Connecting people and voices for radical change in Africa

Abstract

In this new section of the journal, we aim to give readers of the print journal a picture of what’s been published on Roape.net over the last few months, and invite you to connect and follow the articles, blogposts, authors and debates online. Details of all the blogposts referred to here are in the reference list at the end. We warmly invite all our readers to sign up to the Roape.net newsletter by entering their email address at the top of the home page of the website.

In the last quarter we have posted a blogpost by Ben Radley and Sara Geenen (2021) on the DRC and scuppered industrialisation there and the findings and implications of their research paper published in this issue. To celebrate publication of our March issue of ROAPE, a special issue on Samir Amin’s legacy (Kvangraven et al. 2021), when the entire issue was opened up online for a fortnight to access for free by Taylor and Francis, we published blogposts from the editors and authors. In series of short interviews, including video clips, the authors speak intimately and inspiringly about the influence of Samir Amin’s work on their own research and activism (Ndlovu-Gatsheni et al. 2021).

Other pieces have included Peter Dwyer’s excellent interview with ROAPE’s Tunde Zack-Williams, looking at his life and work in the light of last year’s African Studies Association of the United Kingdom’s Distinguished Africanist award (Zack-Williams and Dwyer 2021). Dwyer asks Zack-Williams about his research and writing on economic and political reform across Africa, which have focused on alternatives to Western prescriptions, and also looks at his work as an editor of ROAPE for many years.

We have also managed to cover some important topical issues, anniversaries, elections and protest movements. We posted two pieces on Uganda’s election, including one by Pitasanna Shanmugathas (2021). We also posted on Senegal’s anti-government protests, which threatened to unseat president Macky Sall, co-posting a ‘campaign’ piece initiated by Boubacar Boris Diop and Moussa Sene Absa which was also published in the Senegalese press (Diop and Absa 2021).

Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, who wrote on Samir Amin in our special issue (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2021a), writes a longer commentary on how war, violence and extractivism defined the legacy of the empire in Africa, and why recent attempts to explore the ‘ethical’ contributions of colonialism amount to rewriting history (Ndlovu Gatsheni 2021b).

Following some key anniversaries, we posted on the sixtieth anniversary of Patrice Lumumba’s brutal extermination in the Congo, along with two of his comrades, Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito. In this post, the great Congolese historian Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja (2021) writes about the All-African People’s Conference (AAPC) that Lumumba attended in 1958, and the years of his leadership of the nationalist movement before his murder. We have also posted exclusive material, including a recently discovered document written by Omar Blondin Diop, who was murdered by Senghor in 1973 during a tumultuous period in the country’s history. Film-maker and author Florian Bobin (2021) introduces and gives the background to the publication of this material by Blondin Diop.

As part of our collaboration with the website Africa Is a Country (AIAC), we posted a short piece by their staff writer, William Shoki (2021), introducing a new interview series, AIAC Talk. The weekly show, co-hosted by Shoki and Sean Jacobs, the founder of AIAC, seeks to take advantage of the migration of life online to reach captive audiences and occupy an important space to talk about the world from an African perspective.

Also well worth a look if you missed it is a longer read, published earlier this year, on how the World Bank maintains its decades-long work of pushing power into the hands of private capital. In it, Sean Taylor looks at how the Covid-19 response is being used to further the Bank's role of acting as a private investment broker in the global South (Taylor 2021).

Finally, we’re delighted to announce that readers can now sign up for a bi-monthly email showing selected highlights of what’s been published on Roape.net over the previous two months. Ben Radley has played a creative and central role in developing this and getting it going. We hope you’ll find this inspiring, and a useful resource.

About Roape.net

Together with the print journal, Roape.net seeks to develop a critique of the existing balance of class and social forces in African political economy as a vital part of the project of radical political, environmental and economic transformation. ROAPE’s online platform keeps the struggles for racial, gender and economic equality at the centre of our focus. We aim to highlight debate on the agrarian question, rural immiseration and food sovereignty, the shifting dynamics of popular protest, the transformation of imperialism on the continent, and the role of national and international elites. We are not a substitute for African voices, but a platform for them. To find out more and read our latest contributions, go to https://roape.net/. To subscribe to the bi-monthly newsletter, fill in your details in the blank box next to the red ‘SUBSCRIBE’ prompt at the top of our home page.