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Horman Chitonge and ROAPE's Peter Lawrence introduce Volume 51 Issue 180 of the journal, a special issue honouring the life and work of leading African scholar-activist and one of our contributing editors, Lungisile Ntsebeza. Ntsebeza’s work has prominently featured in debates on the land question, rural local government and social movements in South Africa and Africa more broadly. Yet Ntsebeza’s work has not only been academic. He has used his research on land and rural governance to inform and support the daily struggles of communities in different parts of South Africa and the continent.

In a celebration of the life of John Saul, his friend and comrade Peter Lawrence remembers a tireless revolutionary, activist, and writer. One of the founding editors of ROAPE, Saul worked in Tanzania and Mozambique, where he analysed the struggles and possibilities for real independence and socialism. Later, he was a leading member and founder of Southern African liberation organisations in Canada. Lawrence marks a remarkable life and contribution to socialist politics.

In this review essay ROAPE’s Peter Lawrence discusses Alex Callinicos’ new book The New Age of Catastrophe. Callinicos has written a book that admits to the mind-numbing scale of the catastrophe that confronts humanity but provides enough ammunition to those who want to see a more optimistic future. Lawrence argues that Callinicos makes a strong case for socialism as the solution and mass mobilisation from below of the organised working class as the only way to achieve it. 

ROAPE’s Peter Lawrence argues that there are strong echoes across Africa of the recession of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The reappearance of recession, debt and structural adjustment to the continent reminds us of the fundamental contradiction of capitalism. Based on his editorial in the forthcoming ROAPE issue 174, Lawrence concludes that there are alternatives to the continent’s enduring entrapment in a global financial system that works for the global financial corporates that dominate it.

ROAPE’s Peter Lawrence writes how Covid-19 has hit capitalism when it was already confronting systemic problems. The pandemic has helped to connect the dots between environmental degradation and the development of global capitalism. Lawrence argues that only with organised pressure from below can a way through be found.

From the editorial to issue 156 of ROAPE, Peter Lawrence discusses articles that examine the state and global capitalism. Included in the issue are papers which look at how the colonial and post-colonial states in Malawi have pursued policies that have been in the interests of the tobacco industry, state capture in South Africa's motor industry and the history of capital controls. While the Debates section is devoted to the ROAPE/Third World Network workshop on radical political economy and industrialisation in Africa held in Accra last November.

At a ROAPE organised workshop at the ASAUK in September on 'African capitalist society' speakers reflected on the state of scholarship on capitalism in Africa and the dynamic and development of capitalism on the continent. Kate Meagher (LSE), Stefan Ouma (Frankfurt) and Jesse Ovadia (Windsor) were speakers, and Jörg Wiegratz (Leeds) and Peter Lawrence (Keele) chairs.

In this extended report on a far-reaching and radical workshop held in Ghana in July 2015 on equitable development and transformation, Peter Lawrence and Yao Graham describe the debates and discussions that took place on Africa's political and economic future.

Peter Lawrence reflects on the early days of the Review of African Political Economy, the role Ruth First played in the Review's first issues and an important argument about Cuba's involvement in Angola that divided the editorial group.

ROAPE's Ray Bush introduces Volume 51 Issue 181 of the journal, a special 50th anniversary issue on imperialism and Africa. The role of imperialism in undermining African sovereignty and independence has been a recurrent theme in ROAPE since the journal's first issue editorial back in 1974. Here, Bush interrogates what imperialism is, how it may have changed over time, and with what consequences.