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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.

ROAPE in partnership with Third World Network-Africa will hold a series of three webinars starting in August 2021 to explore the connections between Africa, climate change and the pandemic from a political economy perspective. The first webinar is being held on 5 August.

Magdi el Gizouli argues that the new prison complexes in Sudan’s major towns are part of the legal scaffolding of the privatisation and austerity assault which continues to punish insolvency with imprisonment. Gizouli sees the massive rates of imprisonment as manifestations of social conflict, the hunger, the hustling, the jockeying, the wheeling and dealing of Sudan today.

ROAPE’s Bettina Engels reviews a new Handbook of Marxism and Post-Marxism which, she argues, presents a variety of important Marxist thinkers and successfully demonstrates the wide range of theoretical approaches of those who have engaged with Marxism.

Heike Becker writes about the recent agreement between the German and Namibian governments for special “reconciliation and reconstruction” projects to benefit the Ovaherero and Nama communities that were directly affected by colonial genocide. Becker asks what are the possible international ramifications of the Namibian-German agreement? Will the deal possibly turn the tide more broadly for reparation claims from ex-colonies of the empires of European colonialism?

When Guyanese Revolutionary Walter Rodney returned to Guyana in the mid-1970s, he joined a socialist organisation called the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) to fight against Fordes Burnham’s dictatorship. Anne Braithwaite speaks to ROAPE’s Chinedu Chukwudinma about her experience as a founding member of the WPA's Support Group in the UK ahead of the 41st anniversary of Walter Rodney’s assassination.

ROAPE’s Peter Dwyer introduces new members of the journal’s editorial working group. He welcomes a new generation, Leona Vaughn, Chinedu Chukwudinma and Njuki Githethwa, who are activists from the African diaspora and those implanted in Africa. In a personal, political and scholarly sense, Dwyer argues, they will irrevocably change ROAPE.

In the sands of the arena, gladiators embodying colonial and decolonial modes of thought are locked in academic combat, exchanging blows of disciplinary conquest, identity and self-styled objectivity versus self-awareness and epistemic revolution. Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, describing such a combat, reignites important questions and sets out to open our eyes to the battle lines, and the weapons that are available to defeat gladiatorial scholarship – the moment to learn to unlearn is upon us, he writes.