Celebrating women’s history first came into effect with humble beginnings as one week in March 1978. The week has since evolved and, in 1987, became a monthlong, nationally recognized celebration in the United States that champions gender equality and the achievements of women throughout history. To kick off Women’s History Month, BLACK ENTERPRISE is spotlighting 20 influential Black women and acknowledging their extraordinary journey and the barriers they’ve broken along the way. These women have left their mark in a host of areas, from business and politics to the arts and activism. Their legacies have shaped society and inspired progress.
by LUIZ INACIO LULA Da SILVA, CYRIL RAMAPHOSA, & PEDRO SANCHEZ
Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez pose for a group photo with other world leaders at the G20 summit, in Rio de Janeiro on November 18, 2024 IMAGE/Ricardo Moraes/Reuters
Amid creeping unilateralism, the world must reinforce multilateral action to tackle global threats, such as climate change and inequality.
The year 2025 will be pivotal for multilateralism. The challenges
before us — rising inequalities, climate change, and the financing gap
for sustainable development — are urgent and interconnected. Addressing
them requires bold, coordinated action — not a retreat into isolation,
unilateral actions, or disruption.
Three major global gatherings offer a unique opportunity to chart a path towards a more just, inclusive and sustainable world: the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4) in Seville (Spain), the 30th Conference of the Parties (COP30) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Belém (Brazil) and the G20 Summit in Johannesburg (South Africa). These meetings must not be business as usual: they must deliver real progress.
A multilateral moment we cannot waste
Trust in multilateral institutions is under strain, yet the need for dialogue and global cooperation has never been greater. We must reaffirm that multilateralism, when ambitious and action-oriented, remains the most effective vehicle for addressing shared challenges and advancing common interests.
We must build on the successes of multilateralism, in particular the
2030 Agenda and the Paris Agreement. The FfD4, COP30 and G20 must serve
as milestones in a renewed commitment to inclusiveness, sustainable
development, and shared prosperity. This will require strong political
will, the full participation of all relevant stakeholders, a creative
mindset and the ability to understand the constraints and priorities of
all economies.
Tackling inequality through a renewed financial architecture
Income inequality is widening—both within and between nations. Many
developing countries struggle under unsustainable debt burdens,
constrained fiscal space, and barriers to fair access to capital. Basic
services such as health or education must compete with growing interest
rates.
This is not just a moral failing; it is an economic risk for all. The
global financial architecture must be reformed to provide countries in
the Global South with greater voice and representation and fairer and
more predictable access to resources.
A finely crafted jar offers a glimpse into the daily life & craftsmanship of the Indus Valley Civilisation
The Perforated Jar of Harappa is a remarkable artefact that
offers insight into the cultural advancements of its time. A baffling
yet fascinating discovery, it unveils another layer of mystery — this
time related to an unusual aspect of diet culture. This terracotta jar,
dating back to approximately 2500 BCE, was found in Harappa, Punjab,
Pakistan. Measuring 15.9 cm in height and 6.9 cm in width, it is
currently displayed at the National Museum in New Delhi, India.
The mouth of the perforated cylindrical jar is partially
shattered, likely due to wear and tear over time. Its base is flat, with
a single hole in the centre. Harappan pottery was predominantly made
from fired clay, known for its durability and intricate designs.
Typically adorned with black motifs over a vibrant crimson slip, these
pottery pieces ranged from simple horizontal lines to complex geometric
patterns, pictorial embellishments, and even perforations, showcasing
the artistic and technical sophistication of the Harappan civilisation.
Dr. J.M. Kenoyer, one of the world’s foremost experts on
the ancient Indus civilisation and Professor of Anthropology at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been excavating at Harappa since
1986. In his well-known book Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley
Civilisation, he writes “this shape of perforated jar may have been used
as a strainer at the end of a hollow straw, similar to those used in
Mesopotamia for drilling beer from a large jar filled with some kind of
mash. Larger perforated jars at Harappa and other sites were set inside
jars, possibly for making beer or for processing milk to make cheese.
Wheel thrown and holes punched through from the outside.”
Further research of Dr. Kenoyer suggests that the
perforated cylindrical jar maybe wrapped in cloth and used as a strainer
for the fermentation of liquids. “These vessels have been discovered
with burial offerings in the Harappan cemetery, where they are
vertically inside big open-mouthed vessels most likely filled with
fermenting mash, most likely barley.” The many openings in the cloth on
the outside would let the liquor strain through and gather in the
central hollow space, then be expelled using long straws or a dipper.
While investigations of the sediments within these
perforated vessels have not revealed the type of beverage being brewed,
Dr. Kenoyer notes that continuous research of the porous pottery itself
may recover some remnants of organic components to assist identify the
contents of the jar.
Dr. Akshyeta Narayanan is currently a Gerald Averay
Wainwright Postdoctoral Fellow (2023–2026) at the Faculty of Asian and
Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford, though she is based at the
McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research in Cambridge. Her
research focuses on archaeological vessel use, foodways and exchange
networks, with a particular interest in the subsistence strategies and
interaction networks of the Indus Valley Civilisation. While analysing a
larger sample of perforated jar fragments, she has found evidence
suggesting that these jars may have served multiple purposes.
Kalyan Sekhar Chakraborty et. al, Department of
Anthropology, University of Toronto, Mississauga, ON, Canada in the
recent study on analysis of one fragmentary perforated jar suggests
possible use for dairy processing.
Faiz Ahmand Faiz in 1983. IMAGE/Amarjit Chandan/CC BY-SA 4.0
The Urdu poet was born on February 13, 1911 in Sialkot of undivided India.
Exclusion, ostracism, imprisonment and other variations of
imaginable/unimaginable infliction seem to be the universal fate of
great minds and souls and those who stand for truth. History has been
unkind to its heroes and has chased them to death. As we trace this
trajectory, we see Socrates holding his hemlock, Jesus carrying his
cross, Hallaj fleshed alive, Meera tortured, Sarmad beheaded. Their
truth displeased their contemporaries and upset the societies they lived
in. “Truth is an explosive, in whose presence everything is in danger”,
remarked Nietzsche. No wonder that power and societies have always been
afraid of truth and pushed it to margins, lest it usurp the tyranny and
brings down “the earthly Gods” from their raised pedestals. The
phenomenon that Faiz would depict as:
“When, from the seat of the Almighty every pedestal will lie displaced…”— translated by Victor Kiernan
Art and truth have been eternal twins and art has been
seen as the expression of truth in its most unalloyed form. That is why
artists have been haunted by the power and made to suffer on one pretext
or the other. Poetry, the sublime artistic expression is the most
potent and radical way of articulating the truth. Poets have mostly
stood on the wrong side of the power and took upon themselves the task
of making the truth known. Faiz Ahmad Faiz is a poet of this family, the
family of which Persian poet Nazeeri Nishapuri said, “The one who is
not killed is not from our tribe”.
Poetry of passion
Faiz,
born to a well-to-do and literature-loving family had a knack for
poetry and had devoured a vast share of Persian, Urdu and English
classics while he was still a teenager. Teachers like Moulvi Mir Hassan
and Sufi Ghulam Mustafa Tabasum had tuned his poetic strings while he
was a student at Government College Lahore. However, his revolutionary
spirit was asleep and the poetry of defiance, which later characterised
his style, was yet to flow from his pen. Besides his evolving poetic
sensitivities, his mind and soul were open to the developments taking
place at home and in the world and he was deeply disturbed by events
such as the growing economic disparity among people, the rapid spread of
fascism and the systemic intrusion of capitalism into the lives of
masses world over.
However, this was just a feeling at this stage and had not assumed the character of a well-found ideology in Faiz’s mindscape.
Ever
since the discovery of Indus valley civilization, scholars have debated
the linguistic identities of its people. This study analyzes numerous
archaeological, linguistic, archaeogenetic and historical evidences to
claim that the words used for elephant (like, ‘p?ri’, ‘p?ru’) in Bronze
Age Mesopotamia, the elephant-word used in the Hurrian part of an Amarna
letter of ca. 1400 BC, and the ivory-word (‘pîruš’) recorded in certain
sixth century BC Old Persian documents, were all originally borrowed
from ‘p?lu’, a Proto-Dravidian elephant-word, which was prevalent in the
Indus valley civilization, and was etymologically related to the
Proto-Dravidian tooth-word ‘*pal’ and its alternate forms
(‘*p?l’/‘*pi?’/‘*pel’). This paper argues that there is sufficient
morphophonemic evidence of an ancient Dravidian ‘*pi?’/‘*p?l’-based
root, which meant ‘splitting/crushing’, and was semantically related to
the meanings ‘tooth/tusk’. This paper further observes that ‘p?lu’ is
among the most ancient and common phytonyms of the toothbrush tree Salvadora persica,
which is a characteristic flora of Indus valley, and whose roots and
twigs have been widely used as toothbrush in IVC regions since
antiquity. This study claims that this phytonym ‘p?lu’ had also
originated from the same Proto-Dravidian tooth-word, and argues that
since IVC people had named their toothbrush trees and tuskers
(elephants) using a Proto-Dravidian tooth-word, and since these names
were widely used across IVC regions, a significant population of Indus
valley civilization must have used that Proto-Dravidian tooth-word in
their daily communication. Since ‘tooth’ belongs to the core
non-borrowable ultraconserved vocabulary of a speech community, its
corollary is that a significant population of IVC spoke certain
ancestral Dravidian languages. Important insights from recent
archaeogenetic studies regarding possible migration of Proto-Dravidian
speakers from Indus valley to South India also corroborate the findings
of this paper.
Introduction
Indus valley civilization (IVC) and its linguistic diversity
IVC,
stretching across almost one million square kilometres of Pakistan,
Afghanistan, and the North-Western part of India (Kenoyer, 2010),
was the most expansive of chalcolithic civilizations. Right from the
discovery of IVC and its enigmatic script, several scholars have tried
to trace the types of languages spoken in IVC. Types of languages
presently spoken in the IVC regions are: Indo-Aryan (e.g., Punjabi in
Punjab with dialects Siraiki and Lahnda, Sindhi in Sindh, Hindi,
Marwari, Gujarati in eastern parts of Greater Indus Valley); Dardic
(e.g., Shina, Khowar, Kohistani); Iranian (e.g., Baluchi, Dari, Pashto,
and Wakhi in western parts of Greater Indus Valley); Nuristani in
northeastern Afghanistan; Dravidian; Brahui (spoken in Baluchistan and
Sindh); and Burushaski (a language isolate) spoken in northernmost
Pakistan close to the Chinese border (Parpola, 2015, pp. 163–164).
Since
the ancient world was generally more multilinguistic (12,000–20,000
languages existed before spread of agriculture, compared to some 7000
human languages of present times) (Pagel, 2009),
ancient IVC too arguably hosted more languages than today. This makes
it unlikely that all the languages spoken in its 1,00,0000
square-kilometre expanse belonged to only one linguistic group, whether
Proto-Indo-Aryan, Proto-Dravidian or Proto-Austroasiatic. Languages of
various groups, including some presently extinct languages (Masica, 1979), might have coexisted in IVC for ages, influencing and shaping one another.
The perennial puzzle regarding IVC languages: how archaeologists, linguists, historians and genetic anthropologists approach the problem
Arguments from archaeology and linguistics
Incommoded
by the absence of any deciphered written record composed in IVC (Indus
script is still undeciphered), scholars hold vastly different opinions
regarding types of languages spoken in IVC. Once an advocate of the idea
of a ‘Para-Munda’ (not ‘Proto-Munda’) speaking IVC (Witzel, 1999, 2000, 2009),
Witzel, presently prefers keeping the question of ‘original’ Indian
language(s) ‘open’, till better reconstructions of Dravidian and Munda
languages, and investigation of substrate words of ancient indigenous
languages present in North-Indian Indo-Aryan languages are done (Witzel,
2019). While many linguists (Parpola, 2015; Driem, 1999; Osada, 2006) have opposed the Austroasiatic-related hypotheses regarding IVC’s languages, Southworth (2004,
pp. 325–328) shares Witzel’s ‘Para-Munda’ theory, despite vigorously
advancing the idea of prehistoric Dravidian influence on various
languages presently spoken in IVC regions (e.g., Sindh, Gujarat,
Maharashtra). Although some scholars claim that IVC language(s) belonged
to some Proto-Indo-Aryan/Early-Indo-European language group (Renfrew, 1987, pp. 185–208; Rao, 1982), many others (e.g., Krishnamurti, 2003, p. 501; Parpola, 1994) defend a Proto-Dravidian speaking IVC. Parpola (1988, 1994, 2015)
proposes Proto-Dravidian etymologies of suspect substrate words (e.g.,
kiy?mbu, ?aka?am, o?, kinnara) present in Vedic texts, and certain
suspect Indic words found in Mesopotamian texts (the ‘magilum’ boats of
Meluhha); suggests that some of the fish-like signs of Indus script
represented the Dravidian fish-word ‘mina’, to spell out certain
Dravidian theophoric astral names prevalent in IVC; and adduces
additional anthropological and ethnographic proofs of Dravidian
influence, including Dravidian kinship and cross-cousin marriage rules
practiced in the presently Indo-Aryan speaking societies of IVC regions
(e.g. Gujarat). Though the prehistoric existence of ‘Language X’, an
unknown primordial language not of proto-Indo-Aryan, Proto-Dravidian, or
Proto-Munda type, was suggested by Masica’s (1979) analysis of various agricultural terms prevalent in some North-Indian languages, Masica (1991,
p. 40) has later commented that the Dravidian stock is “a strong but as
yet unproven contender for the languages of the Harappans”.
Taking advantage of the chaos following Damascus’s fall, Israel’s seizure of Syria’s Al-Mantara Dam showcases the long-standing Zionist strategy to secure regional water dominance, exacerbating tensions across an already parched West Asia.
At the
beginning of January, less than a month after rebel forces seized
Damascus and toppled the Syrian government, Israeli occupation forces
launched an unchallenged advance extending to the vicinity of the Al-Mantara Dam – a critical water source for Deraa and the largest dam in the region, located in the western countryside of Quneitra.
Reports
indicate that Israeli tanks and troops established military outposts,
erected earth mounds, and imposed stringent restrictions on local
movement, allowing access only during specific, pre-determined times.
Geopolitics of water
Natural resources have always played a pivotal role in shaping geopolitics, and among them, freshwater
sources have become increasingly contested. While oil and gas dominate
global headlines, the indispensable role of water in agriculture,
industry, and daily life makes it an equally critical factor in global
stability.
As freshwater
resources grow scarcer, the risk of conflict over this precious resource
escalates, threatening economic development and social stability.
Historically,
nations have vied for control over water-rich territories to secure
trade routes, forge alliances, and drive technological advances. Ancient
civilizations in the Cradle of Civilization, like the Sumerians and
Babylonians, flourished by harnessing the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
In contrast, resource-poor regions often lagged in development, limiting
their political and technological progress.
Today,
water scarcity continues to shape regional political strategies. The
Nile River Basin serves as a notable example, where Egypt, Sudan, and
Ethiopia are locked in a dispute over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance
Dam (GERD).
This project,
Africa’s largest hydropower initiative, has heightened diplomatic
tensions with Egypt, which relies on the Nile for 90 percent of its fresh water.
The West Asia and North Africa (WANA) region faces unparalleled water scarcity, with 83 percent of its population under extreme water stress. According to the World Resources Institute,
12 of the 17 most water-stressed countries globally are located in this
region, with Qatar, Israel, and Lebanon ranking as the top three.
Additionally, about 40 percent
of the global population depends on rivers that cross international
borders, making transboundary water management a critical geopolitical
challenge. The recent Israeli incursion at the Al-Mantara Dam starkly
illustrates this reality.
Global water demand is projected to rise by 20–25 percent by 2050,
placing immense pressure on regions like WANA. By mid-century, 100
percent of the region’s population could face extreme water stress,
further destabilizing political relationships and heightening the risk
of inter-state conflicts over shared water resources.
Such tensions are already apparent in Israel and Syria, where control over vital water sources has become a flashpoint.
Lantian “Jay” Graber (left), CEO of Bluesky, a microblogging social platform. The picture on the right has Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, IMAGE/The Express Tribune
Meta’s Zuckerberg is mesmerized by the founder of the Roman Empire
Emperor Augustus Caesar (also Octavian) (63 BCE–14 CE) (27 BCE-14 CE)
Mark Zuckerberg & his wife Chan went to Rome for their honeymoon
“My wife was making fun of me, saying she thought there were three people on the honeymoon: me, her, and Augustus. All the photos were different sculptures of Augustus.”
(they have named their daughter August)
talking to Evan Osnos of The New Yorker, Facebook’s Zuckerberg said
“You have all these good and bad and complex figures. I think Augustus is one of the most fascinating. Basically, through a really harsh approach, he established two hundred years of world peace.”
Angela Davis (with eye glasses), James Baldwin, and Nicole Dennis-Benn IMAGE/Gay Community News
James Baldwin on white madness–and Black resistance.
In An Open Letter to My Sister Angela Y. Davis , James Baldwin gave us a haunting vision of fascism’s creeping death march. Published in the New York Review of Books
in January 1971, the letter was written on November 18, 1970, about a
month after Davis was captured by the FBI. The letter was Baldwin’s
disturbed response, in part, to a photograph of Davis on the cover of Newsweek
following her capture: she appeared handcuffed and manacled, chained.
It was an image that brought Baldwin back to an earlier period in US
history, a period that Baldwin realized was still very much alive in the
present – especially for United States whites.
Indeed,
Baldwin’s letter castigates US whites for taking “refuge in their
whiteness,” and allowing their leaders to imprison thousands and
slaughter millions on the way to all-out race war. Baldwin’s present is
our own. We are living through an intensified wave of white madness
and now, as then, many white folk have chosen silence, or active class
collaboration in the name of the white race. Yet the white supremacist
chickens will come home to roost: Baldwin warned that the “fate intended
for you, Sister Angela…is a fate which is about to engulf them, too,”
and that these whites “will perish…in their delusions.”
But
Baldwin’s letter is also a public offering of solidarity for a younger
generation of US Blacks – like Davis, like George and Jonathan Jackson,
like many others – attempting to carry forward the struggles of older
generations against white supremacist savagery.
As an
elder, Baldwin offered these words of support: “we must fight for your
life as though it were our own — which it is — and render impassable
with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you
in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.”
Baldwin’s
ultimate message, Black people, is this: “We cannot awaken this
sleeper, and God knows we have tried. We must do what we can do, and
fortify and save each other…”
We reprint Baldwin’s letter below.
An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Y. Davis
James Baldwin
Dear Sister:
One might
have hoped that, by this hour, the very sight of chains on Black flesh,
or the very sight of chains, would be so intolerable a sight for the
American people, and so unbearable a memory, that they would themselves
spontaneously rise up and strike off the manacles. But, no, they appear
to glory in their chains; now, more than ever, they appear to measure
their safety in chains and corpses. And so, Newsweek, civilized defender
of the indefensible, attempts to drown you in a sea of crocodile tears
(“it remained to be seen what sort of personal liberation she had
achieved”) and puts you on its cover, chained.
You look
exceedingly alone—as alone, say, as the Jewish housewife in the boxcar
headed for Dachau, or as any one of our ancestors, chained together in
the name of Jesus, headed for a Christian land.
Well.
Since we live in an age which silence is not only criminal but suicidal,
I have been making as much noise as I can, here in Europe, on radio and
television—in fact, have just returned from a land, Germany, which was
made notorious by a silent majority not so very long ago. I was asked to
speak on the case of Miss Angela Davis, and did so. Very probably an
exerciser in futility, but one must let no opportunity slide.
I am
something like twenty years older than you, of that generation,
therefore, of which George Jackson ventures that “there are no healthy
brothers—none at all.” I am in no way equipped to dispute this
speculation (not, anyway, without descending into what, at the moment,
would be irrelevant subtleties) for I know too well what he means. My
own state of health is certainly precarious enough. In considering you,
and Huey, and George and (especially) Jonathan Jackson, I began to
apprehend what you may have had in mind when you spoke of the uses to
which we could put the experience of the slave. What has happened, it
seems to me, and to put it far too simply, is that a whole new
generation of people have assessed and absorbed their history, and, in
that tremendous action, have freed themselves of it and will never be
victims again. This may seem an odd, indefensibly pertinent and
insensitive thing to say to a sister in prison, battling for her
life—for all our lives. Yet, I dare to say it, for I think you will
perhaps not misunderstand me, and I do not say it, after all, from the
position of spectator.
I am
trying to suggest that you—for example—do not appear to be your father’s
daughter in the same way that I am my father’s son. At bottom, my
father’s expectations and mine were the same, the expectations of his
generation and mine were the same; and neither the immense difference in
our ages nor the move from the South to the North could alter these
expectations or make our lives more viable. For, in fact, to use the
brutal parlance of that hour, the interior language of despair, he was
just a n—–—a n—– laborer preacher, and so was I. I jumped the
track but that’s of no more importance here, in itself, than the fact
that some poor Spaniards become rich bull fighters, or that some poor
Black boys become rich—boxers, for example. That’s rarely, if ever,
afforded the people more than a great emotional catharsis, though I
don’t mean to be condescending about that, either. But when Cassius Clay
became Muhammad Ali and refused to put on that uniform (and sacrificed
all that money!) a very different impact was made on the people and a
very different kind of instruction had begun.
The
American triumph—in which the American tragedy has always been
implicit—was to make Black people despise themselves. When I was little I
despised myself; I did not know any better. And this meant, albeit
unconsciously, or against my will, or in great pain, that I also
despised my father. And my mother. And my brothers. And my sisters.
Black people were killing each other every Saturday night out on Lenox
Avenue, when I was growing up; and no one explained to them, or to me,
that it was intended that they should; that they were penned where they
were, like animals, in order that they should consider themselves no
better than animals. Everything supported this sense of reality, nothing
denied it: and so one was ready, when it came time to go to work, to be
treated as a slave. So one was ready, when human terrors came, to bow
before a white God and beg Jesus for salvation—this same white God who
was unable to raise a finger to do so little as to help you pay your
rent, unable to be awakened in time to help you save your child!
There is
always, of course, more to any picture than can speedily be perceived
and in all of this—groaning and moaning, watching, calculating,
clowning, surviving, and outwitting, some tremendous strength was
nevertheless being forged, which is part of our legacy today. But that
particular aspect of our journey now begins to be behind us. The secret
is out: we are men!
But the blunt, open articulation of this secret has frightened the nation to death.
Planet Earth viewed from the cupola of the International Space Station. IMAGE/NASA/SpaceEnhanced/Alamy Stock Photo
The overly sterile environment of the International Space Station is missing important microbes, a new detailed map shows. If we want to live off Earth, we may need to take more of our bacterial friends with us
For almost a quarter-century, humans have continuously occupied what is arguably our most isolated habitat ever: the International Space Station, or ISS. Perched in the near vacuum of low-Earth orbit, it’s been home to some 270 people and a variety of animal guests—plus the microbes that hitched a ride to space on the bodies of those residents.
There these uninvited microbial guests have been evolving. Bacteria adapt to cosmic radiation with new ways to repair their DNA. Some become resistant to antibiotics and sterilizing agents or develop other changes that make them more likely to cause disease.
“This
is such an extreme environment,” says Rodolfo Salido, a bioengineer at
the University of California, San Diego. And the microbes that inhabit
it can directly affect astronaut health. To map the space station’s microbial world, Salido and his colleagues sent swabs up to space, where astronauts sampled hundreds of surfaces. Their resulting three-dimensional map of the ISS’s microbial diversity, published on Thursday in the journal Cell, shows
that this orbital habitat lacks many types of bacterial life that
humans normally encounter and that may be important for our well-being.
To stay healthy on future long-term off-world forays, the researchers suggest, we may need a little more help from our microbial friends.
“To
take care of us humans, we have to take care of our human microbes. And
that’s going to be a very interesting challenge” in space travel, says
Martin Blaser, a microbiologist at Rutgers University, who was not
involved in the new study.
In
December 2020 Salido and his colleagues collaborated with NASA’s Jet
Propulsion Laboratory to launch about 1,000 sterilized sampling devices
to the ISS. The team had redesigned the devices to work in space: as an
Earth-bound scientist, Salido had learned a lot from a visit to a
replica of the ISS in Houston, where astronaut Michael Barratt pointed
out that the researchers’ normal sampling swabs were far too large and
flammable to fly.
