In recent years governments across Southern Africa have targeted foreign investors, increased taxation on mining companies and enacted indigenisation. In this blogpost, Alex Caramento and Richard Saunders investigate the social forces currently shaping resource nationalism in the region. They hope to initiate a discussion on the various responses to extractive capitalism in Southern Africa. ...
On the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Frantz Fanon’s 1959 classic, A Dying Colonialism, Ken Olende considers Fanon’s complex relationship to class and Marxism. Fanon wrote during a period of intense anti-colonial struggle where links with Marxist ideas were taken for granted. Olende argues Fanon’s work was grounded in a deep understanding of capitalist society....
In a wide-ranging defence of the legacy of Walter Rodney, Cecil Gutzmore takes on Chinedu Chukwudinma’s critique of Rodney’s work. Theoretical rigour and principled arguments are essentials in Marxism, but Gutzmore sees little evidence of these in Chukwudinma’s blogpost....
Algeria is undergoing a period of dramatic popular resistance to an authoritarian regime in power for decades. In Emma Wilde Botta’s second blogpost, she focuses on the construction of Algeria’s political order, the dynamics of the current crisis, and an assessment of the ongoing impasse. ...
Lena Grace Anyuolo describes the hunger games of capitalism in Kenya. In this diabolical world where the sponsors of jobs and healthcare are corporations, or rich individuals and media personalities who have the power to deliver life from poverty or fund-raise for a lifesaving medical procedure. Anyuolo is scathing about a form of existence where life or death depends on philanthropy or whether or not your story is worthy of a prime-time slot on TV. ...
Capitalizing on the growing disillusionment of Uganda’s development and the ubiquitous anger and discontent of the country’s youth, which represent over 75% of the population, Bobi Wine’s movement, known as People Power, has become a formidable political force. Sam Broadway tells the story of the people where Wine grew up and where much of his political operations and support are centred today....
Heike Becker reflects on an exhibition that foregrounded black subjects in 19th and early 20th century art. The exhibition restored the identities of the black models, often naming them for the very first time. Heike challenges us to face head-on the colonising act of invisibilising the black subject and fieldworker, without whose contributions the celebrated cultural and intellectual accomplishments of ‘Western’ scholars and artists would not have been possible....
Ethiopia invests a higher percentage of its GDP in public infrastructure than nearly every other country in the world. In this blogpost, Daniel Mains argues that the construction of infrastructure is a site for understanding the tense relationship between citizen and state in Ethiopia. In a contribution to the debate on Capitalism in Africa hosted by roape.net, Mains argues that an analytical method is needed that can examine these processes without assuming a capitalist society that is unified by a singular mode of economic production. Such an approach enables researchers to examine multiple, sometimes contradictory, economic dynamics....
Action for Southern Africa’s report, The Money Drain: How Trade Misinvoicing and Unjust Debt Undermine Economic and Social Rights in Southern Africa, was recently launched at the Southern African Development Community People’s Summit in Dar es Salaam. For roape.net, the report’s author, Sunit Bagree, outlines some of the actions that the UK government must take in order to end these damaging financial outflows....
After spending several months with gamblers in Kenya, Mario Schmidt finds that many see their activity as a legitimate and transparent attempt to make ends meet in an economy that does not offer them any other stable employment or income. In a blogpost co-published with The Elephant, gambling Schmidt argues can be seen as an act against an economy in which wealth is not based upon merit but upon social relations and where profit and losses are distributed in a non-transparent way through corruption, inheritance and theft....