Geography Archives: Africa

The 1973 Durban strikes were part of a wider political ferment in the city in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when it became a generative site of political experimentation and innovation.

Adopted in October 2022 at the Museum of Black Civilizations, Dakar, Senegal.

In the spring of 1860, wealthy businessman Timothy Meaher made a bet that he could illegally kidnap and ship Africans from Africa to Mobile, Alabama, without being detected by federal officials.

The United States government held the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in mid-December, prompted in large part by its fears about Chinese and Russian influence on the African continent.

South Africa is sitting on a tinderbox, says Irvin Jim, General Secretary of the country’s largest trade union NUMSA. The solution is to foster a spirit of solidarity which will have to come from people’s struggles and movements.

Africa will not get much help from foreign powers unless they are equally powerful; that way, they can negotiate with the self-declared superpower from the point of strength.

The ongoing plunder of Africa’s natural resources drained by capital flight is holding it back yet again. More African nations face protracted recessions amid mounting debt distress, rubbing salt into deep wounds from the past.

An interview with Aminata Dramane Traoré on the chaos caused by Western states in the Sahel and the interests of the international oligarchy.

The 1890 Brussels Act provided Europeans with the legal and humanitarian justification for the colonization of Africa. Why have so few heard of it?

On November 17, a photo exhibition titled ‘Socialism or Death: Abahlali baseMjondolo on the Frontlines of Struggle’ opened at The Forge in Johannesburg. The work displayed chronicles the years-long struggle of South Africa’s shack dwellers movement to secure land and housing for the urban poor.

On 21 November 2022, Mali’s interim prime minister, Colonel Abdoulaye Maïga, issued a statement on social media announcing the government’s decision ‘to ban, with immediate effect, all activities carried out by [French] NGOs operating in Mali’.

The ongoing plunder of Africa’s natural resources drained by capital flight is holding it back yet again. More African nations face protracted recessions amid mounting debt distress, rubbing salt into deep wounds from the past.

This is the first English translation of this interview and the opening installment in a Liberation School series of previously untranslated work by Thomas Sankara. This translation series is the result of a collaboration with ThomasSankara.net, an online platform dedicated to archiving work on and by the great African revolutionary. 

South Africa is set to implement an $8.5bn plan funded by western countries to transition from coal-based energy to renewables. The country’s biggest union NUMSA has warned this plan will only intensify privatization while burdening South Africans with debt and poverty.

Nnimmo Bassey (NB): Simple solutions are avoided in today’s world because they don’t support capital.

Western media fixates on coup supporters waving Russian flags in Burkina Faso’s capital while overlooking the long history of U.S. and French control over the country–and its destabilizing consequences.

The Ethiopian and Eritrean armies now seem close to winning a two-year war with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF,) a U.S.-backed clique that ruled Ethiopia brutally for 27 years, from 1991 to 2018.

At this year’s UN General Assembly, the African Union firmly rejected the coercive efforts of the U.S. and Western countries to use the continent as a pawn in their geopolitical agenda.

On 30 September 2022, Captain Ibrahim Traoré led a section of the Burkina Faso military to depose Lieutenant Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, who had seized power in a coup d’état in January.

Numerous countries, including Canada, profit from the illegal exploitation of Sahrawi resources.