In A Time Not So Far Away

In In a Time Not so Far Away, an audiobook published with The Nawi Collective, author and narrator Agazit Abate traces a genealogy of community care, in which our values of social reciprocity have degenerated into schemes of proft extraction, resource privitization, and the political brutalization of civilian healthcare. Poetic and lyrical, Abate’s visions for an equitable future argues that systems of governance must recenter their priorities onto care regulation, compensation for marginalized bodies, equitable social servicing, and economic expansiveness. Abate asks us readers to mobilize our global histories of gendered, racial violence towards reconstructing a mutual harvest of communal care.

The Nawi Afrifem Macroeconomics Collective (The Nawi Collective) is a Care Economies in Context affiliated project partner for Africa.

Citation

Abate, A. (2026). In A Time Not So Far Away. https://nawi.africa/audio-visual-resources/in-a-time-not-so-far-away.

Excerpt

With the demand for all work to be compensated work, the laborers of love start talking about women’s unpaid care work. They talk about the time and energy and labor that it takes women to raise children, care for the sick, cook, clean, fetch water. The time and energy and labor that previously had not been recognized and compensated by society. The time and energy and labor that supported economies and ensured that societies function, however poorly.

They start talking about women’s unpaid care work and they begin to imagine a shift towards care; they imagine care prioritized, respected and compensated. Care had an inherent currency in the time of the first people and now the people begin to believe that the same can be true in this time. And like anything of
value, they demand that care be compensated in the currencies recognized by society. It is a wild imagining and the most basic of demands.

The people hold on because now, the only way that they remember how to live is free.