An edited book project of short essays, interviews, and longer chapters, we focus on papers of the African left, featuring movement journals, widening our appreciation for the range of self-publication that came out of oppositional movements across the continent across time, and opening up the question of the role of archiving in movement building and movement histories.

These publications were organising tools which not only circulated ideas and fostered networks of resistance but also acted as archives of emancipatory struggle- spaces where political vocabularies, networks of solidarity, political analysis, cultural movements, and artistic practices were forged in conversation and conflict. They contain histories of these movements, their activists, struggles, political debates and analyses. Further work is needed to gather, study and activate these activist archives, which document the continent’s past and ongoing anticolonial struggles, revolutionary visions, and experiments in freedom, thereby reshaping how we understand Africa’s intellectual and political histories.