In the last year, some of the most exciting initiatives for the website have been launched by ROAPE’s Ben Radley. The newsletter is a quarterly email update of our content sent to our supporters, and we encourage all our readers to sign up on the home page of the website. We have recently introduced a Roape.net WhatsApp subscribers’ service, which is increasingly a key platform for sharing content to a wider audience across Africa. This is not for ROAPE chitchat or comment (interesting as that might be), but a news service where content from the site is shared as soon as it’s posted on the website. Once more, please sign up on the home page.
A notable recent post was an interview with the Kenyan environmental activist and socialist Irene Asuwa (Asuwa and Anyuolo 2021). In discussion with Lena Anyuolo, Asuwa talks about the current struggle for climate justice and for social and economic change. In the same post, introducing a short film on a major dumping site in Nairobi, Lena Anyuolo describes the environmental waste and devastation caused by multinationals, facilitated by the Kenyan government.
In the run-up to the COP26 conference in Glasgow, we published a blogpost that concentrated on South Africa’s interpretation of the green economy. In this piece, Franziska Müller and Simone Claar (2021) scrutinise what South Africa has really achieved, whether this matches with its green ambitions, and how it translates into green capitalism’s wishful thinking. The full article setting out their research and analysis, published on the Taylor & Francis ROAPE journal site, was opened for free access over a month with links in the blogpost.
Louis Allday, founder and editor of Liberated Texts (https://liberatedtexts.com) wrote for us on how book publishing from the 1960s became an important weapon of strategic propaganda used by the CIA and other intelligence agencies. Examining Nkrumah’s Neo-colonialism: the last stage of imperialism, Allday argues that books remain powerful tools that can fundamentally transform one’s world-view (Allday 2021).
We also posted an exceptional interview with ROAPE’s Ray Bush. Reflecting on African studies, the neoliberal university, decolonisation and resistance, Bush discusses what it means to be a scholar-activist working on Africa today, and how his teaching and research have been informed by a commitment to the radical transformation of the continent, and the world. Stirring stuff, and vital to our promotion of activist-scholars in ROAPE (Bush and Borowski 2021).
Ambreena Manji, a regular contributor to Roape.net, wrote for us on how Kenya still faces intractable land problems, including unequal concentration of land in the hands of the wealthy, land grabbing, landlessness and unresolved historical land injustices. In the blogpost, Manji calls for an acknowledgement of Kenya’s roots deep in regimes of land ownership facilitated first by a settler political economy, noting how these are maintained in new forms today (Manji 2021).
In December, Aymar N. Bisoka, David Mwambari and Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni wrote about the recent Africa–France summit that was held in October last year. In their piece, they describe how the scholar Achille Mbembe was recruited by the French state to prepare a report for the summit by speaking to African youth. Their blogpost asks what is the real meaning of the summit behind the official pronouncements (Bisoka, Mwambari and Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2021).
The start of this year saw Nick Bernards write how, in the context of the climate emergency and the need for renewable energy sources, competition over the supply of cobalt is growing. He argues that this competition is most intense in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Bernards contends that the fever for cobalt is a capitalist scramble, and that there can be no just transition without overthrowing capitalism on a global scale (Bernards 2022).
Roape.net has a significant and growing reach into the USA, as well as across Africa. We intervene in debates, and our pieces often become part of the common treasury of the movement, shared and reposted on multiple websites and news outlets.
In the coming months, we will be interviewing the radical socialist and climate activist Andreas Malm, who has written several recent ground-breaking books on the planet emergency, including How to blow up a pipeline (Malm 2021). We will also be marking the 80th birthday of the Guyanese revolutionary Walter Rodney and the 50th anniversary of the publication of his ground-breaking How Europe underdeveloped Africa (Rodney 1972).
Roape.net will be undergoing some reorganisation later this year. The weekly management of the site, and the considerable work this involves, will be run by several hands – a small team will take responsibility for the content, commissioning blogposts, running the outreach work and the backend of the website.
As ever, we welcome – enthusiastically – contributions and comments from our journal readers: we live or die on such engagement.
