In this section of the journal, we aim to give readers of the print journal a picture of what has been published on Roape.net over the last few months, and invite you to connect and follow the articles, blogposts, authors and debates online. Details of all the blogposts referred to here are in the reference list at the end. We warmly invite all our readers to sign up to the Roape.net newsletter by entering their email address at the top of the home page of the website.
There has also been an interesting blogpost by Scott Timcke, Jörg Wiegratz and Chris Paterson (2021) on the ‘securitisation of capitalist rule in Africa’, which looks at how some African governments, encouraged by multinational corporations, are turning to surveillance technologies and foreign military support to garrison their economic hubs against violent disturbances.
We started September with two posts about the Ruth First prize winner for 2020, one of these announcing the prize and the second a blogpost by the winner. In this, Lawrence Ntuli, the winner of the prize, wrote about his journey into activism and research (Ntuli 2021). Ntuli’s political activism and research combine in a single objective – helping to advance the struggles of the working class in South Africa. His paper in ROAPE looked at precarious workers who have fought through the union and those who engaged in struggle without being led by trade unions. It was this paper that we believe best embodied the scholarship and activism of Ruth First, one of our founding members.
At the end of July we posted the second part of ROAPE’s Chinedu Chukwudinma’s interview with Anne Braithwaite about Walter Rodney’s assassination, and the activism of the Working People’s Alliance-Support Group in the UK (Braithwaite and Chukwudinma 2021). As a founding member of the group, Braithwaite explains that although Rodney was betrayed, then assassinated, his body destroyed and concerted efforts made to tarnish his record, people around the world continue to develop and build on his immense legacy. The piece was widely and enthusiastically picked up by other outlets, including the Walter Rodney Foundation in Atlanta.
Another interesting blogpost was from ROAPE’s Chanda Mfula. In it he discusses the political economy of the media in Africa. Mfula argues that from colonialism to postcolonialism and throughout the post-cold war era, and into the twenty-first century, media in Africa have remained at the service of the propagandistic and capitalistic needs of local and global elites (Mfula 2021).
Reflecting on events in Ethiopia in June, Fisseha Fantahun Tefera argued that to understand famines we must go beyond a narrow, localised and simplistic understanding to look at how global structures foster conflicts that lead to famines (Tefera 2021). Tefera explains that colonial legacies and contemporary global power shape famine response operations, both by the states themselves and by the international aid industry.
Other pieces have included an interview with Robtel Neajai Pailey in July about her new book on citizenship and Liberia. She argues that Liberia today must address historical and contemporary inequalities that have fuelled armed conflict and currently underpin claims against dual citizenship (Pailey 2021).
At the beginning of July we also posted a powerful polemic against the new intellectuals of empire, by Yusuf Serunkuma (2021). Serunkuma warns his audience of a new breed of missionary-scholars who speak to the visible wrongs across Africa, but who hardly ever offer any context or longue durée, to the point that they have even conscripted disciples from among writers and academics on the continent.
Roape.net has managed to carve out a place for itself as a radical and critical forum for debate, with new voices, authors and readers in Africa. We work closely with other websites, who share our posts, and collaborate: MR Online, The Elephant, Africa is a Country and many others regularly repost our articles and debates, or directly collaborate with us in hosting webinars. We are also cited in print newspapers and publications, including, recently, the London Review of Books, for our work on Rwanda (Maja-Pearce 2021). In our efforts to publish critical and radical opinions, debates and research from the continent, on a platform that can be accessed for free from anywhere in the world, Roape.net has made some important strides.
