Highlights from recent months on Roape.net have included a blog on Nelson Mandela Bay in South Africa, where climate change has exposed apartheid’s economic roots, barely concealed by the country’s so-called democratic political structure (Martel and Mama 2022). Compounded by corrupt ANC leadership, a five-year drought has triggered an unparalleled disaster for the city’s poor. Tony Martel and Siyabulela Mama revealed how more than a million people now face a Day Zero when their household taps will run dry.
For the elections in Kenya, we posted a blog by radical activist and poet Lena Anyuolo on why she did not vote (Anyuolo 2022). How could anyone vote in elections that offered no alternative? As Anyuolo explained, ‘Politicians crawl out like cockroaches from dark holes every five years; fat and destructive, ready to unleash more destruction.’
Yusuf Serunkuma’s piece on the apparent success and smoothness of electoral democracy in African states argued that such hollowed-out democracy is a recipe for disaster (Serunkuma 2022). Beneath the hype is the ruthless continuity of economic and political control by Western companies and governments. Serunkuma sees elections across the continent as invariably a trap that disguises naked and unabashed plunder.
ROAPE’s Ray Bush has been a leading member of our editorial board for many years, and we were delighted that he won the prestigious Award for Outstanding Achievements in African Studies. We posted a news item and video of Ray’s acceptance speech at the African Studies Association of the UK (ASAUK) conference in Liverpool, where he received the award (ROAPE 202 2). Ray has maintained a consistent, original, and militant Marxist analysis of Africa’s politics and development since the 1970s. He has been a teacher, friend and comrade to a generation of activists and students, and to all of us at ROAPE.
To mark the death of the British queen, we asked some of our contributors to reflect on her rule, the legacy of the British royal family, and on the British empire in Africa (Ndung’u; Aborisade; Timcke 2022). Gathanga Ndong’u looked at the crimes of the British state and the queen’s part in these, focusing on Kenya. Femi Aborisade analysed the reaction of Nigerians to the death, highlighting that this was an opportunity for real change. Finally, Scott Timcke outlined how the royal family sits at the apex of a pyramid of continuous horrors.
We published an extract from Revolution is the choice of the people: crisis and revolt in the Middle East and North Africa by Anne Alexander (2022), which looked at the complex class structure of the Middle Eastern and North African societies in which uprisings and revolutions erupted in the 2010s. Neoliberalism produced a crisis and profound transformations among the middle class and proletariat, propelling them to play a major role in popular resistance.
In September, we posted two interviews, one with Ndongo Sylla (Sylla and Zeilig 2022) and another with Japhace Poncian (2022). Both scholars spoke – in complementary though distinct ways – about the continent’s search for anti-capitalist political alternatives, grounded in a radical analysis of trends and developments across Africa and the global South.
In July, we posted a remarkable piece on a murder committed on 22 September 1998, when Semira Adamu was killed in Belgium as she was being deported. Semira was a 20-year-old Nigerian asylum seeker who was suffocated to death by two Belgian policemen to keep her silent while the flight was about to take off for Togo. Twenty-four years later her cousin, Benjamin Maiangwa (2022), investigated the truth of her murder. The post was read and shared extensively in Belgium by campaigners from the original movement for justice in the late 1990s.
We also looked at projects of capitalist extraction, evictions, and mass expropriations of land in Africa (Moko and Bens 2022). The Tanzanian government currently wants to expand the space for luxury tourists to enjoy picturesque views of nature – a wildlife fantasy supposedly untouched by humans. Laibor Kalanga Moko and Jonas Bens argued that this is one of many examples where justification for the dispossession of indigenous communities has shifted from ‘economic development’ to ‘wildlife conservation’.
