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In an interview conducted in 2003, ROAPE’s Leo Zeilig spoke to Nelson Chamisa who was then the National Youth Chairperson of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) In the early 2000s, the MDC was a very different organization, founded by a mass movement, with a large working-class membership many in the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU). Now leader of the MDC, Chamisa promises his supporters victory in the elections and resistance if he does not win. In 2003 the 25-year-old organizer of a mass party, reflects on his own activism as a student militant, his hope for socialist change and the struggles against neo-liberal forces in the new party.

For roape.net Max Ajl interviews radical geographer and activist Habib Ayeb about food sovereignty, the peasantry in North Africa and film-making. Ayeb is a founder member of the Observatory of Food Sovereignty and Environment and Max Ajl is a sociologist, activist and an editor at Jadaliyya and Viewpoint. The interview was conducted on March 4, 2018, in Tunis, Tunisia.

Every quarter roape.net posts extracts from the introductions to our print journal. In this quarters issue (Vol. 44, Issue 153) Hannah Cross writes about the widespread revolt against neo-liberalism in an issue that addresses the ‘attacks on gender relations and rights, workers and standards of living’ across Africa.

On the launch of the English edition of Zohra Drif's extraordinary autobiography 'Inside the Battle of Algiers: Memoir of a Woman Freedom Fighter', Sarah Grey spends an evening with Algeria's national-liberation heroine in Washington. In unflinching detail and with piercing honesty, Drif describes the struggle against French occupation and colonialism in Algeria, and her vital role in the Battle of Algiers in the late 1950s.

Peter Waterman, who died on 16 June, remained committed until the very last to internationalism and the key role that labour must play in any transformation to a post-capitalist order. In this obituary for roape.net Peter Cole writes how Waterman appreciated, better than most, the failures of Marxism and the Soviet Union. Writing for years about Africa, Waterman relentlessly promoted international solidarity, as a force, a movement, and a theory. Cole celebrates the exemplary life of a scholar-activist.

Laura Mann writes about a workshop on Africa’s growing youth populations. Participants discussed the challenge that African societies face in reimagining their economies and social policies in light of this demographic pressure. These pressures were not relieved by the recent economic boom within African countries which has been resource-intensive and “jobless”.

Jointly published by Jacobin and ROAPE, David Seddon writes about Joseph Kabila’s second term as president which was supposed to end last November, but he’s still clinging to power, despite massive resistance. For the past two years, the political opposition has struggled against Kabila, worried that he will try to extend his term by any means necessary. Seddon explains what has been happening.

roape.net interviews Samir Amin, the Marxist economist, writer and activist. Amin is one of the continent’s foremost radical thinkers, who has spent decades examining Africa’s underdevelopment and Western imperialism. With great originality and insight he has applied Marxism to the tasks of socialist transformation in Africa.

In this far-reaching interview, ROAPE’s Ray Bush argues that the products and commodities that rural people produce must sustain local demand and local needs, rather than produce export crops to generate foreign exchange on the international markets. The foundation of any modern society has to be the basis of generating sufficiently and appropriately priced food stuffs from local markets. This is the path, he argues, to a real alternative for societies in the Global South.

For our series on capitalism in Africa, political economist Pádraig Carmody argues that although globalisation has ‘hollowed out’ the manufacturing base of many European and North American economies, in some parts of Africa there might be the possibility of connecting global production networks on relatively more favourable terms, which could assist industrialisation.