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For roape.net Magdi el Gizouli provides a detailed account of the revolutionary crisis in Sudan. Events started on 18 and 19 December last year in the small city of Atbara, but soon spread across the country. However, the forces of counter-revolution in the country are formidable. Importers, wholesale merchants, bankers, military and security officers, large landowners, sharia scholars and preachers embedded in Islamic banks, all have stakes in maintaining in the current regime. Magdi el Gizouli argues that to dismantle their powers and to fulfil the promise of the Atbara moment requires a revolution in Leninist terms. The country and its peoples have been subject to deep and dramatic socio-economic changes of which the current wave of protest is a symptom, it is so far unclear whether the leadership of the protest movement can turn elemental anger into systemic agency.

The Central African Republic has, despite being at the centre of the continent, been a country on the margins of global power since independence. Despite a conflict which has lasted for more than a decade, the country remains largely ignored. Ben Jackson writes that while African conflicts are often underreported, for example the war in Sudan barely gets a mention, the situation in the Central African Republic demands our attention.

Jesse Harasta describes the complex dynamics of contemporary imperialism and resistance. He argues that understanding a world system divided into Core, Semi-Periphery and Periphery is essential for unpicking and analysing the real workings of global capitalism today. Harasta states that Gulf states have engaged in an active imperial re-peripheralization of the Horn of Africa, which has had devastating consequences but it has also triggered resistance, and important political confrontations.

On CLR James’ 123rd birthday, Matthew Quest examines the collaboration between James and George Padmore since their partnership within the International African Service Bureau in the 1930s. Despite their joint activism in Pan-African affairs, political rifts emerged on democracy, socialism, and revolutionary strategy. Quest looks at James’ portrayal of Padmore to highlight the political tensions underlying their friendship. James' and Padmore's different perspectives on anti-imperialism reveals hidden disputes in the Black radical tradition. 

Last year, for the first time on roape.net, members of ROAPE’s Editorial Group offered some of our favourite radical reads from 2022, new and old, fiction and non-fiction. Here again, in what we hope will beome an annual offering, Editorial Group members provide a list of books that have served to educate, shock, move, and inspire over the last 12 months, in our 2023 offering of ROAPE's best reads for African radicals. Five of the ten books listed are available as free downloads.

South African human rights activist and academic, Salim Vally, discusses the Israel-Palestine conflict, asserting that it originates from 75 years of Israeli settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing. He calls for African support for Palestine against Israel's military-industrial complex, backed by Western imperialism. Vally also criticizes the shifting positions of African countries on the conflict and explores the parallels between the Israeli regime and South African Apartheid.

On the 60th anniversary of Kenya's independence, Gathanga Ndung’u criticizes the country for betraying its independence war heroes and aligning with imperialist forces. He points out Kenya's support for Israel and abandonment of Palestinians, alliances with apartheid regimes, and questionable international peacekeeping missions. The article calls for a rethink of Kenya’s foreign policies, realigning with oppressed nations, and rectifying internal betrayals to truly achieve independence.

Mark Duffield and Nicholas Stockton write about the spectacular growth in livestock exports from the Horn of Africa to the urbanising Gulf states, and argue that neoliberalism has transformed the former reciprocity between ‘farmers’ and ‘herders’ into a relation of permanent war. Based on their article in ROAPE - freely available to read below - they argue that the crisis in the Horn is rooted in how the wealth of its peoples is being internationally plundered.

Rama Salla Dieng explains that the current genocide in Palestine is a feminist and reproductive justice issue. The ultimate goal of Israel - and the Western powers that support this settler colonial and Apartheid state - is to render impossible the social and societal reproduction of Palestinians, and eventually to lead them to their physical death.

In the 1960s, newly independent African governments asserted sovereignty over their metal and mineral resources, in a reversal of their prior colonial exploitation by European mining corporations. In this excerpt from his new book Disrupted Development in the Congo: The Fragile Foundations of the African Mining Consensus – published today, with the first three chapters available as free downloads – Ben Radley shows how transnational corporations have once again become the dominant force assuming ownership and management of industrial mining projects, and this time around across a far greater number of African countries than during the colonial period. Radley argues this latest reversal has taken place through a three-stage process spearheaded by the World Bank: first, blame the African state; second, liberalize and privatize; and third, criminalize African miners. Recent mining code revisions in several countries have been heralded by some as marking a new era of resource nationalism. Yet the new codes remain a far cry from the earlier period of resource sovereignty.