We are told that Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to be a powerful tool for advancing democratic concerns and human rights across Africa. Yet, there are also early indicators that AI could undermine democratic institutions and processes, especially if these technologies prioritise colonial-capitalist development trajectories. Scott Timcke looks at some of the issues at stake.

ROAPE’s Njuki Githethwa writes that the current regime in Kenya has been struck a devastating blow by the uprising of youth. The state has been weakened and is now vulnerable. This regime can fall. A revolution in Kenya is in the air. But the success of this revolution, Githethwa argues, depends on how well placed the social forces, revolutionary movements and organisations are to harness, sustain and extend this uprising.

Angela Chukunzira writes about a protest movement in Kenya that has changed the country. The current regime has constantly bowed to western imperialism and the Finance Bill was an effort to offset Kenya’s debt to the Bretton Woods Institutions by imposing heavy taxation and economic hardships on the poor. Armed with smartphones and dance moves, Gen-Z took to the streets to redefine Kenyan protest culture.

A new chapter in Kenya’s history is being written as young people of Gen-Z express their discontent, undergo political awakening, and collectively protest for a life free of poverty and humiliation. In their messages and actions, Gen-Z protesters have made it clear that their demands for change go beyond policy reforms and challenge the heart of global power relations and capitalism. As Kenyans take to the streets again to exercise their democratic rights, Zachary Patterson reflects on the context, challenges, and successes of the past 10 days of protests.   

After Voices for African Liberation: Conversations with the Review of African Political Economy, ROAPE is pleased to publish a new edited collection, Capitalism and Economic Crime in Africa: The Neoliberal Period. The volume brings together a collection of research articles, briefings and blog posts that were published over a period of nearly 40 years (1986–2023), in our journal and on our website. Here, the book's editor Jörg Wiegratz introduces the book, followed by Yusuf Serunkuma's foreword to the collection. Both Wiegratz and Serunkuma firmly locate economic crime in Africa within a global, neoliberal capitalist order that sustains accumulation in the global centres of power and wealth and reproduces dependency and underdevelopment on the continent.

For too long the subaltern world, and Africa, has relied on reporting of events in the world by outlets at the centre of empire. The stories that emerge from these institutions tell complicated lies, peddle myths, and repeat racist tropes about the Global South. Yusuf Serunkuma lauds the impact of Aljazeera, a major news network which was set-up in 2006 and has changed our understanding of the world. Africa too, Serunkuma concludes, must create its own media network to tell its story.

For the first time in South Africa’s 30 years of democracy, the African National Congress (ANC) failed to obtain a majority of votes making a coalition with other parties imminent. Luke Sinwell considers the consequences, and discusses the emergence of a new party, MK, led by Jacob Zuma. Sinwell looks at what has happened to the left, and its repeated failure to make any serious inroads into South Africa’s political scene.

On 2 June 1937, members of the Labour Trade Union of Kenya returned to work after their masterfully strategic 62-day strike secured them an eight-hour work day, a nearly 25% wage increase, and recognition from colonial employers. Shiraz Durrani’s A Struggle of 62 Days dramatises the legacy of this mass strike. In this article, ROAPE contributor Zachary Patterson reviews Durrani’s play and writes on the history of the Kenyan labour movement in the struggle for independence and liberation.

Israel, as a settler colony, perceives Palestine as ‘empty land’, empty of people, culture, history and a future. Busani Ngcaweni argues that Palestinians are denied an identity and have become dis-membered, without a home, state or nation. There are striking similarities, Ngcaweni explains, between Israel’s ideology of racial subjugation by a ‘God-chosen people’ and apartheid South Africa’s belief in racial and religious superiority over an inferior black race.

Colin Darch writes about attending the anniversary last month of the Portuguese revolution on 25 April 1974. This was the  “fourth revolution” alongside the anti-colonial transformations in Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and Angola. Darch argues that it remains vital to remember that between 1974-1975 radical socialist transformation in a small country on the south-western edge of Europe was on the cards – and that it was African leaders such as Amílcar Cabral, Samora Machel and Agostinho Neto who were showing the way.

On the evening of 24 April, a deluge of rain led to flooding that decimated many homes along the Mathare and Getathuru rivers in Nairobi, Kenya. The floods have left nearly 200 people dead and 200,000 more displaced across the country. Zachary Patterson reports on the climate disaster that is claiming lives, and uprooting communities in Kenya and the activists providing support to the displaced while campaigning against state brutality.

Analysing the recent anti-French coups across West Africa, Salvador Ousmane argues that opposition to French imperialism is not a panacea for the region’s poverty and crises. Ousmane also argues that calls for a new currency are overstated, and instead urges collective action against the military juntas and old ruling elites across the region by the working poor in their trade unions.

ROAPE’s Rama Salla Dieng writes Senegal is facing a wave of protests following the appointment of the new  government. Feminist organisations have been shocked at the pathetic number of women ministers in the new government. Dieng writes about the history of marginalisation of women in public office in Senegal since independence, and what the new government must do.

Immaculata Abba and Sa’eed Husaini introduce a project that aims at digitising important and imperilled archival holdings of Nigeria’s radical and pro-democracy activists to increase accessibility to these materials as well as to preserve them for posterity. Abba and Husaini invite researchers working in the social sciences and humanities to submit proposals for research papers that use archival research in the collections to produce new narratives of Nigeria's rich and important history of the radical left.

In this blog summary of a ROAPE journal article, Ben Radley argues that the Democratic Republic of the Congo provides an illustrative case of...