Thomas Sankara - search results

This project hopes to provide a constantly up-dated account (and archive) and analysis of instances of popular protest and examples of social movements across the African continent with a view to identifying patterns and trends.

Eugénie Rokhaya Aw, imprisoned under the regime of Léopold Sédar Senghor, was an active Senegalese left-wing activist who fought clandestinely for the country’s democratisation in the 1970s. More than a year after her passing in July 2022, her testimony sheds light on the struggles of several generations who fought imperialism beyond official African independences.

ROAPE’s Leo Zeilig interviews the radical journalist, campaigner, and writer Victoria Brittain. Brittain has spent a lifetime exposing the lies and destructions of Western imperialism and celebrating the resistance and hope of those who fight back. For decades, Brittain worked and lived in Africa, and struggled to get the voices of the oppressed heard, and their lives seen.

Adam Mayer praises a new collection, Liberated Texts, which includes rediscovered books on Africa’s socialist intellectual history and political economy, looking at the startling, and frequently long ignored work of Walter Rodney, Karim Hirji, Issa Shivji, Dani Wadada Nabudere, A. M. Babu and Makhan Singh.

In an interview with ROAPE’s Leo Zeilig, writer, researcher and activist Ndongo Samba Sylla speaks about his work, French imperialism in Africa, and the struggle for economic and political liberation in Senegal and the continent. Ndongo continues Samir Amin’s search for anti-capitalist political alternatives, grounded in a radical analysis of trends and developments across Africa, and the Global South.  

West Africa is in the grip of a wave of coups, popular protests and fierce geopolitical struggles. Amy Niang argues that declining western hegemony in the region goes hand to hand with intensified competition for access and control of Africa’s natural resources. Furthermore, Niang states, the Russian occupation of Ukraine compels us to look at the importance of the country's growing presence in Africa.

Adam Mayer celebrates a new volume on the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Lenin150 (Samizdat) has a sheer diversity that takes one’s breath away. Authors young and old, queer and old-style Marxist-Leninist, women and men write about Lenin’s work, history and legacy in an anthology that also includes many African and Black voices.  Mayer argues that this rich collection proves that Leninism is alive and well.

ROAPE’s Bettina Engels reviews a new Handbook of Marxism and Post-Marxism which, she argues, presents a variety of important Marxist thinkers and successfully demonstrates the wide range of theoretical approaches of those who have engaged with Marxism.

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...

Discussing the recent elections, Luke Melchiorre argues that Uganda’s Bobi Wine is a symbol for a generation's desire for political change. However, his power has often distracted attention from the underlying politics of his People Power project. Melchiorre explains that Wine did not disavow the country’s underlying neoliberal moorings, but instead fixated on the ruling party’s history of ‘poor governance’.