The new editorial team on the website has already deepened our rich and radical pan-African coverage. Our new Roape.net editors, Ben Radley and Chinedu Chukwudinma, have commissioned and edited numerous blogs and interviews.
At the end of June we published an extract from Susan William’s new book White malice on the assassination on 17 January 1961 of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime minister of the Congo (Williams 2022). We also posted an interview conducted by Ben Radley with the Congolese activist Bienvenu Matumo (Matumo and Radley 2022). Matumo speaks about what led him to become an activist with Lutte pour le changement – LUCHA, a Congolese non-partisan and non-violent citizen movement – and LUCHA’s struggle for social justice and human dignity. Bienvenu argues that the killing, imprisonment and repression of activists has continued unabated under the new presidency of Félix Tshisekedi.
After the publication of the latest special issue of ROAPE, which critically examines Mozambique’s political, social and economic trajectory, we posted short videos by the authors introducing their articles. In the blogpost, the authors introduce their own topic and a brief introduction to the main themes in the special issue (Ali et al. 2022).
Notable among a number of interviews, blogs and articles published this quarter, ROAPE’s Peter Dwyer interviewed Andreas Malm (Malm and Dwyer 2022). Malm engages with African political economy, the climate emergency, anti-capitalist alternatives to development and the radical thought and politics of Frantz Fanon and Walter Rodney. To accompany the interview and to remind us of the importance of Malm’s research, ROAPE’s Colin Stoneman (2022) wrote an excellent introduction to Malm’s work and politics.
In May the website introduced a dedicated ‘Climate emergency’ page, which brings together a full back catalogue of our posts on climate justice, interviews with activists, ‘long-read’ feature pieces and wide-ranging interviews dealing with climate, environmental destruction and collapse (ROAPE 2022) and the effects on people’s lives and livelihoods. While the subject matter of course isn’t new, the page joins seven existing ‘Debate’ pages covering issues that are central to the journal’s focus and agenda, including capitalism in Africa, critical agrarian studies and popular protest and class struggle across the continent.
In this quarter, we finally completed the serialisation of Chinedu Chukwudinma’s insightful biography, A rebel’s guide to Walter Rodney, posting the final piece on the anniversary of Rodney’s murder in Georgetown on 13 June (Chukwudinma 2022). The blog chapters have attracted considerable attention and have been widely shared and debated. From this serialisation, unique to Roape.net, Chukwudinma’s posts have been used in a range of reading groups and activist meetings in, inter alia, America and South Africa, with the blogpost series listed as essential reading.
Also in June we posted the first of three reflections on mental health in Kenya by Noosim Naimasiah. Naimasiah writes about the pandemic of mental health breakdown in Kenya and how extrajudicial executions, sexual abuse, fatal domestic violence and suicides are interspersed by the chronic conditions of violence in the informal settlements of Nairobi. The first blog in the series is an original and powerful account of the tsunami of mental health crises in East Africa (Naimasiah 2022).
We have appreciated the opportunity offered by Roape.net to hear from authors about their own books, as well as using the site to publish reviews of a range of work related to the continent and to political economy. In May we posted a thought-provoking blogpost by Gediminas Lesutis who discusses his new book, The politics of precarity, on the experiences of extractivism, dispossession and resettlement in Mozambique (Lesutis 2022). Lesutis shows how what might be conceived as ‘marginal African experiences’ can help us understand the core questions of global politics and capital and the contemporary impossibilities of living within global capitalism. The book is a powerful intervention in the debate on political economy, Africa and precarity.
We also posted two reviews, one by Heike Becker on a new book about Rosa Luxemburg and another by Sanya Osha on a new exhibition in Cape Town on Robert Sobukwe. In the first of these, Becker (2022) reviews Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg, edited by Jane Anna Gordon and Drucilla Cornell and bringing together authors from diverse intellectual disciplines and from global South and North. It is a book 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 to claim radical humanity in struggle and theory. The heart of the book places Rosa Luxemburg in conversation with thinkers of the Black radical tradition. In the second review, Sanya Osha (2022) writes about the opening of a new exhibition by Robben Island Museum, ‘Remember Africa, Remember Sobukwe’, which took place in Cape Town in May. The exhibition reflects on the life and times of Robert Sobukwe on Robben Island and is a tribute to this major but much overlooked liberation activist. Osha describes the contributions by the speakers at the opening event, including heartfelt remembrances, collective singing and ululation from the audience invoking ‘the spirit of Sobukwe’. The speakers explored possible reasons for the survival of only limited recordings and archives of Sobukwe’s work, and also the humanism and ‘simply unquenchable’ spirit of the man. For those of us not based in Cape Town, Robben Island Museum makes a photographic presentation of the exhibition ‘Robert Sobukwe in Solitary Confinement’ that is available online (Robben Island Museum 2022).
Finally, our WhatsApp readership, sharing new posts from Roape.net, has grown considerably, as has the quarterly newsletter. We warmly invite you to sign up for both if you haven’t already.
