sudan - search results

Tom Gillespie and Seth Schindler argue that infrastructure megaprojects in Kenya and Ghana have driven rapid urbanisation processes in historically rural areas. Drawing on the concept of rentier capitalism, they show how infrastructure initiatives created opportunities for the appropriation of rents by various actors, from global real estate developers to local land speculators. If policy initiatives to socialise and redistribute land rents are to be successful, Gillespie and Schindler conclude, they must be accompanied by political movements to challenge the vested interests that benefit from rentier capitalism in Africa.

Foreign aid to Somaliland has fostered authoritarian rule and contributed towards conflict in the eastern city of Las Anod. In recent months, the apparent miracle of democracy has fractured as conflict has led to hundreds of deaths, and hundreds of thousands displaced. Jethro Norman writes there is a clear international dimension to the crisis. Those in Washington, London and Brussels are oblivious to the problem right under their nose: the consequences of their own aid and investment strategies. 

In a response to Fana Gebresenbet and Yonas Tariku’s recent Debate piece in ROAPE’s journal, ‘The Pretoria Agreement: Mere cessation of hostilities or heralding a new era in Ethiopia?’.  Mulugeta Gebrehiwot, Alex de Waal, Martin Plaut, Jan Nyssen, Mohamed Hassen, and Gebrekirstos Gebreselassie argue that the article reproduces the central narrative threads of the propaganda of the Federal Government of Ethiopia.

In an interview with Victoria Brittain, Tariq Ali speaks about Winston Churchill, the subject of his latest book. Ali has produced a searing critique full of little known detail, of a long and powerful British life which did untold damage at home and abroad. Ali exposes Churchill’s crimes against freedom fighters in Kenya. As the reputations of empires are being dissected, Ali and Brittain discuss the crimes of an imperial activist.

Habib Ayeb and Abeer Abazeed celebrate the life of Helmi Sharawy. Born in Egypt in 1935, Sharawy saw Africa as one with all its own coherence. He spent his life campaigning for African unity, with empirical knowledge of Africa he was a committed anti-racist and anti-colonial scholar and activist. The idea of two Africa-s was a colonial and racist lie – the continent was one and must unite.

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.

ROAPE contributor Yusuf Serunkuma asks if the pillage we are witnessing on the African continent—mostly from the 1980s-onwards—is worse than the exploitation of the 1884-1960s, where is the resistance? Serunkuma writes that even after decolonisation has been achieved (the academy decolonised, stolen artefacts returned, Rhodes, and others, fall), Africa will remain an impoverished and looted continent. The reason for this absurd state of affairs is that the African intelligentsia still struggles to see and expose the performative, informal, localized, and seemingly benevolent manifestation of new colonialism.

The action proposed by world leaders, their advisors, and corporate lobbyists at the climate talks (COP27) in Egypt are neoliberal, market-based, and focused on preserving a racist and capitalist global order. Introducing a collection of papers on the climate emergency in North Africa, Hamza Hamouchene, Ouafa Haddioui and Katie Sandwell denounce mainstream and top-down solutions for an environmental crisis engulfing the region, and continent.

Looking in detail at the issues behind COP27, ROAPE’s Ray Bush examines migration in the age of the climate emergency. The consequences of imperialism, colonialism and climate crises is the persistence of labour migration. Bush argues that the underlying cause of migration is structural inequality and its reproduction between the global north and south, which is now exacerbated by climate catastrophe.  

We share a second extract from ‘Revolution is the choice of the people: crisis and revolt in the Middle East and North Africa’ by Anne Alexander. The extract provides an astute historic and comparative analysis of the revival of the workers' movement, which played a vital role in the mass protests and revolutions of 2011 and 2019.