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While revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s in Europe, the United States and Latin America have been the subject of abundant literature, similar movements that emerged in Africa have received comparatively little attention. In an extract from their forthcoming book, the editors, Pascal Bianchini, Ndongo Sylla and Leo Zeilig shed new light on these political movements. They argue that Africa’s revolutionary left was extremely active in these years, and forms a vital part of global history.

Roberto Sirvent interviews Koni Benson about her new book Crossroads: I Live Where I Like, that tells a sidelined story of the creation of the city of Cape Town, and the central role of movements led by African women in campaigning for public services. Benson speaks about how today there are over 2 million people in informal settlements, in a so-called ‘World Class’ city in the ‘Rainbow Nation’ - the great myth of the 1994 miracle.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Black Panthers told their members and supporters that to be a good revolutionary you must make time to read for at least two hours a day. We realise with the almighty, soul-destroying pressures of work and neoliberalism, this will seem like an impossible luxury to many of our readers and supporters; but it’s a good objective for 2023, and the political and personal challenges to recalibrate the world, and our lives, for a just and socialist alternative. It’s in this spirit that we – members of ROAPE’s Editorial Group – offer the following list of our favourite radical reads over the last 12 months.

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.

In her final blog in the series Lee Wengraf celebrates the life and work of Walter Rodney, the scholar, working class militant and revolutionary from Guyana who was murdered 37 years ago. His book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains a classic that must be carefully studied by activists and scholars today.

In this extensive interview, socialist activist and writer Issa Shivji discusses the peasantry, capitalist development and socialism. In a discussion with Freedom Mazwi he argues that those who predicted the end of history, have been proven woefully wrong. Capitalism and the planet are in deep crisis. For the first time in decades people in both the South and the North are openly using the ideas and slogans of socialism – even if they have divergent ideas. Shivji argues, we must let a hundred socialist flowers bloom.

ROAPE’s Ben Radley interviews the Congolese historian and scholar-activist Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja. He explains that the overriding motivation of his work is solidarity with the oppressed and an uncompromising quest for the truth to elucidate the political history of the Congo and Africa generally from the colonial period to the present.

In an interview with ROAPE’s Hannah Cross, we ask about her work, research and her new book Migration Beyond Capitalism. A book that asks what kinds of political alliances, programmes, policies and arguments do – and do not – work in the interests of global worker solidarity.

ROAPE's Peter Dwyer interviews the scholar-activist Tunde Zack-Williams. In 2020, Zack-Williams became the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom’s Distinguished Africanist. For decades, his research and writing on economic and political reform across Africa has focused on alternatives to western prescriptions, which has influenced his work as an editor of ROAPE.

On 17 January 1961 Patrice Lumumba, the Congo’s first leader, was murdered. In this celebration of his life and work, the Congolese scholar and...