In April 2020, Macky Sall, the president of Senegal, called for a new global order, asking for the cancellation of Africa’s debt in the context of the current pandemic. His argument was based on a lucid assessment of the extractive nature of the productive structures on the continent (The Africa Report 2020). While broad generalisations about a region composed of highly diverse countries runs the risk of repeating neo-colonial tropes, this issue argues that it is fair to say that extractivism is the dominant feature of most African economies. The absence of processes of structural transformation and the persistence of primary commodity dependence create highly porous extraverted economies, organised around extractive cores (Castel-Branco 2014). Foreign exchange earnings on the continent largely accrue from primary commodities and the extractive sector: mining, oil and gas extraction and export-oriented agriculture. The colonially inherited pattern of agrarian and mining extractivism has been reinforced by post-colonial patterns of uneven and combined development and capital accumulation, sustained by a global trend of growth in extraction of natural resources, which went up from 27 billion tonnes in 1970 to 92 billion tonnes in 2017 (IRP 2019). The rapid urbanisation and industrialisation of Asian countries that led to the commodity boom of 1993–2003 meant that extractives have attracted increasing investment. Since 2000, the sector has grown at an annual average rate of growth of 3.2%. Until 2014, the hike in global commodity prices – involving mining, oil and gas but also food and agricultural commodities – led to an increase in foreign direct investment in extractives and agriculture in and Africa and Latin America. Compounded by financialised investments after the global financial crisis of 2007/08, agrarian extractivism through land grabs (McKay 2017) and an increase of investment in mining and energy led to a renewal of the debate on extraction and imperialism (Veltmeyer and Petras 2014). Especially in the mining and energy sectors, it also led to new political responses, dubbed ‘neo-extractivism’, based on a return of the developmental state in its functions of rent appropriation and redistribution. In Latin America, neo-extractivism pictured extractives as carriers of development through strong developmental states, which reinvested extractive rents in social programmes and structural transformation (Gudynas 2010). Its politics had the ambition of defining themselves as post-neoliberal, while retaining capital’s trend of exploitation of workers, dispossession of land and unmitigated environmental destruction (Bebbington and Humphreys Bebbington 2011). Following the Latin American example of neo-extractivism, many African governments have experimented with resource nationalism, although with considerable national-level variations. At the regional level, the African Union’s Africa Mining Vision (AMV) 2030 is an attempt to propose stronger rent extraction from the mining sector and use it to finance programmes of structural transformation in the continent (Bush 2018). However, contemporary neo-extractivist policies in Africa nowadays are nowhere near as ambitious as those once attempted by African socialist governments. These aimed at regulating the global market for extractives, like in Kenneth Kaunda’s Zambian initiative of the Intergovernmental Council of Copper Exporting Countries (CIPEC), or Julius Nyerere’s nationalist ban on extractives, aimed at keeping resources in the soil until the nation could develop the productive forces to manage extractives for national development. These politics often attacked multinational corporations in extractives, banning their operations or heavily regulating them in a way that neo-extractivism has not managed to do. Most African countries have moved away from national control over natural resources, towards a more modest agenda aiming at increasing ‘local content’ in extractive policies, not only in mining but also in oil and gas extraction (Ovadia 2016). As Money, Frøland and Gwatiwa argue in this issue, while the AMV proves African agency, it also lives under the shadow of the failures of resource nationalism of the 1970s. And how could they not? The Latin American experience carries considerable significance to the African one, showing that the appropriation of ground rent mediated by state policies tends to create ‘a structural dependence upon the magnitude of ground rent available for appropriation’ (Purcell, Fernandez and Martinez 2017, 924) even when these same policies support and incentivise small capitals, and use rents for social protection and redistributive social policies. The effects of global recessions on extractive economies are well known: as global commodity demand decreases, extractive economies quickly fall in a recession, their rents fall, and so do the programmes of redistribution based on them – as shown throughout the last commodity prices downfall, started in 2014. In this analysis, African miners and farmers remain firmly inscribed in global value relations through their integration in the world market (Araghi 2003) and in capitalism as a totality – the world economy being more than just ‘the sum of its parts’ (McNally 2009, 43). For Marx, the world market expressed ‘the primacy of the concrete corporeality of the sum total of the vast multitude of labours living under the geographies of capitalist society, before it assumes distorted forms in international political relations and inter-capitalist competition’ (Arboleda 2020, 52). The utter dependence of the ‘successes’ of this neo-extractivism on ground rent from primary commodities, tied as these are to the fluctuations of the world market and inscribed in global value relations, have already failed to pass the test of decreasing commodity prices. At every global recession, or primary commodity prices downturn, the political strategy of neo-extractivism shows its limits, and African economies which bought into this model are likely to succumb to the current recession. This issue responds to recent calls to ground the intellectual work on and against extractivism in the material struggles of workers – living labour – and of all those who struggle against exploitation, dispossession and environmental degradation (Arboleda 2020).
The crisis this time
September’s ROAPE editorial (Lawrence 2020a) anticipated that the global recession would hit African economies hard, with a shrinking global demand for primary commodities and a further downturn in prices. The pandemic has indeed triggered a global recession and, as a consequence, Africa has entered its first recession since 1995 (World Bank 2020a). Foreign exchange earnings coming from extractives have fallen due to the decline of consumption in Europe, the US and China caused by the pandemic, and the global recession that is unfolding, with global trade drastically reduced and primary commodity prices in a downward trend (UNDESA 2020). The economy of remittances has also been affected by the pandemic. While the formal service sector, structured around patterns of real estate and financial speculation, is likely to be less affected, the social reproduction of the majority of people will be more impacted, dependent as it is on farming and artisanal mining (which will suffer as a result of the global recession) and circulation activities (petty trade, transport and services), many of which largely escape GDP calculations. The World Bank regional report estimates the contraction at 3.3% in 2020, underlining that this is the first recession in Africa in the last 25 years (World Bank 2020a). On the basis of these estimates, shrinking GDPs will bring real per capita GDP back to 2008 levels, and about 40 million people will be very possibly pushed into extreme poverty on the continent. Africa is also the region with the highest number of countries (39) which, since April, have been receiving emergency debt relief from the International Monetary Fund to cope with the pandemic (IMF 2020), alongside 28 countries which have joined the World Bank/G20 Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI) (World Bank 2020b). However, as of 2018 about a third of African governments’ public debt was owed to private financial investors (JDC 2018), thus falling outside the mandate of the DSSI. For their part, private financial groups remain unwilling to renegotiate debt with African governments to ease the impact of the pandemic, and responded to public criticism by creating a public relations agency, the Africa Private Creditor Working Group (2020).
Pandemic responses have varied tremendously across the continent and beginning to chart them is certainly a task for political action as well as for academic analysis. It is hard to produce rigorous research in the absence of reliable, systemic information on the effects of the pandemic on the ground. While the African Union Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention publish weekly bulletins on statistical epidemiological trends on the continent (Africa CDC 2020), the validity of these data might be severely hampered by the resource constraints under which most governments on the continent are working, which limits the capacity to test and trace widely.
The first 10 months of this pandemic have made clear that many governments have taken an extremely pragmatic approach: if the economy cannot afford the losses, workers have to keep on working to put food on the table. The ‘grim calculus’ (The Economist 2020a ) – how many people governments decide can be considered as disposable – and sheer pragmatism have informed many decisions on economic policies. The pragmatism of governments that cannot afford to pay for a crisis is epitomised by President John Magufuli’s stance in Tanzania. Tanzania is to date the only African country which has stopped submitting official reports on Covid-19 cases and mortality to the World Health Organization (WHO 2020a), denying the presence of the virus in the country. While presidential declarations blended a dubious anti-scientism (coming from a president with a PhD in biology) and religious sentiment, in the run-up to presidential elections Magufuli left all the street vendors on the streets, did not close shops and schools, nor did he prohibit religious gatherings, securing himself popular support. While this response has largely been portrayed as an extreme example of authoritarian populism, it can also be interpreted as pragmatism of a poor, highly donor-dependent nation which is about to be hit by a global recession. Policy covers up with populist actions the pragmatic acknowledgment that its government cannot afford the slightest disruption in production – especially agrarian, on which millions depend for sheer survival – nor can it fund social protection programmes and a lockdown to protect people’s lives.
But is this position a departure from the norm? I would argue that this is more of an extreme position than an exceptional one. Many governments in the global North have implicitly admitted defeat to capital, faced with a pandemic that threatened to disrupt the circuits of capital, hitting both production and consumption and grinding them both to a halt. A global recession causes unemployment and hunger that can, if unmitigated by public policy, kill more than the virus; and only a minority of countries have responded with Keynesian interventions.
While the public debate is aptly hijacked by discussions on the social aspects of the pandemic, and of its control, the underlying issues are fundamentally economic ones. An example of this is the WHO’s warning that in second-wave Europe, ‘pandemic fatigue’ (WHO 2020b) has taken the place of the ‘heroism’ rhetoric that accompanied the first round of lockdowns. A blend of behavioural analysis and moralising rhetoric prevails in the public debate in Europe, while the debate on limitations imposed by social distancing in social life reinforces the silence on the workplace as vector of infections. The workplace and work as a vector of infection are kept to the margin of political discussions.
In lockdown Europe, the pandemic as crisis offers a ‘simplification of social relations and clarification of reality’ (Antentas 2020) revealing hidden social features that are hidden to the eye in ‘normal’ times. One example is the debate on workers and work. The crisis this time led the European middle classes to discover that some workers are ‘essential’ and some others are not. Well hidden under the ideological label of ‘unskilled work’, cleaners, grocery workers, and nurses kept society from complete paralysis during the first wave of lockdowns in Europe. In England and Wales, workplace exposure – alongside place of residence – has been proved to be the main reason behind the staggering racialised impact of the pandemic, as people of black and Asian descent are 2.3 times more likely to die from Covid-19 (Office of National Statistics 2020).
In terms of economic policies, defining who is an essential worker has clear budgetary implications. Reviewing the policy definitions of which jobs classify as ‘essential’ in seven different countries, Stevano, Ali and Jamieson (2020) remark on a variability and an inconsistency in national systems of classification. Perhaps an extreme example is offered by South Africa. While in many countries miners have been prevented from entering the mines during the pandemic, in South Africa they have been declared ‘essential workers’, alongside Canada, Australia, the Philippines, Peru, Brazil and Colombia (Ramdoo 2020). The South African Association of Mine Workers and Construction Unions has challenged the decision in court and pressed for the provision of health and safety equipment (Ibid.).
Essential workers stay at the bottom of the hierarchy, more often than not on precarious contracts, minimum wage, and exposed to the worst work conditions, and disproportionately exposed to infection because of the scarcity of health and safety equipment. Stevano, Ali and Jamieson (2020, 9) also note that across different countries very high percentages of ‘essential workers’ are black and brown people, women, migrants and marginalised groups. Keeping people at work with increasing infection rates during the pandemic exposed the nature of workers as disposable people, and the underlying reality of surplus populations in capitalism. On the continent, given the prevalence of ‘informal’ work, the notion of ‘essential worker’ is ‘inconsequential and ill-suited’ (Ibid. 2020, 11) as workplace regulations concern only a tiny minority of workers, excluding the majority of people who perform productive and reproductive work. The global health crisis caused by this virus has ‘exposed and exacerbated a global crisis of productive and reproductive work across the globe’ (Ibid. 2020, 2). This holds true for the mining sector, too: the vast majority of workers in the sector are not employed in large-scale industrial mining, but rather work as artisanal and small-scale miners, estimated at 42 million worldwide (DELVE 2020).
Crises in capitalism cause at once ‘immense suffering and hardship for the world’s workers’ and also open up moments in which ‘new spaces of resistance can be pried open’ (McNally 2009, 72). What strikes in the current crisis is that not an inch of the revolutionary potential of this pandemic has been seized. We are not witnessing a radical upheaval, not even a reformist discussion on the necessity to nationalise public health services. As before the pandemic, semi-privatised health services prove to be good for business, and the long legacies of structural adjustment in Africa are at their most visible in the failure of basic health service provision. What unifies governments across the globe lies in what the pandemic did not do: questioning the role of the state in public health service provision in any fundamental way. While demand-side Keynesian policies have been put in place to rescue capital – from large companies to small and medium-sized enterprises (see editorial in previous issue, Lawrence 2020a) – political discussions on the necessity of public health service provision during a pandemic have been conspicuous by their absence. Perhaps with the exception of Spain, the partial privatisation and cuts to public health services and the dominance of private provision do not seem to be part of the debate. On this point, the left has missed another opportunity to shift the terms of the political debate to a discussion about social needs. Even the mildest multilateral proposals of collaboration – like the WHO’s efforts to coordinate public provision of a vaccine through the COVAX programme, aiming to guarantee vaccine access in poor countries – have so far been held hostage by the quest for global hegemony, pitching the USA against China, both refusing to join COVAX alongside Russia (The Economist 2020b ). The deadly conservative political climate makes any redistributive proposal look like a radical step, as suggested by the neo-Keynesian plans put forward by the Transnational Institute – to tax the rich and use the wealth for a pandemic response, and concluding by quoting exhortatory words spoken by the African revolutionary Thomas Sankara (Tippet 2020).
What the pandemic did do, in fact, is to prove once again that illness and death can be very good business for capital. As Rob Wallace and others observed back in May 2020, ‘a pandemic that arises out of the capitalist mode of production and that the state is expected to manage on one end can offer an opportunity from which the system’s managers and beneficiaries can prosper on the other’ (Wallace et al. 2020). The pandemic opened up opportunities for huge private gains, deriving mostly from the prospects of a vaccine for Covid-19 and the related speculative ventures in health and technology on the stock market. This led to an increase in total billionaire wealth, which reached US$10.2 trillion in July 2020, from US$8.9 trillion at the end of 2017, divided among 2189 billionaires (UBS and PwC 2020). Dead labour triumphs over living labour, and the class implications of this triumph are mortally clear.
Articles in this issue
Contributions to this issue are witness to the dialectical relation between capital and labour in conflicts around extractivism, which are more the rule than the exception in most sites of extraction on the continent. Resistance against extractivism does not only concern mineral, oil and gas enclaves. The articles point to ongoing struggles to reclaim access to salt mines in Ghana, profit from sugarcane production in Zimbabwe, and pastoral land in Senegal.
The first article, by Maura Benegiamo, brings original evidence of the ongoing struggles of pastoralist groups in the Sahel region of the River Senegal's delta, in the north-east of Senegal, where the pattern of agro-extractivism, originating from colonial legacies, is signalled by an increasing presence of agro-industrial companies, the restructuring of land property and the deepening marginalisation of pastoral groups and their activities. Benegiamo documents the resistance of pastoral groups against the threat of eviction, arguing that the Senegalese government has shifted away from earlier strategies of integration of peasants into the global economy, and is currently supporting an extractivist form of integration based on the dispossession of rural producers, and the creation of export-oriented large-scale farms by agro-industrial companies.
The second article is by Matteo Capasso and points at how some historical patterns of extractivism established during the colonial era have been fundamentally reinforced by contemporary imperialism. Libya is a clear example of how a country has been turned into a playground for inter-imperialist rivalries between US and European imperialism, and among European imperialist powers, such as France, Italy and the UK (Pradella and Taghdisi Rad 2017). Analysing the Libyan political crisis, Capasso makes a twofold argument: the political and economic trajectories of countries in the global South are constrained by the structures of capitalism as a world-system; and war and militarism remain central features of capitalist accumulation, and of US-led imperialism. Arms flows directed to the United Arab Emirates have been channelled through proxies in Libya; the country has been turned into an outpost of European border control and surveillance over African migrants; and war has become a fundamental tool of capital accumulation. Departing from crudely economic understandings of circuits of imperialist capital – such as those calculated through the analysis of capital outflows and inflows at the national level – the author proposes a value analysis of imperialism in Libya, arguing that global value circuits put constraints on national security and define the features of the state and class relations at the national level. The broader argument is that ‘the fragmentation of Libya epitomises the further consolidation of war as a mode of imperial governance through which the post-colonial space enters the circuits of capital’ (Capasso, this issue, 561). The transformation of revolutionary Libya into a comprador state is explained as a consequence of a ‘global class war’ (Ìbid., 558) of which Libya has become an outpost. Capasso argues that ‘the increasing reliance on war and militarism by US-led imperialist forces is indicative of the progressive decline of the power of Europe and the US at the geopolitical level’ (Ibid., 560) and proxy wars, as the one in Libya, point to the ‘continuing decline of US imperialist power’ (Ibid.).
In the third article, Freedom Mazwi observes that, after the fast-track land reform in Zimbabwe, black farmers have become an important political force in the sugar sector, while also facing a situation where the alliance between state and monopoly capital results in a highly exploitative contract farming arrangement that makes it impossible for them to accumulate capital. This is Mazwi’s analysis of the situation of monopsony control of the sugar sector in Zimbabwe by Tongaat Hulett Zimbabwe (THZ), a multinational company which sources sugarcane from farmers, tying them into contracts which give them no control over the determination of sugar prices. Sugarcane requires relatively more investment than other crops and farmers depend on input loans from THZ. Farmers are overcharged for agricultural inputs and pay high interest rates on loans together with high fees for every stage of production: from irrigation water, to sugarcane transport, down to its milling. These arrangements exemplify how contract farming shifts not only the risk intrinsic in agricultural production, and that caused by volatile commodity prices, away from capital onto farmers; but also the very costs of production. The immediate consequence is that black sugar farmers are not accumulating capital to reinvest; on the contrary, the scheme plunges them into indebtedness, also because the repayment terms of the loans are not adapted to the agricultural schedule, asking farmers to repay before harvest, and thus pointing to their adverse incorporation.
The fourth article, by Duncan Money, Hans Otto Frøland and Tshepo Gwatiwa, focuses on the agency of African states in the context of neo-extractivism in the context of a global commodity boom in the 2000s. Shortly after the boom, many countries on the continent found themselves having to negotiate for EU development funding against unfavourable trade agreements on minerals and metals, as part of the European Union’s Raw Materials Initiative (RMI). The RMI reproduced ‘asymmetrical power relations between resource-rich producer countries and consumers in the EU’ (Money, Frøland and Gwatiwa in this issue, 593). The global commodity boom has prompted a ‘new scramble for Africa’ as the EU faced increased competition from China for African mineral exports and responded with a new ‘resource diplomacy’ (Ibid., 594). Against this background, the authors assess the potential of the 2009 Africa Mining Vision (AMV), observing that its ambitions are much smaller than those of many African states right after independence. Reflecting on Zambia’s role in the establishment of the Intergovernmental Council of Copper Exporting Countries (CIPEC) in 1967, Money and his co-authors observe that in the post-independence period many African states aimed not only at redistributing revenues from extractives’ rents, but rather more ambitiously tried to protect real earnings from the world market. This contrasts with the thrust of contemporary neo-extractivism, which aims mainly at renegotiating better contracts with multinational companies, revising the mining laws and redistributing rents through social policies.
The fifth article, by Alhassan Atta-Quayson and Amina Baidoo, explores an often neglected sector of extraction: salt mines. Why does conflict over resources erupt in areas where resource extraction has endured for centuries in a peaceful way? In the Keta lagoon, at the eastern end of Ghana’s coastline and close to its border with Togo, local residents have been extracting salt since at least since the eighteenth century. In 2013, violent protest erupted against a salt manufacturer. This was the first time in the history of salt production in Ghana that extractives have caused violence. Salt has a minor role in the overall extractive political economic structure of the Ghanaian economy – where 43% of exports are minerals and state policies have historically supported large-scale mining companies. Atta-Quayson and Baidoo observed that while salt is not central to foreign currency exchange earnings at the national level, it is a very important part of the livelihoods of local producers in the Keta lagoon. Since 2010, the government has issued new concessions to foreign-owned large-scale mining companies, which have undermined the access to salt-producing areas for local residents. This research documents the critical incidents between the company and local residents, analysing the episodes of overt violence and clashes as being caused by an overall negative impact of the company’s operations on the local livelihoods, especially of women and the youth, and on the negative environmental consequences such as increased salinity and drying-up of the hand-dug water wells on which local residents rely. Drawing on a comparison by contrast with the sector of gold extraction, the authors argue that the Ghanaian government needs to adhere to the national minerals and mining policy framework to address the causes of the conflict and resistance surrounding large-scale salt production in the Keta lagoon area, in order to put an end to ongoing violence caused by a skewed pattern of extractivism that erodes local livelihoods.
The sixth article reflects on another form of extraction – the extraction of knowledge – as most scholarly research on the continent is produced outside of it. Zack Zimbalist highlights the power asymmetries in scholarly production about politics on the continent, arguing that these create a systemic disadvantage to knowledge produced by scholars on the continent, contributing to a situation where the largest amount of scholarship on African politics is produced outside the continent, mostly by non-African scholars. Underlining the colonial legacy of the problematic tendency to generalise and homogenise arguments about one African country to the whole continent, Zimbalist builds on Olukoshi’s critique of ‘Africanists’ and their power over the field as a cause of intellectual impoverishment of ‘African studies’ (Olukoshi 2006), substantiating his argument with a quantitative analysis of undergraduate syllabi and doctoral-level reading lists on ‘African politics’ in Northern American universities.
Also in this issue
In the first briefing, Angus Elsby explores how mark-ups on African coffee and cocoa exports have changed relative to European re-exports in recent decades. His analysis shows that the European side has made huge advances in the neoliberal period, while millions of producers on the continent face a severe earning crisis: for example, African coffee is now re-exported from Europe at an average mark-up of over 300%, compared to just over 50% in the 1970s and 1980s. These staggering pro-Europe trends, Elsby argues, reflect the growth, expansion and extended control over production of European agribusiness, which European governments have encouraged by implementing favourable competition, corporate tax and regulatory policies, as well as by helping to suppress the management of supply at the international and national levels.
In the second briefing, Eddy Akpomera takes into focus Africa’s Blue Economy, and explores the challenges and potentials of this vital economic sector. While 70% of the countries in the continent have territorial coastlines and extensive kilometres of Exclusive Economic Zones into the sea, much of this potential remains untapped as a resource that could advance locally beneficial development. His analysis highlights impeding factors such as maritime insecurity, weak governance, and corruption of sections of political elites that advance the interests of (often foreign) voracious companies, as well as the limited financial and technological capacity of coastal states to harvest ocean assets. Akpomera calls for collective strategies and efforts to make the assets benefit local populations much more than they have to date.
The final briefing, ‘Oil and its discontents’, by Agaptus Nwozor, John Olanrewaju, Modupe Ake and Onjefu Okidu, examines the underexplored issue of artisanal oil refining in Nigeria. It adds an important dimension to the ways in which communities are impacted by and contest resource extraction. This is timely and important: as the Nigerian economy moves away from dependence upon oil revenue, artisanal refining becomes an entrenched element of the Niger Delta’s political economy with a number of significant outcomes.
And in a debate piece, also in the context of the politics of oil in Africa, Nelson Oppong offers a critical take on the political settlements approach that is popular in sections of African studies, political economy and international development circles. He analyses the framework for its applicability to the politics of oil and finds that, contrary to the postulations of strategic elite bargains by political settlement researchers, Africa’s oil landscape is marked by pluralistic politics and contestations at multiple scales. Oppong thus underscores the importance of foregrounding analysis of oil on critical levers that combine the industry’s complex materiality with the dynamic of pluralistic politics.
Finally, we include two book reviews by Ray Bush: the first of these, appositely, examines Bettina Engels’ and Kristina Dietz’s Contested extractivism, society and the state: struggles over mining and land, issued in paperback at the end of last year. The second reviews Koenraad Bogaert’s Globalised authoritarianism: megaprojects, slums, and class relations in urban Morocco, building on our knowledge of the persistent political turmoil and protest of the North African region following the uprisings sparked off in Tunisia 10 years ago, in December 2010.
On Roape.net in this quarter
The most important development in the last quarter has been the complete design of ROAPE’s website, Roape.net. The platform has now been entirely updated, with easier access, functionality and new resources. Among the new features on the site is a full archive of every back issue of ROAPE, from 1974 – our first issue – to 2013. Under our agreement with Taylor and Francis, who publish the print issue of ROAPE, we have access to our back catalogue, excluding the last seven years. We encourage all our readers to make use of this online resource, and to discover authors and topics from almost 40 years of publishing cutting-edge radical political economy.
On the new site, we have published a range of exciting material – some of which links to longer pieces in the Review. For example, at the end of September, ROAPE’s John Saul (2020) called for a serious consideration of assassinations and executions in the analysis of Africa. Based on his two-part debate feature in the Review, Saul argues that assassinations are key moments in African politics and deserve proper attention and debate. In October, making use of our archive, we published a blogpost by Biko Agozino (2020) based on his 2014 Review article which argued that Karl Marx was among the few European theorists of his time who did not try to conceal his ‘debt’ to Africa but celebrated such knowledge as foundational. Agozino shows how people of African descent were central to the theory, practice and writings of Marx. Marxism is not a Eurocentric ideology, he argues.
ROAPE has also championed progressive and radical campaigns and protest on the continent. In a clarion call for support and solidarity for the struggle of teachers in Zimbabwe, Tafadzwa Choto (2020) in October explained that the government and bosses have declared war on workers, vendors, students, youths and the poor. Choto, a regular contributor to Roape.net, argued that there must be a militant riposte.
John Loxley, a radical economist and a political activist involved with ROAPE since its inception, died in July. In a series of short eulogies on the website by John Saul, Issa Shivji and Peter Lawrence (2020), John is remembered as an extremely skilled and articulate radical economist and as an equally articulate and committed radical activist. In addition, an obituary of John was published in the journal in the September issue (Lawrence 2020b).
In a blogpost in October, Annamaria Artner (2020) examined how Samir Amin was read, studied, and understood in pre-1989 Eastern Europe. She argues that Amin understood that the transition of the world system from capitalism to socialism, what he referred to as a long transition, would make use of the historical experiment of the USSR-led Eastern Europe. This far-sighted and interesting piece, revealing many new aspects to Amin’s influences and life, and impact among radical scholars in Hungary, is complementary to a ROAPE special issue on Samir Amin – one of the founding editors of ROAPE from 1974 – which is coming out next year.
The mass protests in Nigeria have brought out tens of thousands of people in several cities across all the geopolitical regions of the country, defying the guns, risking their freedom and life, and declaring they are ready to die for freedom. Femi Aborisade (2020) and Andy Wynne (2020) look at the background to the protests and celebrate a movement that challenges Nigeria’s ruling class. This blogpost was co-published with our comrades at Africa is a Country.
In November, we posted Brahim Rouabah’s astonishing ‘long read’ – a new category on the redesigned site – which challenges what is referred to as ‘the post-colonial’ era: instead he proposes a decolonial approach that refers to the ‘colonial counter-revolution’. In a detailed analysis of Algeria, Rouabah (2020) demonstrates the horizons such an approach unlocks and the new perspectives it allows to emerge. Finally, in 1971 and 1972 two of the most important books of the twentieth century were published – volumes that have made an enormous difference to scholarship and activism. In 1971 the Uruguayan journalist and writer, Eduardo Galeano, published Open veins of Latin America: five centuries of the pillage of a continent (Galeano 1997 [1971]). The book has sold over a million copies and been translated into more than a dozen languages. The following year Walter Rodney’s How Europe underdeveloped Africa was published (Rodney 2012 [1972]). Rodney’s book took a similar approach, examining the history of slavery and colonialism across Africa. Like Galeano, he examined how a continent was driven back – ‘underdeveloped’ – by European occupation and economic control. To mark these two incredible books, we posted in November a blogpost by Brian M. Napoletano, Héctor Ignacio Martínez Álvarez and Pedro S. Urquijo (2020) that looks again at Galeano’s Open veins of Latin America. On 10 November, ROAPE’s Leo Zeilig (2020) examined the context and content of Rodney’s 1972 masterpiece – a book which turned the ‘world upside down’.