In light of the mass anti-austerity protests in Kenya and Argentina in 2024, Rea Maci offers a historical analysis of the neo-colonial relationship between the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and these two countries. She exposes the cycle of debt, austerity, poverty, and governmental negligence imposed by this institution of Western imperialism on nations in the Global South. Maci decries IMF policies as a form of unforgiving structural violence inflicted on the most vulnerable populations. She calls for renewed global solidarity to dismantle the institutions that perpetuate colonial power structures and economic dependency.

Over the next two weeks, we will be posting three pieces to mark the publication of Working People Speak - Oral Histories of Neoliberal Africa. Here, the book's editors introduce the volume, which draws on worker testimonies from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Uganda, and South Sudan. They argue the value of oral histories in helping document and understand significant change in the everyday working lives of people on the continent, and review the wide range of material covered by the book. Commentaries by Alexander Freund and Kalundi Serumaga will follow next week.

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.

Dismantling Green Colonialism has received much critical acclaim since its publication with Pluto Press in October 2023. Here, while acknowledging the usefulness of such a volume in the current climate and highlighting several must-read chapters, Max Ajl sees a missed opportunity in how the book is framed by its co-editors, Hamza Hamouchene and Katie Sandwell. Shorn of a broader anti-imperialist politics, among other issues, Ajl argues that the edited collection loses its political edge and is unable to help address the problems it identifies.

There is an ongoing effort to archive the materials of Arghiri Emmanuel (1911-2001), a Greek-French theorist and author of the seminal 1972 critique of imperialism Unequal Exchange. In the process of creating this archive, the Arghiri Emmanuel Association discovered new information about Emmanuel’s time in the Belgian Congo (1937-1941 and 1946-1960). Here, in the second of this two-part instalment (the first post can be found here), Héritier Ilonga details Emmanuel's relationship with leader of the rebel socialist Free Republic of Congo, Antoine Gizenga, considers the complex nature of his relationship with Lumumba, and reveals Emmanuel's insistence that socialism - not capitalism - must come first in the Congo.