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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.

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.

Barbara Bompani takes aim at the dominant narrative that rising homophobia in Africa is the result of external actors, and in particular US conservative Christian groups. Drawing from more than a decade of research and analysis, she argues rising homophobia is not simply the result of external influence, but is shaped by the complex role religion has played in shaping new forms of nationalisms on the continent. What we are observing in several African countries, she contends, is the emergence of a new politics that threatens untold and profound harm to LGBT communities.

In an analysis of the Wagner group in Africa, Graham Harrison argues that Western coverage on the group’s activities on the continent characterises it as an extension of the Kremlin’s violent and venal cronyism and a disrupter of African-Western partnerships dedicated to the building of liberal sovereignties through aid, peacebuilding, and policy advice. Yet, Harrison explains the commentary from Western circles share a deep and significant misreading of African politics.

ROAPE’s Hannah Cross writes that the UK government’s policy to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda has been ruled unlawful by the Court of Appeal. Asylum seekers, the court argued, risked being returned to their home country and could face inhumane treatment and persecution. Paul Kagame’s Rwanda, with the complicity of Western media and international financial institutions, has been presented as a successful developmental state, but in reality it is a place of systematic state brutality.