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As the total disregard for people of African descent is shown in the context of the deadly invasion of Ukraine by Russia, Christiane Ndedi Essombe and Benjamin Maiangwa argue that the contempt and compulsive need to invalidate, belittle and dehumanize people of African descent remains unchanged in an irredeemably racist Europe.

In a major exposé of the ‘fintech revolution’ in Africa, Milford Bateman and Fernando Amorim Teixeira write that the investor-driven fintech model is nothing less than a 'digitalised' extension of the earlier colonial-imperialist 'extractivist' models that enabled the western nations to appropriate Africa's natural resource wealth to fund their own economic prosperity.

Sixty years after his death from leukemia at the age of 36 on 6 December 1961, and the publication of The Wretched of the Earth, Timothy Wild reviews a new book which reminds us of the relevance of Frantz Fanon. Fanon’s work, Wild argues, continues to engage people by its brilliance, rage, analysis, and hope that the poor can be the authors of their own destiny. 

Ahead of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), Tim Zajontz looks at the immense amounts of debt African governments owe Chinese lenders. This debt is central to capitalist accumulation and financial extraction from the African continent. Zajontz argues that Chinese capital is now pivotal to the global circuit of capital and China, just like other creditors, uses debt for the conquest of Africa and its resources.

Reflecting on African studies, the neo-liberal university, decolonisation and resistance, Ray Bush discuses in an interview with Richard Borowski about what it means to be a scholar-activist working on Africa, and how his teaching and research have been informed by a commitment to the radical transformation of the continent, and the world.

Anna Wolkenhauer writes that there is a much to be criticised about recent social protection programmes in Africa. Though these programmes will not end global capitalism she urges scholar-activists to recognise that they may provide a momentum for posing unresolved social questions at national and global levels.

In an extract from the preface of the African edition of her book, Extracting Profit: Imperialism, Neoliberalism and the New Scramble for Africa, ROAPE’s Lee Wengraf writes about the failure of the system we live under to resolve the crises it produces, and the centrality of resistance to build an alternative to capitalism in Africa and worldwide.

Given the recent exposures of crucial weaknesses in their security systems and encouraged by multinational corporations some African governments are turning to surveillance technologies and foreign military support to garrison their economic hubs against violent disturbances.

Since November last year, Ethiopia has been fighting a devastating civil war with the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front. Hibist Kassa argues that the scale of misinformation on the war, lack of context and attempts to impose false narratives is deeply troubling and pervasive. Kassa calls for a nuanced and historically grounded approach to properly analyse the course of events.

In this report on the TWN-Africa and ROAPE webinar on vaccine imperialism held last month, Cassandra Azumah writes that the unfolding vaccine apartheid which has left Africa with the lowest vaccination rates in the world is another depressing example of the profit and greed of Big Pharma facilitated by imperialist power.