ROAPE’s 2024 Best Reads for African Radicals

In what has become an annual offering at the end of the year, the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) family once again shares their best reads of the year 2024. The journal’s family – from the Editorial Working Group (EWG); contributing editors; International Advisory Board and contributors – share both fiction and non-fiction book which they found interesting, educating, shocking, moving and inspiring in 2024. Some of the books include information about where to access them.

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Revolution is the choice of the people 

by Anne Alexander

 

Here is my radical read: Revolution is the choice of the people by Anne Alexander. The book offers an excellent analysis of the roots and process of revolutions that took the Middle East and North Africa by storm in Tunisia, Egypt in 2010-12 and Algeria and Sudan in 2019. It does so with the aim of drawing radical lessons in struggle. One lesson is that genuine political change can only be won through a complete overthrow of the State along with its military and bureaucracy. Another is that the working class, through its powerful position at the heart of production, has the potential to lead this upheaval. 

Chinedu Chukwudinma 

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Beneath the Mountain–an Anti-Prison Reader

Edited by Mumia Abu-Jamal & Jennifer Black

I recommend “Beneath the Mountain – An Anti-Prison Reader” edited by Mumia Abu-Jamal & Jennifer Black. The book is a collection of essays, letters and excerpts from well-known (and not so much) anti-imperialist and revolutionary leaders who have experienced the violence of the state. I knew some things about some of the writers, but the magic of this book for me is how it brings such vitality to their words and actions by opening a window into their lived experience surviving (or not) in an oppressive white-supremacist state.

Ron Uger 

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Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape: Gender Politics and Liminiality in Tanzania’s New Enclosures 

Youjin B. Chung

My favourite read for 2024 was Youjin B. Chung‘s Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape: Gender Politics and Liminality in Tanzania’s New Enclosures (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press- open access). Chung has written an eloquent analysis of the Eco-Energy Sugar Project in Bagamoyo, Tanzania, focusing on the Swedish Company and government allies involved, and the women and men living in the 20,400 hectares of land transferred to the project. Using stories and photos provided by the study participants themselves, as well as the author, the research documents the tragic loss of land, livelihoods, identity and family history resulting from the project, which ultimately failed. Community members found multiple ways to resist the foreclosures, pitting themselves against the company and the state. Their voices are an eloquent indictment of commercial agribusiness, patriarchy and global capitalism. 

Majorie Mbilinyi

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Red Africa: Reclaiming Revolutionary Politics 

by Kevin Okoth

The best thing I read this year was Kevin Ochieng Okoth’s Red Africa: Reclaiming Revolutionary Politics, published by Verso and available for 9.99 USD as an eBook. In the book, Okoth is unflinching in both his critique of Black Studies (‘the making of an anti-politics’) and his insistence the future of revolutionary Black politics requires resurrecting the anti-imperialist Marxism of Red Africa. “A rallying cry for revolutionary black politics”, in the words of Mikayla Tillery’s review for roape.net late last year. It is also refreshingly short, at just 128 pages of writing, and all the better for it.

Ben Radley

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Incompleteness, Mobility and Conviviality 

by Francis Nyamjoh

My choice is Incompleteness, Mobility and Conviviality by Francis.B.Nyamnjoh, Langaa Research and Publishing CIG, Bamenda, Cameroon, 2024, distributed by African Books Collective. How to make sense of and act within the multiplicity of inter-sectional social and intellectual dynamics is a personal challenge for us all. It is also a political question. Francis Nyamnjoh offers us some original ideas on how to proceed. In summary, he suggests how some specifically African concepts of knowing and being could bring necessary insights to global intellectual discourse on the key challenges of our time, not least the continuing growth of ICTs and related work on ‘artificial intelligence’. He does this on the basis not only of his own academic work, but his experience as director of publications at CODESRIA and, more recently, as a perhaps uncomfortable witness to the decolonization debates at the University of Cape Town. The book is based on a series of lectures given in Germany in 2023. It isn’t perfect. It is not always easy to follow and would have benefited from tighter post-lecture editing. Some of the politics sound more aspirational than probable. That said, I would be surprised if anyone working on the issues covered in ROAPE and wanting to reflect on their or their institution’s intellectual practice does not find moments of revelation and inspiration in this book.

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Banjo and Romance in Marseille 

by Claude Mckay

This year, like the previous two, my recommendations are novels. Among politicos – who are perhaps unhealthily obsessed with big questions –  there is a sickness that sees fiction as not real reading, or serious ‘work.’ Novels must be placed in a clandestine world of nighttime reading, a stash of secret stories to be read in the toilet, or on weekends and holidays. Neoliberal utilitarianism has driven a stake into our creative hearts.

I am a culprit and read my novels in secret. Yet what fools we are! Two novels by the great, great Claude McKay have blown apart my reading world this year. McKay was a remarkable figure by any measure – a poet, novelist, political activist and Bolshevik (a comrade of Lenin, Trotsky and Sylvia Pankhurst). He suffered terribly, and though lauded by many people in his day he was despised by others (including W. E. B. Du Bois).

Originally from Jamaica, McKay lived and worked everywhere, including in Marseille – the bustling, beautiful port city in southern France. Marseille is the city at the centre of two of his novels Banjo and Romance in Marseilles. Romance was published posthumously and only saw the light of day 90 years after it was written. The failure to get the book published almost broke the author.

Both of his ‘French’ novels are startling, the prose electrifying, each page – especially Banjo – challenges and confronts, as the characters (Senegalese sailors, Caribbean travellers, Black Americans and North Africans) cross the city, and survive, ‘panhandling’, as McKay writes, to wrestle joy, love and laughter from a hostile and racist world.

The topics in both novels are ours – race, class, revolution, sex, fighting against oppression, and living fully today. The stories have an astonishing, prescient power. If I can persuade one person to read McKay’s French novels this year, I will be satisfied.

Leo Zeilig

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America, Their America

by J.P. Clark-Bekederemo

My favourite read in 2024 is a controversial semi-autobiographic book published sixty years ago (in 1964) by Nigerian poet and playwright, J.P. Clark-Bekederemo, titled America, Their America, which critiques the American society, based on his experiences in the United States during the 1960s. The book recounts the author’s disillusionment as he confronts a society which he finds materialistic, individualistic, and racially divided.

His time in American academia frustrates Clark-Bekederemo, as he perceives it as superficial and disconnected from meaningful cultural engagement. He highlights the contradictions between American ideals and realities, particularly in the context of racial inequality, segregation and social injustice, expressing solidarity with African Americans while questioning their approaches to civil rights struggles. The author contrasts American consumerism and alienation with the communal and spiritual values of African society, and celebrates his cultural heritage, reaffirming his African identity and traditions. My impression is that America, Their America could in fact be described as a postcolonial exploration of cultural clashes and Western imperialism, even though there are elements the author offers less than a nuanced treatment. If, like me, you fancy excavating classic books, this book from six decades ago is my recommendation!

Chanda Mfula 

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Guerrilla Incursions into the Captialist Mindset: Essay with a Focus on Kenya, 1997-2003

by Shiraz Durrani

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Laudering Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property and Profits

by Too Black and Rasul A. Mowatt

The first of my two favourite reads, Guerrilla Incursions into the Capitalist Mindset: Essays with Focus on Kenya 1979-2023 by Shiraz Durrani, was published in 2023. Durrani’s collection of writings and original documentation revisits, recalls, and reminds readers of a radical Kenyan history that has been neutralised through the neoliberalisation of education and displaced and discredited by those in favour of financialised, growth-led development over inclusive, community-driven solutions. Through essays, interviews, petitions and letters, this book tells of the origins of the anticolonial freedom struggle, establishing a historical foundation from which ideas and strategies can inform the people’s ongoing demands for liberation. Presented from a working class perspective, Durrani suggests that the lessons from The Kenyan Land and Freedom Army (KLFA) – once painted as backward and primitive by colonial rulers – are crucial for understanding contemporary resistance movements and addressing the persistent issues of social and economic inequality in the country. I have returned to this book more than once since the youth-led, Gen-Z insurgency in Kenya last summer sparked nationwide protests against inflation, dysfunctional social services, and government corruption. For radicals in Africa and around the world, this book offers an otherwise suppressed revolutionary history, inspiration, and guidance for mobilising and collectively charting alternative futures to capitalism and imperialism.  Purchase the paperback or eBook here.

My second book is Laundering Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Profits by Too Black and Rasul A. Mowatt (2024, Routledge). A groundbreaking exploration of racial capitalism and the co-optation and depoliticisation of Black radicalism in America, this 2024 book presents a thoughtful challenge to the counterinsurgent tactics of the State that repackage Black Rage as a commodity to be bought, sold, and repressed. Sharing stories of resistance found throughout the African diaspora alongside a critical investigation of state-building under capitalism, writer and filmmaker Too Black and geographer Rasul A. Moswatt identify the 21^st Century city as the site for laundering, resistance, and anti-colonial struggle. Through thorough and widespread analysis, the authors suggest Black Rage – an angry reaction to a violently oppressive system – is capable of organising and collectively acting to build a new and just civilisation. Essential reading for scholars and organizers working at the intersection of capitalism and White supremacy, this book offers new considerations for the study of NGOs, the nonprofit industrial complex, and philanthropy for humanitarianism and human rights. A free PDF download available here by clicking GET at the top of the page. You can purchase the hardcover, paperback, or eBook here.

Zachary J. Patterson 

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Crossing Over 

by Ann Morgan

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Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead 

by Olga Tokarczuk

and

Conversations with Friends

by Sally Rooney 

My best reads have been only peripherally related to Africa, more to political economy, environment and war, but the connection to Africa is also there by implication.

Olga Tokarczuk’s ‘Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead’ is a very strange novel by this Nobel-prize winning author. It is cast as a murder mystery, but its main theme concerns the fight against corrupt bureaucracy and environmental depredation in an isolated rural community. The title is taken from a proverb of William Blake, and all 17 chapters have one of his proverbs as a subtitle

Sally Rooney’s ‘Conversations with Friends’: Sally Rooney is a ‘marmite’ writer (note for non-British readers: marmite is a yeast-based by-product of the brewing industry that half the country loves and half hates). Her writing is precise and unshowy and her novels almost plotless, or at least the plots are not important (E.M. Forster would have approved). As an admirer I find that she gets under the skin of her characters in a way that makes you think about yourself and your friends and acquaintances beyond your superficial immediate reactions. But what is perhaps of more relevance to ROAPE readers is that her lead characters are often self-described socialists, Marxists or communists. Furthermore, their convictions are not much argued over or polemicised or even acted on in the political arena; they are just assumed as natural.

Crossing Over by Ann Morgan: The connection to Africa is overt in this novel, in that one of the two protagonists is an economic migrant who has escaped people smugglers and taken refuge in a neglected farm on the coast of Kent. What makes it interesting is that the farm is still owned by an old woman, with incipient dementia, possibly related to a traumatic event in her early adulthood. Both characters are therefore traumatised albeit by very different experiences, and from initial incomprehension begin to develop some sort of friendship.

Colin Stoneman 

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Minor Detail

by Adania Shibli

In my life between Cape Town and Berlin, I have found this year particularly difficult. The outpour of pro-Palestinian solidarity in South Africa, from the political and cultural grassroots through to the court case brought by South Africa against Israel in the International Court of Justice, was contrasted by an unbelievably cold-hearted lack of empathy in German politics and the country’s mainstream media.

I selected Minor Detail by the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli as my read of the year because it moved me as an extraordinary literary achievement, and also because the slim novel experienced the persistent difficulty faced by Palestinian voices in countries such as Germany. Translated to multiple languages since its publication in Arabic in 2017, in October 2023, a ceremony scheduled for the Frankfurt Book Fair, where Shibli was to receive a prestigious award, was cancelled. This followed accusations of Israel-hatred and antisemitism in the German press against Shibli, notwithstanding that she had already condemned any form of nationalism and emphasised the novel’s aim of “perceiving the pain of others.”

Minor Detail begins in 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba – the catastrophe that led to the displacement and expulsion of more than 700,000 people, and which the Zionist narrative celebrates as the war of independence. The novel has two parts. Its first half fictionalises the true story of a 1949 gang rape and murder of a young Palestinian girl by Israeli soldiers. Shibli, a Palestinian writer based in Berlin, starts with an account of Israeli soldiers setting up camp at the desert border with Egypt. The boredom of long, uneventful encampment days is broken when they capture a teenager, whom they rape, kill, and bury in the sand.

The novel’s second part tells the experience of a young woman from Ramallah, who investigates this incident many years later. She becomes fascinated with this ‘minor detail’ of history, Top of FormBottom of Formnot only because of the nature of the crime but also because it was committed exactly twenty-five years to the day before she was born.

Minor detail evokes a present haunted by the past, which has raised its head in ever more sinister ways since October 2023, yet having drawn on three quarters of a century of an entrenched historical narrative. Reading this justification of the soldiers’ actions in 1949 sent a chill down my spine:

“And if the Arabs act according to their sterile nationalist sentiments and reject the idea of us settling here, if they continue to resist us, preferring the area remain barren, then we will act as an army. No one has more right to this area than us, after they neglected it and left it abandoned for so long after they let it be seized by the Bedouins and their animals. It is our duty to prevent them from being here and to expel them for good.”

I found that Minor detail cuts to the heart of the Palestinian experience of life under occupation. It also demonstrates the difficulty of re-writing the perpetrators’ chillingly-unmoved narrative and counter their entrenched sense of entitlement and superiority. The novel’s second part exposes the ongoing disempowerment and erasure in the ostensibly trivial experiences of the unnamed Ramallah woman. The travel restrictions faced by Palestinians in their own land obstruct her attempted investigation during a risky road trip. In the end, she is killed by Israeli soldiers on the same spot as the young girl who was murdered in 1949.

More than simply political fiction, this is a literary masterpiece. The two parts of the novel are impressively layered. Shibli’s writing is focused on the minute description of action and leaves little room for the narration of emotion. This impassive narration demonstrates the impossibility of shaking off the victim’s point of view in this haunting meditation on war, violence and memory.

Heike Becker  

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