Geography Archives: Africa

Many commentators and academics interested in African development have in recent decades shown a disinclination or disdain towards incorporating ‘global capitalism’ into their analyses of countries of the continent.

One of the most astonishing books that Walter Rodney–the Guyanese revolutionary and historian–ever wrote was published several years after he was assassinated on 13 June 1980.

2018 seems like a lifetime ago. When ‘Extracting Profit’ came out that year, the COVID-19 pandemic was two years away. Since then, the world has been plunged into a devastating crisis, with 4.5 million lives lost globally, including close to 200,000 reported deaths on the African continent.

Re-reading Guy Endore’s “forgotten masterpiece” it is striking how this novel from 1934, long-noted for its shocking and sophisticated account of slavery and resistance in the lead-up to the Haitian Revolution, is also a penetrating account of the ethical and political deformity and alienation perpetuated by the ideology of “whiteness.”

The SFG was born in 1993, first as a Marxist study group, at the beginning this group was made up of four people, today there are more than three thousand members organized in 25 collectives throughout the country.

In 2008, the establishment of the U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, one of the eleven U.S. global command structures, began the new scramble for Africa, an effort by the United States to practice full spectrum dominance over the entire continent.

Nkrumah, Nyerere and Senghor were acutely aware of the need to displace the epistemic conditions of colonization in order to transcend it.

July is mid–winter in the Southern Hemisphere, where Billie Holiday singing “like a summer with a thousand Julys” rings somewhat oddly. Just the same, there was plenty of fire to keep people warm this winter.

On 13 July 2021, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) adopted a landmark resolution on the prevalence of racism and for the creation of an independent mechanism made up of three experts to investigate the root cause of deeply embedded racism and intolerance.

The webinar on ‘Vaccine Imperialism: Scientific Knowledge, Capacity and Production in Africa’ which took place on 5 August 5, 2021, was organized by the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) in partnership with the Third World Network-Africa (TWN-Africa).

How early post-independence clarity on the link between food self-sufficiency and national sovereignty offers lessons for contemporary efforts.

Canadian imperialism in Africa has had a rare social media moment.

Last month, Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari wrote an op-ed in the Financial Times. It might as well have been written by the Pentagon. Buhari promoted Brand Nigeria, auctioning the country’s military services to Western powers, telling readers that Nigeria would lead Africa’s “war on terror” in exchange for foreign infrastructure investment.

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research created the collages in this dossier based on archival photographs, inserting silhouettes of people and activities and breathing life back into the spaces of the Black Community Programmes of decades past.

The U.S. and its Western European allies have been trying to pass some kind of resolution censuring Ethiopia that will lead towards military intervention, but so far, they have not succeeded. Why? Because China and Russia have been blocking it. They say that this is Ethiopia’s internal affair, and we shouldn’t engage in any undue interference. Everyone is saying the same thing they have been saying all along.

On 26 August, two deadly attacks on the perimeter of Kabul’s international airport killed over a hundred people, including a dozen U.S. soldiers. The bombings struck people desperate to enter the airport and flee Afghanistan. Not long afterwards, the Islamic State of Khorasan (IS-K) took credit for the attack.

Frantz Fanon’s influence on Paulo Freire’s thought is well known, but the Brazilian educator also drew considerably from Amílcar Cabral, the revolutionary intellectual from Guinea-Bissau.

Malibongwe Mdazo, an organizer of National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, who had led a 7,000-worker strike last month, was publicly gunned down at the doorstep of Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration, amidst a labor dispute on August 19.

This July, the Biden administration picked up where Trump left off and began bombing Somalia, a country with a gross domestic product of less than $6 billion and a poverty rate of 70 percent. But why?

As Cabral said, “There may be revolutions which have had a revolutionary theory and which have failed, but there have certainly been no revolutions which have succeeded without a revolutionary theory.”