Revolutionary Papers

Revolutionary Papers is a transnational research collaboration exploring 20th century periodicals of Leftanti-imperial and anti-colonial critical production. Read More

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Inqaba ya basebenzi was the journal of the Marxist Workers’ Tendency of the African National Congress, a Marxist group which operated within the larger body of the ANC. The publication Inqaba ya basebenzi was launched in 1981, with the Tendency’s accompanying paper, Congress Militant, launching towards the end of the same decade. The two periodicals […]

Pambana and Cheche were pamphlets and newspapers of the party organ of the December Twelve Movement (DTM) launched in May 1982. DTM emerged from an underground Marxist-Leninist worker’s political party established after the first conference of the Kenyan Marxists-Leninists in Nairobi on December 22-23 in 1974. Later in May 1982 the DTM launched the Pambana […]

The Analyst was a magazine published in Jos, Nigeria from 1986 till the early 1990s. While a hand-full of scholarly journals attempting to understand Nigerian and African realities from a Marxist perspective sprung up mainly on university campuses through the 1970s, The Analyst distinguished itself by pursing a highly accessible mass circulation magazine format, seeking […]

The Blufo newspaper was printed by the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, and played an important role in the struggle for decolonisation and political re-africanisation. Its production was overseen by Luís Cabral, from the Cassacá Congress onwards. The Blufo archive contains all 22 editions produced by the Escola-Piloto in Guinéa […]

This little known political periodical, published in Cairo between 1958 and 1961, was largely the initiative of its founder and editor John Kalekezi, or Kale. An activist in his twenties from the Kisoro district of western Uganda, Kale was responsible for most of the dense articles and lively opinion pieces on African anti-colonial struggles that […]

Spearhead. The Pan-African Review was established by the South African lawyer and journalist Frene Ginwala in Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanganyika (later Tanzania), just one month ahead of the country’s full independence in December of 1961. The newspaper was published monthly until May 1963, when Ginwala was expelled to Great Britain, likely due […]

Born two years after the landmark Culture and Resistance Conference, held in Gabarone, in 1982, Vakalisa Art Associates, a flexible group of about twenty artists, formed to reject the idea of the romantic artist and individual genius, opting to produce work with a purpose— art, in its broadest acceptation, that would develop society and contribute […]

French, African, and Arab: Negotiating Post-Colonial Algerian Identity in Révolution Africaine Six months after Algeria won its independence, an unusual group of militants gathered in Algiers. Led by a Siamese-born French lawyer, Jacques Vergès, the group consisted of French and Algerian journalists, cartoonists, photographers, and militants. Their mission? To craft a new cultural and political […]

Small Magazines in Africa: Networks of Curation and Scalability Christopher Ouma and Madhu Krishnan The small magazine has held a significant but understudied effect on not only the project of imagining Africa in the long twentieth century, but also of articulating projects of solidarity, intimacy and political action. As a key node within larger ecologies […]

The Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA) or Mau Mau as it is more widely known as across the world was the cornerstone of the anti-colonial movement in Kenya and presented perhaps the most revolutionary fight against imperialism in the country. After Kenya’s independence from the British in 1963, there were hardly any substantial changes […]