John Saul - search results

Written in 1978 from inside a Mozambican prison camp Wilfred Mhanda’s devastating Treatise, published for the first time with roape.net, exposes the reality of Zimbabwe’s so-called war for liberation. Known by his nom de guerre, Dzinashe ‘Dzino’ Machingura, Dzino explains that the guiding principle of the Zimbabwean nationalist movement was the pursuit of personal and clique power and not the attainment of revolutionary ideals. Mhanda presents an extraordinary, critical view of the liberation struggle, providing a Fanonian analysis of the role of the so-called liberators of contemporary Zimbabwe. This invaluable, unpublished text is introduced by David Moore.

In the final part of her penetrating analysis of worker and community struggles in Mozambique, Judith Marshall argues that the strikes, bread riots and blockades across the country are part of a broader panoply of global resistance at a moment in history characterized by grotesque rich-poor disparities and unregulated corporate power.

In the first of a two part article on the struggle of Mozambique’s workers and poor, Judith Marshall writes about the experiment in radical transformation in the first years of the country’s independence after 1975. However the tragic slide in the 1980s into the arms of the IMF and World Bank saw the adoption of structural adjustment. Marshall charts the birth of new protest movements against the government and international capital.

In his second piece on popular protest in Africa, David Seddon examines the popular reactions to elected presidents who have extended – or attempted to extend - their term of office beyond the limits defined by the Constitution, as is the case in all too many African countries.

Miles Larmer reviews Lara Pawson's In the Name of the People, seeing in the book an exploration of the disillusionment with African national liberation. These are lessons, Miles writes, that continue to be highly instructive for many of us today

The first essay in our special issue on Radical Agendas in South Africa argues that the liberation struggle that culminated in 1994 and saw the emergence of a formally democratic South Africa and a population apparently liberated from oppression and, theoretically, from penury, has not been, in its essentials, so very liberatory after all. In subsequent essays, Vishwas Satgar, Shireen Hassim and others write about South Africa's radical possibilities.