Samir Amin - search results

At a ROAPE organised workshop at the ASAUK in September on 'African capitalist society' speakers reflected on the state of scholarship on capitalism in Africa and the dynamic and development of capitalism on the continent. Kate Meagher (LSE), Stefan Ouma (Frankfurt) and Jesse Ovadia (Windsor) were speakers, and Jörg Wiegratz (Leeds) and Peter Lawrence (Keele) chairs.

In this review of a major new book on Nigeria, Naija Marxisms, Salvador Ousmane describes how Nigerian Marxist theory developed in the second half of the 20th century and still provides intellectual ammunition for the labour movement. As a tradition that is alive today, Wynne writes how Nigeria Marxists have analysed Nigeria as a capitalist country, embedded in a global capitalist economy, but affected by pre-colonial structures.

Adefolarin A. Olamilekan review the new collection of essays 'Polarising Development: Alternatives to Neoliberalism and the Crisis.' He argues that many of the authors in the volume are creatively adapting the traditional tools to the current challenges of global inequalities within as much as between countries, to tackle issues such as climate change and the changing nature of imperialist competition.

John Saul has been an editor of one sort or another of ROAPE since the very beginning. In this interview he talks about almost fifty years as an activist scholar building solidarity for the struggles in Southern Africa and analysing developments in the sub-region.

In this wide-ranging interview with ROAPE's Mike Powell, Leo Zeilig asks him about Amílcar Cabral’s revolutionary activism. Powell talks about Cabral’s relentless focus on actual political dynamics of struggle, the purpose of theory, and his focus on the mode of production. For Cabral, Powell argues, nothing was static, everything was in a process of dialectical change, processes which could be consciously influenced by people acting together. Powell also discusses Basil Davidson’s collaboration and friendship with Cabral.

In this blogpost, Yusuf Serunkuma slams the cowardice of intellectuals today, who display self-censorship and contentment with the status quo, in contrast with an earlier generation of activists and subaltern scholars. Serunkuma argues that this did not happen overnight, rather it has taken years of manufacturing conformity and consent.

Fifty years ago, on May 11, 1973, young Senegalese revolutionary philosopher Omar Blondin Diop died in detention under suspicious circumstances in Dakar. Our understanding of liberation movements in Africa tends to focus on struggles in colonial settings, yet Florian Bobin argues that over sixty years after Senegal’s independence, Diop’s life, work, and legacy reveal what revolutionary politics looks like in a neo-colonial context.

ROAPE’s Peter Lawrence argues that there are strong echoes across Africa of the recession of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The reappearance of recession, debt and structural adjustment to the continent reminds us of the fundamental contradiction of capitalism. Based on his editorial in the forthcoming ROAPE issue 174, Lawrence concludes that there are alternatives to the continent’s enduring entrapment in a global financial system that works for the global financial corporates that dominate it.

Yusuf Serunkuma writes that a migrant worker dies many times, and has many killers. They die in their home countries - where they are structurally, violently uprooted -  they then die on the journeys to either Europe or the Middle East and then, they finally die in dehumanising working conditions if they ever arrive. Serunkuma exposes the hypocrisy, racism and murder at the heart of the global north.  

ROAPE’s Ray Bush reviews a collection of essays which grapple with early post-independence development projects and policies in Africa. Bush argues that the lessons in this collection are relevant for understanding the constraints and opportunities for radical African transformation in the 21st century.