A broad, radical socialist African website

After ten years working on the Review of African Political Economy’s website, Leo Zeilig reflects on the struggles, history and analysis that has been published on the platform. The website has proclaimed loudly for a radical agenda on the continent and has been resolute in supporting struggles of communities and working people fighting for justice and liberation. As he steps away, Leo shares his reflections on ROAPE and the website.

By Leo Zeilig

Commenting on the recent mass uprising in Kenya, and the extraordinary anger and unity that swept the capital, ROAPE’s Njuki Githethwa wrote on the roape.net, “The underbelly of the current regime in Kenya has been struck a devastating blow by the uprising of youth. The state has been weakened and is now vulnerable. Its technical knock-out could be imminent … [But] how this revolution will chaperon a radical and just social order in Kenya depends on how well placed the social forces, revolutionary movements and organisations are to harness this uprising.”

Analysing the mass struggles across Africa that are frequently ignored, barely (or badly) reported, or simply relegated to marginal ‘other news’ has been a mainstay of roape.net since it was set-up in 2014. ROAPE, and its website, has attempted to rescue from imposed obscurity the vital struggles of working people on the continent, and to analyse the circumstances (the ‘political economy’) they are trying to transform – to revolutionise. We are not willing, or able, to simply report on events, but to challenge and examine them. On the Kenyan uprising, Njuki wrote, ‘revolution is in the air …’ but for this change to be realised it will require, ‘revolutionary movements and organisations.’

Ten years ago, ROAPE had a website, but this was a static platform – as websites often were in those days – where information about the journal could be found: Who we were? What we published? What our project and purpose was? How to submit? Etc. Though there was plenty of vital resources, including pdfs of previous, historical issues which were available to read away from the locked-down content held by our publisher Taylor and Francis.

Roape.net, when it was first conceived in 2013 by ROAPE’s Editorial Working Group (EWG), was intended as a dynamic blog, with journal information, but also important and energetic radical political economy about the continent. Appropriately, the first virtual special issue we published was edited by one of our founding members, John Saul – an enthusiastic supporter of the site, and everything we were trying to do. He put together the issue on Radical Agendas – South Africa, examining the country’s challenges, and the possibilities of a radical and left future as the 1994 settlement collapsed.Soon the site became much more than an occasional forum for blogs on African political economy and engaged scholarship (though it has continued to provide a platform for this). Gradually the site grew into a forum of broad radical analysis, history, contemporary research and memory. We published on campaigns, when possible, and started an interview series – the section on the site, which has pleased me most.

ROAPE’s project, so well described – in an eerily prescient editorial in 1974 – was: ‘to examine the roots of Africa’s present condition. In simple terms, we propose to ask: Why are most of its people still poor? Why is the continent still dependent and its future still controlled by outside forces? But merely providing an alternative analysis could be just as emptily ‘academic’. It is hoped therefore that our contributors will also address themselves to those issues concerned with the actions needed if Africa is to develop its potential’ (emphasis added).

But we set ourselves the additional task on the website of recalling the vital lessons and mistakes of the past. ROAPE had been born in a period of immense political hope on the continent that few today can remember.  In 1974 it was not necessary to dig deep into history for political possibilities, revolutions and anti-capitalist alternatives, but simply to reach out and touch them.

A keen sense of this world, temporarily extinguished by the present, and academic fashions that invaded ROAPE’s production as it was sucked into the academy, can be seen in countless posts and interviews. So in very different times, we sought to resurrect this history – return to it, and as much as possible tell the stories about  a world very different from the one we now lived in.

Issa Shivji was an early member of ROAPE, a student of Walter Rodney and one of the greatest theorists of Tanzania’s failed socialist experiment in the 1960s and 1970s – among much else. I remember being upbraided by him in the interview in 2016 when I asked timidly about the ‘project of transformation on the continent’, an insipid statement if there ever was one. Shivji responded, ‘I chuckled on reading that phrase of yours: in the 1960s and 1970s we would have called it by its true name, ‘Revolution’, not as a project, but real-life struggles of the working masses. It seems to me that much of the language and vocabulary – imperialism, revolution, liberation, etc. – became “profane” words with the onslaught of neo-liberal ideology on the right, and post-modernism on the left. Some of that vocabulary is still lingering on …’

I learnt my lesson.

But the site, and those of us working on it, was infused by contemporary protests, social movements and revolutionary changes on the continent, and the world. Across Africa we gave a platform to these projects and their catastrophic and precipitative fall. Though we  also sought to denounce the crushing eurocentrism of northern universities, where many of our comrades still made their daily bread, and to celebrate and examine the great revolutionary possibilities that frequently erupted on the continent – south of the Sahara.

ROAPE has always attempted to erase the colonial era division of the continent between the north and south. We needed a site which unequivocally could be the loudhailer to political  movements across Africa, recording them, and critically analysing them. We managed this with mixed success. The editor of our section ‘Popular Protest and Class Struggle Across the Continent’ was David Seddon, the bold, radical theorist of the Global South hosted a broad range of reports and debates. David once told me years ago with typical youthful enthusiasm burning in his eyes that a radical Africa journal and website must be internationalist at its heart.

ROAPE’s own political trajectory – as I mention above – was mixed, so it saw, perhaps naively, some version of state-led political changes from above. The models were diverse, and complex, but, in broad terms, the ‘role-model’ was in Tanzania (at one point), Mozambique and Angola (and a range of other possibilities, including Eritrea). Movements and popular agency from below, as the sine qua non of socialist change, were relegated to a supporting role – though, as with all generalisations much of this is a blunt description. ROAPE also charted the anti-structural adjustment riots, near revolutions, and occasionally saw popular agency as a force for political transformation, and revolution.

As roape.net grew, and our influence spread, we provided a platform for radical history, analysis of trends and processes, and contemporary Marxist research on the continent, with an orientation to new movements, socialist groups and activists on the continent. Afterall, the importance according to that founding editorial of “acquiring the tools and applying them to make an analysis should not be seen as an end in themselves or the separate task of full-time intellectuals. They are necessary in the practical business of working out a strategy for carrying on the struggle.”

We were at our best when we declared our solidarity for the movements, campaigns and activism on the continent. Recently we posted on the continent’s solidarity with Palestine, and stood behind those resisting the apartheid state of Israeli, and the on-going genocide in Gaza.

Some of the heady successes of the website came from our ability to attract impressive analysis. For example, in a debate that ran for more than four years on Rwanda’s dubious poverty statistics, which formed the basis of a Financial Times investigation. Or a unique forum to discuss the life and work of the revolutionary Walter Rodney, and his contribution to Marxism, and African and Caribbean liberation. It was a pleasure to interview Anne Braithwaite – a friend and comrade to Rodney – who discussed Rodney’s modesty, and the activism of the UK based Working People’s Alliance support group. Rodney’s Marxism, based firmly in the Global South, was close to my heart, his classic 1972 book broke open the history of the continent when I was being schooled in a brilliant though thoroughly Eurocentric Marxism as a young activist in the 1990s.

Nor have we limited ourselves to a vision of the continent apart from the rest of the world – such continental parochialism would defy the real world of political economy. So our  debate on the contemporary meaning and nature of imperialism drew in David Harvey, John Smith, Patrick Bond, and others, on whether East Asia and the Pacific (including China) or the Triad (US, EU and Japan) is ‘draining’ value from the other, or part a relationship of mutual profiting between an international bourgeoise.

Perhaps a little late we created a dedicated blog on the climate emergency – which across Africa is not a hypothesis, but a daily tragedy. We carry reports, interviews, updates and campaigns on the crisis and how the climate crisis can no longer be siloed off from wider issues of capital accumulation and class struggle. Nigerian climate activist Nnimmo Bassey spoke to us on the need for the continent to break with the futile dash to follow industrialised, polluting nations and interrogate the notion of development and growth in a finite world. ROAPE has also recently published a special double issue on the climate emergency in our journal – now freely available here. The issue edited by  Lee Wengraf, Janet Bujra, Chanda Mfula features an astonishing array of articles and studies on the emergency, and the deepening crisis brought about by further market driven ‘green’ solutions.

The ROAPE blog survived and thrived because of the incredible support of the Editorial Working Group (EWG) – in recent years chaired by the unflappable and brilliant militant, Hannah Cross –  and our ability for years to subvert the funding we received from Taylor and Francis to fund the site, and to the editorial team in particular. The website, the radicalism at its heart, and the inspiration that there was a large community across Africa, and elsewhere, who are interested in revolutionary change – the ‘life struggle of working people’ as Shivji put it –  was sustained, encouraged and maintained from the start by the unstinting solidarity, collaboration, and comradeship of ROAPE’s editorial collective.[1] This allowed us to do a few things.

Firstly, we could turn roape.net into a public address system for our projects, in particular the series of Connections workshops on the continent. When COVID-19 hit we helped to run webinars and focus on the causes of a pandemic which we saw as a symptom of capital accumulation on a global scale, but to also provide a platform to those fighting for access to health care, vaccines and against state repression masquerading as public health measures.

Secondly, the site – with the journal, and the entire EWG – became a vehicle for our commitment to break the stranglehold of journal publishing that locked away content, accessible only at a fee, to become an entirely open – free and uncommodified – publication with all research articles, reviews and debates and briefings in our print issue accessible to anyone. Recall that admission to a single article cost £39 (for 48 hours access) on the platform of our former international publisher, and £209 for an entire issue. Just to illustrate, in our new incarnation our annual subscription for readers in Africa is £25 for digital and print access to all four issues, with no time limit – readers get to keep the issues!

Roape.net helped us to see what open access could mean, and how a new audience existed for radical analysis and activism on the continent. We also trumpeted our decision to finally break from Taylor and Francis in late 2023. Though because of our split from Taylor and Francis decisions had to be made to cover the cost of maintaining roape.net, and we are building subscription income from our readers and institutional subscribers. We have proved it can be done.

The website is, of course, the junior partner of the journal which is celebrating its 50^th anniversary this year. It is the journal which remains the abiding project of ROAPE. Emerging from, once more in Shivji’s words, ‘the womb of the struggles from which the founders had come.’ The journal, or in less academic parlance, review, would be an instrument in the continued struggles for socialist liberation on the continent, and it   unashamedly declared that it would not be another futile academic publication, rather one imbedded in Marxism – but not the ‘ready-meal’ Marxism still fashionable on the radical left, and among Stalinised communist parties in the 1970s, where answers are presented, rather than worked out on the basis of systematic empirical research.

Shivji explained in the interview we posted in 2016, that ‘a Journal based in Europe, unconnected with real-life social struggles on the ground in any direct way, obviously could not consistently do what it set out to do. Over a period of time, it did become a left academic journal, broadly progressive, nonetheless eclectic in the content of articles it publishes.’ This reality resulted in both the pull of academia in the 1980s and 1990s, and the political fashions of the time, crippled as it was by post-modernism. Though the journal also resisted those fashions and provided consistent criticism of the collapse of the left after 1990, with the fall of state-socialist dictatorships, and hope for a revival of progressive projects and politics.

The journal remains a forum for radical debate and research while maintaining an overwhelming commitment to orientate towards the outlook of working people (see our recent issue edited by founding member, Peter Lawrence, with Horman Chitongo honouring the life and work of Lungisile Ntsebeza one of our contributing editors, and a leading activist and scholar on the continent, and forthcoming 50^th anniversary issue edited by Ray Bush on ROAPE’s legacy, and understanding of contemporary imperialism). The journal will remain the mainstay of our scholar-activism.

For ten years work on the site has been exhilarating. We have continually redesigned the platform, managed debates on a great array of areas, dealt with a mountain of positivity and excitement (but also occasional and exhausting vitriol), hosted news and commentary from those on the continent fighting for justice while trying to develop an alternative politics.  Most important, and satisfying, has been our efforts to facilitate connections between militants and groups. Activist and academic Tafadwza Choto – a familiar voice on ROAPE –  wrote to us recently about an online meeting held in Zimbabwe addressed by Njuki Githethwa on behalf of the Left Forum in Kenya on the recent mass events in the country. She wrote, ‘it is an organic way of bringing the left together in the region as much as the idea of breaking borders and creating one Africa.’.

Years ago, I remember listening to an interview on the BBC with the great, radical song-writer Leon Rosselson. As a child, with my sister, we were force-fed his songs by my mother on long car drives, and we would discuss the lyrics, debate the politics and tunelessly sing along (we are a tone-deaf, music loving family). One of Leon’s most famous songs is The World Turned Upside Down, is about the English revolution in 1649 when Charles I was executed; a republic declared, and along with it many radical movements briefly flourished. In the interview, Leon explained that he had once heard a programme on the radio about coffee workers in central America, and there was an accompanying audio of the workers singing his song in Spanish. The presenter explained, ‘this is an ancient coffee pickers song, passed on through the generations written by an unknown composer.’  The song was released in 1975! Rosselson expressed his delight about how the song had become unmoored from his authorship, and his pen – this was the greatest achievement, he thought. I remember laughing joyfully at Leon’s story.

One of the pleasures of the site has been how our blogs written by authors and activists from around the continent for ten years have been shared, reposted, and published on websites, and in publications often without our knowing – unmoored from our website, unacknowledged. The stories, arguments, and debates that we host are the common treasury of the struggles on the continent. But we also have more ‘official’ partnerships, recently with Progressive International which brings together organisations and websites on the left worldwide, and provides another audience for work originally published by us.

The respect for ROAPE’s work has been dizzying, and the ease of commissioning scholars and activists to write for us, and debate, is a sign of the continued vibrancy of radical ideas on the continent, and ROAPE’s 50 year-long commitment to radical and revolutionary change.

In the last two years, what has been occasionally isolating work, has been whittled away by the involvement of a website team who now work on the site. The site will continue to do much of what we have done, but now focusing more on submissions, and promoting journal content. Occasionally cut-off with interminable hours, the constant too and fro of edits, and commissioning, has ensure that I have become an even more eccentric man than I already was, but it has also meant that I could throw myself into ROAPE’s projects, during a period of possibilities, and political struggles amid the endless destructive power of capitalism on the continent. The solidarity and support of my comrades on ROAPE has made this possible.

In the first editorial, there was an aspiration expressed, ‘A periodical prepared at a distance can at best hope to perform a small holding operation by initiating debate, until the political climate in at least one part of the continent allows enough of an opening for a radical journal to ‘come home’. This task – to ‘come home’ – remains a challenge for ROAPE, and one that still needs to be undertaken. Projects and collaborations in the coming years will ensure that ‘an opening’ for the Review on the continent is secured, and for new (and old) editors and activists to take the journal and the website deeper into the continent, and for it to be finally and fully based there.

Leo Zeilig is a member of ROAPE’s Editorial Working Group, and former editor of roape.net.

Notes

[1] One of the dreadful features of our hyper individualised societies is the tendency for self-promotion, we beat our chests about ourselves, even if we are celebrating a cause, or movement – this is a chronic sickness, and one part of the website that I will not miss is the relentless social media hall-of-mirrors where we stare back at ourselves until we can see nothing at all. I have tested the patience of my comrades with my own tendency at chest-beating, and self-aggrandisement – me, me, me, goes the refrain. The comrades at the heart of the website need to be named, without them I would have folded long ago. The editorial collective has tolerated my occasional tantrums, and exhaustion with great magnanimity – Femi Aborisade, Hakim Adi, Alex Beresford, Heike Becker, Janet Bujra, Ray Bush, Hannah Cross, Chinedu Chukwudinma who is part of the website team, Reginald Cline-Cole, Peter Dwyer who conducts interviews on ROAPE’s YouTube channel,  Bettina Engels, Alastair Fraser, Elisa Greco, Peter Lawrence, Chanda Mfula, Ben Radley another website editor who runs our WhatsApp group, and quarterly newsletter, Clare Smedley who has provided indispensable support amid numerous crises, and who was, for years, the only other employee on ROAPE, Colin Stoneman, Yusuf Serunkuma, one of the most brilliant voices on roape.net, Jörg Wiegratz who has been an incredibly energetic editor and collaborator on the site for years, and Tunde Zack-Williams.