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Follow the money – corporate mining profits in South Africa

Andy Higginbottom summarises his report on corporate profits in South Africa. He asks a number of vital questions - who are the main corporate players in South African mining? Who profits from mining in South Africa? The principal data source is thirteen company annual reports for 2022, supplemented by relevant reporting and more analytical literature. Higginbottom argues that we must fight the latest chapter in imperialist neo-colonialism to ensure that Cecil Rhodes’ structural legacy must fall.

How Hegel’s Deliberate Ignorance of African History Legitimated the Colonisation of Africa

Isaac Samuel is an independent researcher whose work focuses on African history and economics. His prolific output on pre-colonial African history can be found on his blog AfricanHistoryExtra, which as a collective body of extraordinary scholarship puts the lie to the still widely held belief that – in the words of esteemed University of Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Rope in the 1960s – there is no African history, “only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness”. Here, in a blistering account, Samuel shows how German philosopher Georg Hegel – one of the most influential figures of 19th century philosophy – wilfully misinterpreted first-hand accounts of the Asante kingdom from the 18th century. The result, both in the work of Hegel and those who followed him, was the construction of an absurdly fictional account of African society, steeped in popular beliefs of his time about the continent’s supposed backwardness, that deliberately subsumed the richness and complexity of Asante history in order to legitimate imperial expansion and colonial rule.

Closing the open veins: international solidarity 10 years after the Marikana Massacre

Joseph Mullen introduces a pamphlet written for the 10th anniversary of the Marikana Massacre. The pamphlet is a guide to be used to educate those unfamiliar with the massacre, and as a call for internationalist, anti-imperialist solidarity with the ongoing struggle in South Africa. The full pamphlet (available in this blogpost) is a vital educational document for reading groups, activists and students.

Surrounded – an ethnography of new colonialism

ROAPE contributor Yusuf Serunkuma asks if the pillage we are witnessing on the African continent—mostly from the 1980s-onwards—is worse than the exploitation of the 1884-1960s, where is the resistance? Serunkuma writes that even after decolonisation has been achieved (the academy decolonised, stolen artefacts returned, Rhodes, and others, fall), Africa will remain an impoverished and looted continent. The reason for this absurd state of affairs is that the African intelligentsia still struggles to see and expose the performative, informal, localized, and seemingly benevolent manifestation of new colonialism.

‘A Curt Farewell’: decolonizing public space in Namibia

At the end of October this year a decision was made in Namibia’s capital, Windhoek, to remove the statue of a colonial officer – the purported founder of the city. Heike Becker describes the extraordinary activist campaign to decolonialise public spaces in the country.

The CIA versus the UN in the Congo: The covert delivery of fighter jets...

An edited extract from White Malice: The CIA and the Neocolonisation of Africa by Susan Williams. The events in this extract took place shortly after...

The Hate Paradigm – How Africa was demonised in the West

Reviewing a new book, the Congolese historian, Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, asks how Africa was demonisation by non-Africans, and Westerners in particular, to generate the hatred and discrimination against Black Africans and their descendants until today? Nzongola-Ntalaja writes that Manufacturing Hate: How Africa Was Demonized in Western Media by Milton Allimadi provides excellent answers to this question, with powerful examples of institutionalised racism from major Western media.

Insurgent Decolonisation: Ndlovu-Gatsheni on the sins of colonialism

Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni writes how war, violence and extractivism defined the legacy of the empire in Africa, and why recent attempts to explore the ‘ethical’...

Capitalism did not die: rethinking a failed liberation struggle

ROAPE’s John Saul writes about who won and who lost in the apparently seismic transition to a liberated South Africa in the early 1990s. He sees a parallel recolonization of South Africa both by global capital and by the self-interested actions of local political elites.

Creative Energy Unleashed: Black Lives Matter and Decolonisation

Heike Becker reflects on the Black Lives Matter movement on the continent, the development of radical art and how institutionalized racism and its root – capitalism – continue to kneel on all our necks.