. Ashwin Bembe is, I think, the kind of personality you don't have to present according to the Goethe Institute, the, I quote, most influential African historian and philosopher of our time. Bembe was born in Cameroon and is best known for his books about the after-effects of colonialism like the La Postcolonie, Critique de la raison nègre, Politik de l'inimité and Necropolitics, all translated in many, many languages, of course, including also German. His last book, Barbarisme, who is co-writing with Felvin Sar, will be translated soon at Zurkamp edition house also to German. Ashwin Bembe worked at the Paris-Saubonne University at the Columbia University in Berkeley, Shale, Harvard and Duke University and he currently lives and works in Johannesburg as professor at the Witwatersrand University, but he is known all over the planet as public philosopher. Together with Felvin Sar again, he's the co-founder of Atelier de la Pence in Dakar, where we come back to this think tank. Our discussion will lead us in the next hour to topics like the global and European border regime, the postcolonial situation and more generally the political economy of our time and members term of necropolitics as the neoliberal sovereignty over life and death and how this is linked to statehood, violence and the colonial past. I hope that you will find time after talking about the state of our world in times of Covid, a state of unprecedented segregation, exploitation about the more eutopic perspective on what has to be done to stay alive as humanity, as biosphere, as a planetary society. But I want to start as announced from a very specific point from an affair that happened last spring in Germany. It became the so-called Achille Bimbe affair. When we announced your invitation to this talk, Achille, many people were immediately thinking about it. And when we were talking about it before, it already seemed a bit historic to me like a long time ago, because it was I think in March. And now we have October, and I will try to give a short expose to all non-German listeners before we start to talk about this affair. So in spring, summer, early summer 2020, Achille Bimbe was to give the opening speech of the then cancelled Ruhr Trinale, the biggest German arts festival at this time. But there were protests against this invitation as Bimbe was accused of relativising the Holocaust by comparing it to the violence in the former colonies. And another issue, comparing the state of Israel to the apartheid system in South Africa, accusations that were based on some completely decontextualised lines of your books, mainly Politik der Limite, and the last book translated in German, and brutalism was not in so far. The accusations turned, like many debates in our time, of excommunications and vilifications, on the one hand, quite fast out to be strategically made up to this misstatistic director of the Ruhr Trinale, Stefanie Karp, who invited you and thoroughly insisted on your invitation. But hopefully Mrs. Karp was not dismissed. But this is, I think, the unpleasant and not so interesting side of the affair. Because on the other hand, a complex debate started. Once again, the so-called post-colonial perspective, known for its transhistorical comparison of political and especially colonial strategies of exclusion and genocidal violence, clashed with a perspective centred on the incomparability of the inner European genocide, the so-called Holocaust. And even if your writings are still misread, the context to allies to create the scandal where hardly could be found one, I was asking myself at this very moment, and also preparing this discussion, what does this tell us about the German or the Western mind and its impossibility to recognise a non-European comparativism? What does this tell us about the memory politics of the West? Why can't you understand that, as Hannah Arendt wrote, the genocidal violence of European totalitarianism in the 20th century has its roots, or is a kind of a re-import of the genocidal violence in the colonies of the same European powers in the 19th century, that racism, capitalism, and even what we call democracy, are historically linked concepts. But first let me ask, how was this affair, this Aschilbembe affair for you, how much were you involved, or was it mostly a German affair? You didn't really grab the reasons. In your letter to the Germans, you wrote as one of your answers in the Tatzi Tages Zeitung, you wrote, I translated in, Germany must decide for itself whether it wants to hear the voices of others, or whether it wants to turn its back to them. Are there misunderstandings you think could be fruitful to design what I would call the paranoia of the Western mind, the paranoia to become also only a voice under others, as you write in, I think, Brutalisme, a province in the globalized world. How did you lift this, and how do you remember this affair? Look, I woke up one morning in Johannesburg, only to hear that I was accused, as you said, of anti-Semitism, of relativizing the Holocaust, and of being anti-Israel. At first, I thought it was a joke, I mean, an unpleasant joke, but mostly the work of a clown. So I didn't really take it seriously. And then phone calls started coming in, journalists sending emails, basically intimating me to respond, and to respond immediately. Some of the emails were rather formulated in a quasi-inquisitorial manner, pretty aggressive. And that's when I understood that it was not a joke, that it was something else. I tried to keep as calm as I could, and I answered as politely as I could answer throughout the process. Then came a point where almost every day, my name was, did appear in one German newspaper or another. All of this during the confinement, this was the very first weeks of the confinement because of COVID in South Africa. Then, as the drama kept unfolding, a number of colleagues in Israel, many of whom I have never met, but who, and been known to me, had been following my work, decided to intervene, and to write to the German minister of interior, asking him to dismiss the federal bureaucrat who had been enlisted by a local politician. In what was clearly a political cabal, the controversy did not originate from academia. These were not colleagues of mine, academic scholars having studied the works who then decided to criticize me. This was a local politician whose name I can't remember now. Yes, who enlisted a federal bureaucrat, meaning a specific arm of the German state. To go after me, and I doubt that he would be able to pronounce my name correctly, and he was accusing me of something extremely serious. So the controversy became international. It went beyond the borders of Germany. A number of German colleagues intervened in it at their risk because this is not a joke in Germany. At the end, you asked me how I experienced this. At the end, I understood that this was not really about me. There's no way in which this could have been about me. I think that, of course, I'm not a citizen of Germany. I don't go where people don't invite me. In fact, I decline 80, 85 percent of the invitations I get. So I'm not an intruder, but I live in South Africa. I don't live in Germany. I don't live in Europe. I don't live in America. I live in my own continent. It is my own continent that is the ground from which I try to make sense of a world which belongs to all of us. It does not only belong to Europeans. I respect Germany. I have the utmost respect for its institutions and its people, but I'm not responsible for some of the historical dramas that happened in Germany. So I don't understand why I would be used as a pawn in a terrible discussion about a terrible part of the history of Germany, of which I'm not part of. In fact, I come from a place that was a German colony. We won't go into the details of what Germans did in my own country during the 30, 34 years, during which they were present there. So Germany, Europe, invented two demons, the demon of anti-Semitism and the demon of colonial racism. I don't think that the way we'll build a just world is by playing one against the other. So as far as I'm concerned, I have moved on and in my letter which you cited, I left it to Germany to deal with its own problems. It doesn't, Germany doesn't need me to deal with it and I trust that they will be able to deal with them in a way that makes our world a more habitable place. That's what my fight has been about. That's what my thought has been about and nothing else. The interesting point in Germany, this discussion became a kind of, you could say, dialectical discussions about two ways of thinking the world. One way which is very centered on the European history and another way that is centered more on what is called the post-colonial way to like link, for example, colonial violence, re-import of violence in the first and the second world war, inner European imperialism and the neoliberal system of today. So to have a more, let's say, a global historic view of what could happen. On the other hand, you have, and I think it's on the one hand, a very useful and beautiful concept that is very far from your thoughts, which is the Western European concept of the guilt of the national socialism and the violence that happened in this specific time. And I think this was mixed in a quite strange way during your affair, the affair around you, besides the fact that of course it started as a political cabal, as to try to dismiss somebody from a festival. What for me is interesting because we were discussing before about COVID-19 and when I read about this affair in the newspaper, I remember it was three weeks after or two weeks after the lockdown. So really in the beginning, when many people was quite eutopic that we would leave behind this kind of cabal, you know, and perhaps enter to a state of another consciousness of what has to be done, how do you think about what changed COVID-19? Are you more like Slavoj Sijek on the eutopic side? You see kind of first glimpses of a socialist society, or more like George Agamben that you see the powers of biopolitics growing, of general control, of closing borders, of new nationalism. So how do you think this pandemic? But I think it is the, first of all, we are not out of it. Yeah, that's true. We keep thinking and acting as if it was behind us. It is not. If anything, it is ahead of us. And therefore the talk about post-COVID might apply to certain parts of the world. But my feeling is that for other important parts of our world, that is not exactly the case. But more importantly, it is still ahead of us because the, what actually brought it about, the ways of relating to the earth that made it possible, those ways of relating to the earth are still with us. They are still going on. If anything, there is an acceleration of those manners of relating to our biosphere, which have produced COVID. COVID is not a spontaneous creation. It is something we have produced through, for instance, the intensification of deforestation through the ways in which we have treated animals, farming them for destruction. That logic, we haven't put an end to it yet. So if anything, it seems to me that COVID has not one future, but many, many futures. So does it mean that nothing can be done? Certainly not. It means that more than ever before, we are called upon when I say we, I use that term purposefully. We the humans, that we the human race, for those who are fond of such categories, we are called upon to revisit our ways of inhabiting the planet. Because if we do not share it as equitably as possible, and when I say share it, it means share it amongst ourselves and with others, or its inhabitants. If we do not share it as equitably as possible, if we do not render it habitable for all, then I'm afraid our story on earth might be extremely tumultuous. But you said it in the beginning of your answer that the capitalist system is even accelerating at the very moment, that there are no, somehow perhaps a mistake, no signs that this term to make it, to share it more, to render it in a different way, to change our way to treating the earth and to treating ourselves as mankind, that's not really happening. I mean, where do you see signs of the possibility to make this truth? I have the feeling that there is, I don't know how to qualify it, but there is some kind of emerging consciousness, a consciousness, form of consciousness, which is not universal in the sense in which we have understood that term at least since the 18th century, because the universal was to a large extent the European universal. It was not the pluriversal, a number of thinkers, especially from Latin America, have been talking about. The universal understood from within the imperial framework was the equivalent of colonialism, the extension, expansion beyond Europe of its modes of seeing, modes of being, and its demeaning of anything that was not its own, a purely Hegelian framework. That is what was understood by the universal, very authoritarian kind of impulse that didn't at all allow for a dialogic, if you want, intercultural exchange of the kind we absolutely need now. And once again, not only between humans, but with the living, and we call it in French, le vivant, with the totality of the living. So what I was saying is that we see emerging here and there a kind of new, I would call it planetary consciousness. Planetary consciousness, that is a form of consciousness that is coming deeply in collision with certain forms of national chauvinism, different forms of let's say, attachment to difference, attachment to small differences. So we have seen elements of that emerging planetary consciousness also in a number of recent struggles against racism in Geneva, and in particular anti-black racism, the origins of which are to be found, at least from the time of the Atlantic's leave trade. So it seems to me that here and there, they are elements that might be building blocks or building points for a work that is colossal, but that is absolutely necessary. You have in your term of necropolitics, you exactly describe in a let's say less eutopic way the way of functioning of our time, since as you say, 500 years perhaps, but also in the neoliberal age as an economy and ecologically of segregation, of separation, of border regime, of racism, and how racism and capitalism is linked one to the other. On the other hand, I think it was in a discussion you had lately, I think, I don't remember where it was or an interview, where you were focusing on ways out of the necropolitics of our time, and you describe the role of the continent of Africa, a continent that you often describe as a possible laboratory of social and philosophical alternatives of the 21st century. Could you explain a bit more about this eutopic concept of a kind of an exit of the necropolitics of our time? Let me say one or two words about necropolitics and then I'll move to, let's see, the very important question you are asking me. As many of our listeners might know, a huge part of the discussion on the politics of over, I would say, the last 20 or more years has been centered around the concept of biopolitics, which is a concept which has been developed by a number of thinkers, in particular Michel Foucault. The idea was that, at least in Foucault's narrative, that modern societies have entered a new period when our conception of sovereignty has changed. It's no longer about putting to death as such, it's about letting live and letting die, which Foucault understood to epitomize what he called biopolitics. Giorgio Agamben intervened powerfully in that discussion when, among many other things, he became interested in the ways in which modern liberal democracies have tended to turn the, what should always be the exception, turn it into the normal, normalizing the exception, the state of exception, that which was always meant to be provisional, now it has become, let's see, our condition, the normal ways of things. The term necropolitics, as I put it forward, I think in 2003 or 2005, was meant to do a different kind of work. It was not about that which relates to the state of exception. I wanted to account for those trajectories in which making it almost impossible for certain categories of people to live, wars has always been the norm. It's not new, it has always been like that. The creation of landscapes of premature death, if you want. Racialized forms of power which operate in such a way as to make life unlivable as a matter of principle for certain categories of people, usually people who are racialized, who are assigned to the prison of race. So necropolitics, that is what it refers to. Then there are all these institutions and dispositives and apparatuses that function precisely along those lines to produce, to make it, make life unlivable environments and inhabitable and hospitable. And the argument I was then making a little later with critique of black reason was that these forms of rule which used to be applied to blacks, they are now being generalized, they are now being applied to more than blacks. And I was calling it the becoming black of the world in the sense that racialized forms of rule were no longer just the privilege in very ironic sense of us. Now we share it with more than us. And that's how I was describing let's say the racial kernel of neoliberalism. Now you asked a huge question, how do we get out of this? Of course, I mean you don't expect me to say in one or two minutes. No, no, I was especially interested in by you quoting many times Africa as a continent of the future together with Elin Sartu. So this is a perspective, this is especially interesting for me. Yes. It's like if there is a story where Europe brought us in and Africa can lead us out. So let me put it like this. You know, I was trying to take seriously the fact that when I was born here in Africa, studied abroad, worked abroad, came back, I mean I go back and forth, I have a little bit sense of what our world looks like. But I'm based here. And I travel a lot in the continent. There are two things I find absolutely striking whenever I travel in Africa. The first thing is that whenever you arrive, you land in one or the other of the big cities of the continent. I mean Lagos, we are told it's 20 million people. So it's not a small town. It's not a city like in Europe. It's an entirely different form of cityness if you want, 20 million people. You land in Kinshasa in the Congo, millions of people. You go to Abidjan in Côte d'Ivoire, millions or Dakar at the same time. Whenever or Nairobi for that matter or even here in Johannesburg, which is one of the biggest modern urban forms in this continent, the number of people who are busy repairing something is absolutely astonishing. So it's a massive fact of everyday life. And for sure something must be going on in these constant permanent acts of repair or if you want of reparation. Some forms of knowledge must be invented in the process through which people are constantly trying to put back together that which has been broken, whether intentionally or not. And it strikes me the extent to which the earth, our planet is in need of repair, of care and of maintenance. So the intuition is that for sure there must be something to draw from these sets of practices which are also forms of knowledge, which are also the building block for some other form of politics, of the political. So it's an intuition. The second thing which strikes me speaking from here, living here, traveling throughout the continent is the extent to which Africa is, let me just call it, a power in reserve, une réserve de puissance in French. It is both une puissance en réserve and une réserve de puissance, the two things together. And a lot of this is to be found in the forms of inhabitation of the world. We have developed over many, many centuries because we tend to forget that, I mean the human, it's here that the human was born. L'Afrique est le pays natal de l'humanité. I don't know how to translate it in English. And if indeed we are le pays natal de l'humanité, for sure, this means something. It means we are the oldest forms of the human are to be found here. And yet the youngest forms of the human too. That by the end of this century, the biggest number of young people on earth will be found here. So it's a set of elements like that, which in fact we have been working with in the Atelier de la Pancée, you mentioned it in Dakar, which we think should be becoming in any case the object of our critical thinking. And that's what is our obsession. It's not, I mean, putting different memories on a scale, on hierarchy, in order to say what form of memory is more important. It has nothing to do with that. It has to do with the futures of life, the futures of reason, if you want, in a planet that is in dire need of repair. That has been the obsession. And that's the project, the intellectual, political as well as artistic project we are invested in. What do you mean political and as well artistic project? Because both ways seem quite difficult to me. You describe in all your work a world in the hands of transnational players, like big, for example, raw material firms in the Congo. We will have the next School of Resistance about this. And for me, the big question is how is resistance possible? How can we get again, for example, possessors of the earth? How can we be connected to it again? When you see, for example, in the eastern of the Congo, you have whole parts of the country that are even not in the hands of the Congolese government, but for example, Glencore or the big mining companies. So we are confronted to an antagonism, to a structure of a world which makes acting very, very difficult. Do you understand what I mean? So how can you develop this kind of problem to come from this political or artistic or intellectual project to direct action? Part of what I see when I travel the continent is the extent to which the forces that you are referring to, and they are extremely powerful. I mean, we cannot fool ourselves. These are not only local forces, it's the combination of local forces and transnational forces, which have a hold on territories, they have a hold on what is on the surface of these territories, but also on what is underground, the minerals, most of which are critical for the, let's say, the daily life of the kind of capitalist system we live in. So these are extremely powerful forces. These are also deadly forces in the sense that they do not hesitate to kill, to kill nature, to kill individuals, to brutalize the poor and the weakest in particular. But these are also forces, forces of extraction and predation, predatory, extractive. These are also forces which operate in such a way as to creeper the imagination, to paralyze the capacity, all kinds of capacities, beginning with the capacity what my friend Arjun Apadurai has called the capacity to aspire. So if one is interested in a long-term struggle to regenerate life in all its forms, one starting point is to make sure that we recover some of those capacities, beginning with the capacity to aspire, to imagine something else, that life can be organized in an entirely different manner, beginning with life in small communities. So the question is, where do you go looking for those models? In what kind of archives? Archives in as a concept, in the big sense of the term. And that's where you, in fact, there is so much in the African archive. Very few of it has been, let's say, put to work or put to use in every sense of the term. In terms of, for instance, the natural life of a forest, for instance, in terms of water, in terms of the air we breathe, in terms of the atmospheres, the knowledge about all of that, the immense treasure, which is, so how do we recover that those repressed all knowledges, all those knowledges that have been somewhat forgotten? How do we reconstitute them and disseminate them, make of them, let's say, an object of wide shape? And to what extent is it that this forces us to rethink what critical thinking is all about? So it's a set of actions or gestures or positions like that in which a number of us are involved in. And one can see how little by little, people who are in a state of despair begin to believe in themselves and in their own capacity is to enact gestures that help to protect life and to bring to an end, let's say, what are called premature death. We have now two questions from the public. Everybody's invited to ask questions through Facebook or the email address you saw in the beginning. So one is a quite interesting question we are discussing now in Europe in some years and lead up to some new laws, the question of the reparation and giving back stolen art during colonialism. So the archives, the museums, that they should be opened as well, common friend is, for example, very strongly in it. And I think we signed a letter a year ago before COVID about this question. So what do you think about this? Because there are of course two positions, one position that say, okay, let's give it back all. It's stolen art and another position who could claim somehow museums are spaces that are outside, are universalistic and are outside this logic of capitalism. So what's your point about it? I think that restitution is unavoidable. It has to happen. It has to happen, although we know very well that what we lost during the encounter with the West is priceless. What the West took away from us, the West will never be able to give it back because the losses we suffered by definition incalculable. Even if the West wanted to pay back, it wouldn't be able to because the value of what it took, what it destroyed, cannot be counted. So for me, the question then is how will we learn to live with that radical loss? That we are somewhat forced to live with it, although we don't choose to live with it. But we'll have to live with it. And in return, the West will owe us a debt of truth. What strikes me the most with here I'm talking about the West as if such a thing existed. But since it's the vocabulary, everybody seems to understand, okay, let's use it at least provisionally. What strikes me the most is the inability to honor the truth, especially when it comes to people the West has defeated. It doesn't believe that it owes the truth to those who have lost in a battle. So if we want to and I think that that is the reason why to answer the question that was on the title of our conversation, that's the reason why basically it is not open to other forms of quote unquote universalisms. And yet we are reaching very fast a face of the history of the humans on earth requires an entirely different, let's say politics. And that entirely different form of the political for it to open up a future for all will have to be premised on reparation. It's a responsibility, obligation to repair that which we have broken. I think the West to use this concept of France or Germany, they are afraid to restitute art, for example, because it would open a long chain of, you know, like remaking the past and remaking the radical loss, which is which is somehow impossible. And that's I think the big part of the paranoia of the West. And another part in my opinion is that they are afraid of a non European universalism or of a universalism that includes Europe, but where Europe is only a province. And I have a quite interesting question, a long one, I will read it out from the from the from the chat from the public. The question is the notion of planetary consciousness is quite interesting. I wonder about the role of racialization when it comes to this non Western universalism. Would you say that it is necessary to overcome race in order to think on a non Western universalism. And then adding, I'm saying this because for instance, when it comes to indigenous cultures in America, what assigned some kind of political agencies precisely the exacerbation of a form of radical of racial identity, which seems to see to be one of the traps of neoliberalism. You understand this question, I could express it. Well, okay. I mean, I think I think I understand. Yes. And I will be forgiven. I'm sure. You see, there was a okay, let me let one one quick thing about this concept of planetary consciousness. I think it's much more let's see, productive than the concept of universalism. And I when we started talking, I put forward a kind of quick critique of universalism. And I opposed it to an idea coming from our colleagues from Latin America, which has to do with what they call pluriversalism, which means the multiplicity of forms of so they understand. But even the concept of pluriversalism, I'm not sure that I'm fully satisfied with it. I prefer the idea of the planetary or to put it even more directly, the idea of the earthly earthly, that which is of the earth, that which originates from the earth, and that which ultimately is restituted to the earth. So this double movement of origination and restitution, that which ends up whether it lacks it or not, ultimately ends up returning to the earth. It seems to me that that's the moment we are in, the moment of the earth, the the moment when the earth occupies center stage in a historical project or process, that is not only social in Ilong, as Dipesh Shakrabarti has shown. It is still social but not only. It is geological because now social history can be separated from geological history. It is cosmological in the sense that we have now entered a laboratory moment when everything reverberates against everything else. So we are far beyond the universal, strictly understood. So it's along that direction that I would like to, let's see, not respond to the question that was posed but reflect with the person who asked it. So now if indeed the injunction is an earthly injunction, if our condition, we finally recognize that it is an earthly condition, we imagine these vexing question of identities. What form of identities? We don't have the time to go through every single details but I am afraid that under neoliberalism identity might have become the new opium of the people. But that's a polemical statement which might land me once again into trouble. In which case I'll come immediately to you to save me from the narcissism of identities. I will never save you from that. There is one more and I think one last question as we have slowly to close this wonderful debate. What do you see as the source of the West's underlying fear of reparations and by proxy the public recognition of shared past in more than a superficial gesture. So why can't we transform competitive memory to a kind of a pluralistic memory politics? Why is this so difficult? I mean to come back also to the beginning of our debate, why people want to compare these violence to that violence, why not accept that they both exist in their horrible brutality. Milo, if only I knew you would be the first person I would share it with. But absolutely I have no clue. I don't know at all. But I know one thing. I know that the right to memory is a right we have to hold on to and I put it in those terms. I put it in terms of a right to memory because I come from a people whose memory has been in a number of instances erased. I put it in terms of the rights to memory because the fact of memory is one of the ways in which we become human. It is one of the modalities through which we turn the world into a habitable place, a place that is open, a place of refuge for everybody. So that right to memory has to be extended to everybody. That's something I know and I know it from our experience of colonialism and slavery and what comes after. A second thing I know which comes from that history is the fact that we need to share memories, let's say traumatic memories, defeated memories. There is a way to share them and sharing them does not at all mean putting them on a scale with some on top others at the bottom in a hierarchical and form a kind of zero-sum game. There's no zero-sum game in terms of those memories of human suffering. So the point third is that if we want to go forward, if we want to move forward, we'll have to somewhat, some way, somewhere imagine forms of solidarity between all memories of human suffering. That's how we will build a world that is habitable, where everyone has a place, not the kind of world which is the dominant one, where the moment I have a place, the result is you're being expelled, evicted and so forth and so on. And we need people to work in that direction. Otherwise, I don't know what will happen. In any case, many of us won't even be there any longer. Thank you, Ashil, for this wonderful end. And thank you to the public for the questions. I couldn't ask all of them, but I think we had yeah, we came beginning with the question of the Ashil and Bimba Affair to the more generous thoughts back to it, somehow perhaps even to a glimpse of a possible solution of a possible dialogue. So thank you so much to having accepted our invitation and for your thoughts, Ashil. And the next School of Resistance has the title, A Global Touristiction for a Global Economy, and we'll host the lawyer and vice-legal director of the European Center of Constitutional and Human Rights Miriam Sage Maas from Germany and the lawyer and chief investigator of the Congo Tribunal, Sylvester Bimba, to speak about global economic justice, especially in regard to the mining industry in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. So a logic next step in our discussion, I think. So thank you again, Ashil, for having shared your thoughts with us. Thanks. And thanks to all our co-producers, especially the helpers. Thanks.


Hello everybody, welcome back to another tutorial. In this one, we're in Photopia and I'm gonna show you how to create a gift for free with this online image editor. It's free, it's free, it's very important. Okay, you'll see I've got one here and this is with multiple images. So these are the images and I've got them in a gift format. Let's go over to a new instance. I'm gonna create one from scratch for you. Let's go to new project and then the next step is I'm gonna click on this size. I want 1920 by 1080 because that's a standard YouTube thumbnail size. Also, I'm gonna select a transparent background. Very, very important. If you don't have a custom background and you're not animating your gift against a background, select transparent because that way you don't get the white pixels coming out when you render it. Okay, now click create. Oh my goodness, use your words. And presto, we've got ourself background. Now I'm gonna unclick that, so unlock it. I'm gonna go to my finder and I'm gonna grab an image. Let's go ahead and grab, maybe we'll use these cool sunglasses. What do you think? Yeah, let's put the sunglasses in. All right, drag and drop these baller sunglasses in and then I'm just gonna make it a little bit bigger. And I want these sunglasses to move, right? Okay, cool. So I'm just gonna move that here. Now the first step is I wanna make multiple copies of this. So I want to go ahead, I'm gonna click on this and then watch, I'm gonna drag and drop it onto this new layer icon here at the bottom. And I'll just hover it here for you so you can see it. It's this one here, new layer. I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna make three copies of this, although you could make a hundred copies and make a gift with that if you wanted to. I just wanna show you the technique. Now, very, very important. This is the crucial part. Double click on the layer and at the beginning you gotta put in underscore A underscore. It's very, very important. Underscore A underscore is the way to tell Photopeia that this is a gift. This is basically the naming convention that they came up with. So underscore A underscore. And then we'll do it for the third and final layer.  Okay, good. So we've got three now all labeled correctly. And if I pulled this out, you'll see here that it's three copy, two copy, one. Doesn't matter. Okay, so the first one, I'm gonna click on that and that's in the correct position where I want it. The second one, I'm gonna go ahead and click on that layer. And I'm gonna move it. I'm gonna move it somewhere right about here. Sure. The third one, it's here as well because they were all duplicated the same spot. I'm gonna move to some place up here. So I basically got these three sunglasses going up kind of like up a staircase without the stairs. Okay, good. Now, head over to file, go to export as and export as is GIF and watch this. There we go. We've got a GIF, it's a little bit cut off at the edges but it downloads correctly. If this is too fast for you or too slow, you can dial the speed down like this. Now we've got a slower GIF and of course you can do the opposite and make it faster. Left click on save unless you wanna reverse the positions and boomerang it which generally you don't wanna do. Left click on save there and presto. It goes automatically, it's in my downloads right here and there it is. It's downloaded as new project GIF. That's all you need to know. Thanks for watching.