Heike Becker reviews a book, Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg, which speaks to a generation of anti-colonial activists, from Cape Town to Cairo, London and Berlin, who are using a new language of decoloniality, with which they claim radical humanity in struggle and theory. The heart of the book puts Rosa in conversation with thinkers of the Black radical tradition.
For years illegal capital flight from South Africa has resulted in a staggering loss of wealth for the country. For roape.net Ben Fine investigates efforts to curb these flows of wealth. He argues that capital flight not only shifts resources elsewhere as is commonly presumed, it also shifts speculation elsewhere – capital flight is financialised.
Since November last year, Ethiopia has been fighting a devastating civil war with the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front. Hibist Kassa argues that the scale of misinformation on the war, lack of context and attempts to impose false narratives is deeply troubling and pervasive. Kassa calls for a nuanced and historically grounded approach to properly analyse the course of events.
In a blogpost drawing attention to the large number of suicides by immolation in Tunisia, Habib Ayeb explains that there has been an average of between 250 to 300 suicides per year since 2011. These desperate political acts are intended to draw attention to the dire social and political conditions experienced by millions of Tunisians in the years since the revolution (and the suicide of Mohamed Bouazizi in December 2010). Translated by Max Ajl, the blogpost looks at the origins of the Tunisian revolution, and broken promises.
In 1974 the Working People’s Alliance emerged as an anti-racist and anti-imperialist formation that fought for socialism from below. To start with it was not an electoral party, but a pressure group that united Pan-Africanist and Indian socialist organisations. Chinedu Chukwudinma describes how Walter Rodney’s uncompromising use of Marxist theory and practice transformed him into the foremost organiser of the Guyanese working people.
Firoze Manji writes that discontent has been growing across the continent, with spontaneous eruptions and mass uprisings that have in some cases resulted in the overthrow of regimes. In such circumstances, one would have thought that this would have been fertile grounds for the emergence of strong left working class movements across the continent. But why has this not happened?
Koert Lindijer writes how the gap between rich and poor is enormous in Kenya. From the perspective of poor inhabitants - the majority - Kenya’s elite is rich thanks to massive corruption. Lindijer writes about the depth and extent of this corruption and the valiant efforts to bring the elite to justice.
In February this year, during a protest against the lack of accommodation for poor students in Cape Town, South Africa, students and members of the #RhodesMustFall movement set alight paintings considered to be ‘colonial artwork’. In a conversation with the artist Faith Pienaar, anti-apartheid activist and judge Albie Sachs reflects on the meaning of art in troubled post-apartheid South Africa.
Continuing our series on capitalism on the continent Kate Meagher writes how debates on industrial policy and the developmental state in Africa have directed attention to wider processes of class formation and economic transformation that seemed until recently to have fallen out of fashion. In this blog she looks at the transformation in the African working class.
In this issue of Popular Protest and Class Struggle in Africa, David Seddon reviews the most recent developments in four countries he has recently discussed – Gambia, Equatorial Guinea, Zimbabwe and the DRC – in all of which long-standing leaders have refused to stand down, in some cases against growing internal opposition and external pressure, but with significantly differing outcomes.
Recent protest in Togo have seen clashes with the police and a certain amount of street violence, but the scale has been unprecedented, with organisers claiming that as many as 800,000 people took to the streets across the country in August 2017. In the latest issue in the series David Seddon looks at the background to the latest wave of popular protests to rock West Africa.
In 1974 the Working People’s Alliance emerged as an anti-racist and anti-imperialist formation that fought for socialism from below. To start with it was not an electoral party, but a pressure group that united Pan-Africanist and Indian socialist organisations. Chinedu Chukwudinma describes how Walter Rodney’s uncompromising use of Marxist theory and practice transformed him into the foremost organiser of the Guyanese working people.
