Talking back - search results

On 13 June 1978, President Samora Machel spoke at a large popular rally in a communal village in the Limpopo valley. Mozambique had been independent for less than three years, after a brutal ten-year war against the Portuguese colonial power, led by Frelimo. The party was now in the middle of a fierce struggle over agricultural policy. Colin Darch and David Hedges introduce the speech which is included in their forthcoming collection.

Before 1994 there was enormous speculation that white intransigence in South Africa would lead to a racial war. In his new book, Roger Southall finds that by the mid-1980s most whites saw the writing on the wall. Even so, he argues, the economic system which had maintained white dominance was left more or less intact.

Noosim Naimasiah interviews Irene Asuwa and Cidi Otieno about food sovereignty, ecologically appropriate production, distribution and consumption, social-economic justice, and local food systems in Kenya. They also discuss the role of social movements in raising popular consciousness and defending the rights of Kenya’s popular classes.

The Manzese Working Women’s Cooperative, or UWAWAMA, unites women in Tanzania seeking a cooperative alternative to the “slavery” of financial institutions. A recent meeting on International Women’s Day, was a chance for women to unite, organise, and articulate their demands. The women who participated in the day’s discussions summed up their demands for working women in a declaration. ROAPE posts the English translation of the declaration.

The Black Lives Matter movement will be recorded in history as one of the most explosive recent political events. Hundreds of thousands of people across the world have been on the streets, angry, radicalised and protesting to achieve change. Elizabeth Adofo writes how the movement has resonated in every part of the world and its reverberations were felt in Bermuda – a tiny island in the middle of the Atlantic.

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.

Zeyad El Nabolsy writes about a fascinating first-hand account of how Tanzanian Marxists interpreted and criticized economic, social, cultural, and political developments in the country in the 1960s and 1970s. El Nabolsy celebrates Karim F. Hirji’s memoir, The Travails of a Tanzanian Teacher which provides a vital and critical Marxist account of Julius Nyerere’s reforms.

ROAPE’s Chinedu Chukwudinma speaks to Anne Braithwaite about Walter Rodney’s assassination, and the activism of the Working People’s Alliance-Support Group in the UK. As a founding member of the group, Braithwaite explains that though Rodney was betrayed, then assassinated, his body destroyed and concerted efforts made to tarnish his record, people around the world continue to develop and build on his immense legacy.

Reflecting on events in Ethiopia, Fisseha Fantahun Tefera argues that to understand famines we must go beyond a narrow, localized and simplistic understanding to look at how global structures foster conflicts that lead to famines. Tefera explains that colonial legacies and contemporary global power shape famine response operations, both by the states themselves and by the international aid industry.

In the second part of his long-read on Frantz Fanon and the Algerian revolution, Hamza Hamouchene looks at recent events in Algeria. He argues...