Kenya hosts about half a million refugees in its camps and urban areas. Increasingly, these camps are also sites of finance, debt, and neoliberal-led forms of experimentation. Ali Bhagat situates refugees as a new population for neoliberal experimentation as camps are transformed into spaces of untapped profit....
In a passionate defence of the strike action of university workers in the UK, ROAPE’s Rama Salla Dieng describes the intolerable pressures on teaching staff and the gender and ethnic inequalities within the academy. Dieng writes, ‘We are on strike to resist the marketisation of our knowledge and lives, and to build radical solidarities with our students.’...
Björn Beckman was one of the most influential Marxist scholars who worked in Nigeria where he was a lecturer in Ahmadu Bello University from 1978. His engagement with Nigeria and Africa lasted to the end. His contribution to radical movements and scholarship was immense. Jibrin Ibrahim and Tunde Zack-Williams celebrate a comrade, friend and scholar....
In a report on a recent conference in Dakar on the Revolutionary Left in sub-Saharan Africa, Adam Mayer celebrates a gathering of activists and researchers, which could not have been more different from the mega-conferences of academia today. The conference examined the extraordinary vibrancy of left politics and movements across the continent in the 1960s and 1970s....
Concluding her discussion on the revolts in Sudan and Algeria, Emma Wilde Botta argues that we are seeing a new surge of global revolt against authoritarianism and austerity. Revolutionaries are grappling with questions of strategy and organization as the forces of conservation come into conflict with the forces of transformation....
Far from being a vehicle to advance higher education in the country, Egypt’s military regime wants to use the collaboration with UK universities to provide cover to a deeply repressive human rights record. Anne Alexander argues that the credibility of UK universities helps to hide the constant abuse of academic freedoms in Egypt....
Rama Salla Dieng introduces a series of interviews with African feminists that roape.net will be posting in the coming weeks. In recent months across Africa we have witnessed women taking to the street to reclaim a fairer and more just world. In these protests and movements woman have often played a leading role. In interviews conducted by Rama, young African feminists will discuss how they are theorising their practice and philosophies....
Baba Aye describes the birth of an impressive new movement in Nigeria. He sees the #RevolutionNow campaign as a spark around which national structures are being built. The blogpost draws lessons from earlier popular struggle in the country and argues that the new movement is fanning the embers of revolts, as part of the revolutionary struggles sweeping across the world....
On the anniversary of Zambia’s independence, Robert Power examines the birth of the Zambian nation by shedding light on the connections that existed between political activists and anti-colonial organisations and governments that proved so vital in winning the liberation struggle in 1964. Power writes about the astonishing transnational connections and solidarity that proliferated from the early 1950s. ...
David Moore reflects on Robert Mugabe's life, politics and ZANU-PF. He sees Mugabe’s rule containing a blend of stultified Marxism and liberalism – a kind of ‘market Stalinism’. Discussing the coup that toppled Mugabe in 2017, Moore sees continuity in Zimbabwe’s liberation history. He asks, to what extent is this constant history of near-coups and coup-paranoia wired into the very structures of Zimbabwe’s political sociology and culture of class and state formation?...