What I am Reading Now…
Titilayo Farukuoye
November 2025

In times like today’s, it is the power, strength and solidarity that is created by coming together to seek collective liberation with peers, workers, neighbours, queers, creatives, women + gender marginalised people and all those I am in community with, that keeps me going.

It’s this shared care and understanding that makes it possible to continuously show up, ask questions and struggle for justice and create a shared vision for a better world.

Every so often this feeling of shared solidarity is violently shattered by an often subtle gesture that demands space for an overwhelming and unkind question in my head: Why do so many people and communities get forgotten about? What allows you to care about this cause, but not the next?!

It seems that we are together, until we are not.

Anti-Blackness is one of the causes of this rupture. It jumps out like a curse ready to haunt even the best community group or initiative, taking whatever shape it pleases: a throw away comment, whether or not people turn up to a Black-led event or initiative, which atrocities are shared on social media, which are not, which activists are remembered, or forgotten, the amount of violence someone is met with, who is afforded grace, extra time and resources, who isn’t…

It is not out of bold malice (though sometimes it is!), but is merely an essential function of white supremacy, which relies on simple racial hierarchy to work: those closest to whiteness (through skin colour, hair and accent but equally so body type, culture, language, passport, nationality, education, upbringing, you name it) are prioritised.

What complicates this notion, is that we can’t all do everything, so prioritisation and targeted action is essential if we are to achieve anything at all (as exemplified by the BDS movement), however, this selectivity is a problem when African and African descendant people by default are de-prioritised.

We cannot wait for one people to liberate themselves before the next group gets their turn, not when we are in a global fight against racial capitalism and neocolonialism murdering so many of us daily, not when all of our struggles are connected –‘The truth is, no one of us is free until all of us are free’ – Maya Angelou.

In this spirit, though there are so many struggles to be in solidarity with, to act and boycott for, like the people of Sudan and Haiti, I have decided to share a few books and resources I have read and continue to engage with to focus on the plight for freedom and justice of the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo:

In the words of Pappy Orion, founder and chair, of humanitarian charity Focus Congo,

“The Genocide in Congo has never been silent. We have had Congolese people screaming, women, children screaming for their lives [..] Because this is happening on African soil to Black people, we all choose to ignore it. […] according to some of us Africans, Congolese people are meant to suffer… 

Millions of lives have perished, and yet we [global witnesses] keep on going, we are all accomplices, we know that, but we choose to ignore.

Congolese Lives Matter. Stand with Congo.”- Pappy Orion, founder of Focus Congo

Free Congo!