Connecting people and voices for radical change in Africa

Abstract

In this section of the journal, we aim to give readers of the print journal a picture of what has 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 and WhatsApp service at the top of the home page of the website.

In March 2023 we finally announced the decision of the ROAPE Editorial Working Group to leave Taylor and Francis and move to genuine open access in 2024 on the ScienceOpen platform. The announcement was received positively by our readers and supporters. One of the many comments we received expressed our own enthusiasm:

Brave move by ROAPE to take this step. Many of us who work for journals will be watching to see how this goes & how ROAPE’s model could be used or adapted. I hope the publishing houses who turn profits on academics’ free labour are suitably worried.

Amílcar Cabral was one of the great leaders of African liberation, perhaps the greatest, and this year marks the anniversary of his murder. In 1993 former ROAPE editor Mike Powell, who spent years working and living in Guinea Bissau, put together an excellent special issue on Cabral. There were three short essays by Basil Davidson, Lars Rudebeck and Shubi Ishemo in the original issue. From March to April, we reposted the collection, creating a virtual special issue celebrating Cabral’s contribution to liberation and Marxist thought, with a new, short introduction by the website editors (Zeilig, Chukwudinma, and Radley 2023). The issue – the separate blogposts in the virtual special issue – have been debated, read, and shared (Rudebeck 2023 [1993]; Ishemo 2023 [1993]; and Davidson 2023 [1993]). Further pieces on Cabral, interviews with his most important recent biographer, and others who were active at the time in Guinea Bissau, and Cape Verde, are being featured throughout this year.

Other notable pieces from our last quarter include Benjamin Maiangwa’s powerful post ‘Where are you from?’ He asks:

Has white supremacy permeated every place on earth and created a world view that favours whiteness so that the question – where are you really from? – is asked to determine your state of being? Being African, Maiangwa argues, you are always identified as the exotic, noble, disease-infected, and chronically misgoverned ‘other’ – traits or images that outsiders impose on the continent. (Maiangwa 2023)

Heike Becker (2023) wrote a penetrating piece on Durban’s 1973 strike wave and parallel events in South African-occupied Namibia (formerly South West Africa). The strikes in South Africa are now widely recognised as a historical turning point. From 9 January 1973, workers of the Coronation Brick and Tile factory in Durban came out on strike. The Durban strikes were the first public mass action in South Africa since the anti-apartheid activism of the 1950s. Eighteen months before the Durban strikes, a reinvention of protest and labour action had already erupted into full public view in little-known events in Namibia.

In early March we published a piece by Shreya Parikh on Tunisia. Since February, there has been a vicious campaign against sub-Saharan Africans in the streets of Tunisia, following comments by the president. Parikh (2023) wrote about how anyone who fits the category of ‘African’ – sub-Saharan students and documented or undocumented workers, as well as Black Tunisians – is being harassed on the streets by police and civilians, many of them attacked, stabbed or forced into hiding.

Ahead of the elections in Nigeria in February, we posted two blogs. The first of these was an interview with activist Alex Batubo about the political and economic situation in the country. Batubo focuses on the struggle of labour and the possibilities of a radical alternative emerging from the challenges (and opportunities) of the present (Batubo and ROAPE 2023). The second piece, published the day before the vote, was a discussion by Daniel Jordan Smith (2023) of the politics of the provision (or lack) of public services and infrastructure in Nigeria. Most Nigerians adapt to the reality that they must provide for themselves, cobbling together fundamental service provision in the context of state failure.

Over the last few years, videographer Yannek Simalla has been compiling a collection of filmed testimonies from activists involved in the protests in Senegal in 1968. In this blog written for ROAPE, Simalla (2023) introduces his collection, the creative process behind its creation, and how the memories of May 1968 inform us as much about the present of Senegalese society as they do the past. These interviews, in French, have been widely read and shared by our readers.

At the beginning of January, Mark Duffield and Nicholas Stockton (2023) wrote about how the ecologically sustainable, communally managed subsistence pastoralism in Somalia has been displaced by militarised extractive ranching. Challenging mainstream accounts of the ‘drought’, Duffield and Stockton argued that the current crisis is the result of decades of bad development and of relief interventions that have promoted impoverishment and hunger.

Elias Aguigah (2023) contributed a blogpost based on his article in the journal. He discusses the restitution of objects from Africa looted by colonial troops and plunderers. Aguigah looks at the debates which have located restitution in broader political questions around identity, representation, and memory politics. The piece was topical, as well as providing an original and radical analysis.

In a piece for the 50th anniversary of the death of Omar Blondin Diop in detention under suspicious circumstances in Dakar, Florian Bobin (2023) argued that more than 60 years after Senegal’s independence, Diop’s life, work, and legacy reveal what revolutionary politics looks like in a neo-colonial context.

A little later in May, ROAPE regular contributor Yusuf Serunkuma slammed the cowardice today of intellectuals who display, he argued, self-censorship and contentment with the status quo, in contrast with an earlier generation of activists and subaltern scholars. Serunkuma (2023) argued that this did not happen overnight: rather, it has taken years of manufacturing conformity and consent.

Towards the end of May, we published a blogpost on the Kenyan government’s proposals for a compulsory housing levy on workers’ salaries to support contractors in building affordable homes for the working class. As incomes are squeezed and living standards collapse, Ambreena Manji and Jill Cottrell Ghai (2023) argued that the case for asking workers to bear the cost of housing development has not been made.

There are many other pieces (which we will write more about in our round-up for the next issue of ROAPE), but the above give a fair reflection of what we have published, commissioned, edited and promoted on the site in the period before this issue was published. Our Twitter followers now number over 10,000, and our reach – despite algorithms that work against us – continues to grow.

As noted in the introductory paragraph, we have managed to announce and launch our new partnership with ScienceOpen: the link between Roape.net and ScienceOpen is now embedded, and once the transition take place at the end of the year, the full, unadulterated, un-paywalled archive, as well as all current issues of the journal and all content, will be available on roape.net (https://roape.net/archive/scienceopen-search/).

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 quarterly newsletter, fill in your details in the blank box next to the red ‘SUBSCRIBE’ prompt at the top of our home page. To subscribe to the ROAPE WhatsApp service, send the message ROAPE to [phone].