"In this
period of frustration and disapointment, we must turn from negation to affirmation,
from the ever-lasting "No," to the ever lasting "Yes."
--W.E.B. Dubois,
The Crisis, June 1934
Who we Are
We are a collective of community members and university students in Durham, NC. We came together around a shared desire to live and act politically, and a common dissatisfaction with single- issue or charity-based interventions characteristic of NGO's and the mainstream left. We have spent several years together investigating alternative models for social change based in collective self-determination. At a moment when the globalized nature of the modern economy has exposed the tragic limitations of over-reliance on under-funded institutionalized welfare, we have been inspired by movements of autonomy to search for concrete projects that are environmentally and socially self-sustainable, responsive to the particular demands and desires of a community, and actively and radically democratic. We attempt to practice our politics by socializing our knowledge, creating spaces where we can form new social relations, and making decisions through collective assembly. We seek to strengthen the collective political struggle of working class and people of color communities in Durham, while simultaneously connecting our struggles with the global anti-capitalist movements.
What's in a Name?
What is a Kilombo? Kilombo is the Bantu (a native language spoken in parts of modern day Angola) word for an encampment. This word was taken up in the New World within the Portuguese sphere of influence to describe the societies of those African slaves and at times Indigenous peoples of the Americas that sought to end their enslavement through direct flight. This phenomena of runaway slave societies appeared throughout the Western Hemisphere: in Spanish colonies they were referred to as Palenques; in areas of French and British influence they were known as Maroon or Marron societies; and in areas of joint Spanish and French influence the inhabitants of these societies were referred to as Cimarrones [it has been suggested that these terms; Marron and Cimarron are derived either from the Spanish term Marrano which literally means swine but refers historically to the community of Spanish Jews; others claim it derives from the term Cimarron itself which has been thought to refer to those people that live in the “Cimas,” or mountain tops].
Regardless of the etymological derivations of these words, what has attracted us to this word is the phenomena that called it into existence—slave flight. It is our contention that these runaway slave societies have a lot to teach all of us in our contemporary context. It is these runaways that first understood that it was their sweat and blood that made the “modern world” possible and that it was this same sweat and blood that could bring another such world into existence. It was thus these runaways that were able to demonstrate that liberation is not built through a life and death struggle against the slave-master, but rather through a life and death struggle for the construction of another life, another formation of daily habit, rituals, and beliefs that would in practice make the slave-master function obsolete. In this respect it may be true, as many scholars have observed, that the modern notion of guerrilla warfare is in many respects directly indebted to these runaways and the military resistance they exerted against their would-be captors. But in this sense our insight must go further in order to understand, as did our Maroon predecessors, that an EFFECTIVE WARFARE against our captors is the one we wage on a daily basis with our hands and tools to create what has yet to be, and not the one limited to tanks, guns, and bullets directed at the destruction of what has already been. Make no mistake, it is warfare nonetheless!
Finally, we have been very conscious of our usage of this term, and we would like to make clear that it is not a metaphorical borrowing, it is a necessary acknowledgment of a gift handed down to us by courageous Afrikans and Indigenous peoples, and a commitment to both flight and the trans- and inter-racial character of the original Kilombos.