Heike Becker reviews a book, Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg, which speaks to a generation of anti-colonial activists, from Cape Town to Cairo, London and Berlin, who are using a new language of decoloniality, with which they claim radical humanity in struggle and theory. The heart of the book puts Rosa in conversation with thinkers of the Black radical tradition.
Gathanga Ndung’u commemorates activists whose lives were snatched away by Kenya’s brutal capitalism. Activists who launched a war against a system of impunity, a world one hundred times larger, mightier, and older than them, but, Ndung’u explains, that each of them mounted a defence to protect and defend their comrades and communities.
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. Essombe and Maiangwe ask what does this racism reveal about international human rights frameworks?
In 1963 Walter Rodney moved to London. He had received a scholarship to undertake a PhD in the UK. In the UK, Rodney confronted racism, a sectarian left and studied Marxism alongside CLR James. In the second part of his biography, A Rebel’s Guide to Walter Rodney, Chinedu Chukwudinma explores the development of Rodney’s politics in London.
The Manzese Working Women’s Cooperative, or UWAWAMA, unites women in Tanzania seeking a cooperative alternative to the “slavery” of financial institutions. A recent meeting on International Women’s Day, was a chance for women to unite, organise, and articulate their demands. The women who participated in the day’s discussions summed up their demands for working women in a declaration. We post the English translation of the declaration and an introduction by Michaela Collord.
West Africa is in the grip of a wave of coups, popular protests and fierce geopolitical struggles. Amy Niang argues that declining western hegemony in the region goes hand to hand with intensified competition for access and control of Africa’s natural resources. Furthermore, Niang states, the Russian occupation of Ukraine compels us to look at the importance of the country’s growing presence in Africa.
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.
The Tanzanian government is threatening to evict more than 80,000 Maasai from the Ngorongoro world heritage site, claiming that the Maasai must be cleared from their land in the interests of conservation and wildlife corridors.
Yusuf Serunkuma asks how the continued and violent colonisation of the continent has not been more systematically resisted. In a long-read, Serunkuma looks at the extraordinary control of the continent, from banking, the coffee trade, land grabs and mining. Why have Africans failed to see these forms of foreign control as ‘colonial,’ in which former colonisers have continued the pillage of the continent?
Graham Harrison argues that all development is capitalist development. Based on his recent book, Developmentalism, he argues that development is not only risky and likely to fail but also very unpleasant. Contemporary notions of development see it is as a stable, incremental, and positive process but this is a fantasy in which capitalist development is reimagined as a planned, inclusive, and socially just modernisation.
The relationship between Africa and China hinges on the question of cooperation and development. Kristin Plys, Amenophis Lô and Abdulhamid Mohamed ask if we should celebrate this relationship as the South-South development that the Global South dreamed of in the mid-20th century, or are contemporary Africa-China relations a new imperialist dynamic?
In the context of the climate emergency and the need for renewable energy sources, competition over the supply of cobalt is growing. This competition is most intense in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Nick Bernards argues that the scramble for cobalt is a capitalist scramble, and that there can be no ‘just’ transition without overthrowing capitalism on a global scale.