





Revolutionary Papers Conference ’22: Counter-Institutions, -Politics and -Culture in Periodicals of the Global South
Revolutionary Papers Conference ’22: Counter-Institutions, -Politics and -Culture in Periodicals of the Global South
A report on the Revolutionary Papers Conference held at Community House, Cape Town in April 2022.
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This tool is intermittently updated to integrate new information sent to the authors.
21 April 2023

Revolutionary Papers delegates gather in the Ashley Kriel Hall, Community House. Photo: Ruvan Boshoff.
The Revolutionary Papers Conference was held at Community House in Cape Town between April 28-30, 2022. The conference looked at how periodicals—including newspapers, magazines, cultural journals, and newsletters—played a key role in establishing new counter publics, social and cultural movements, institutions, political vocabularies, and art practices. Bringing together scholars, activists, and artists, the workshop traced the ways in which periodicals supported social, political, and cultural reconstruction amidst colonial destruction, building alternative networks that circulated new political ideas and dared to imagine worlds after empire.

Poster for the Open(ing) Event.
The three-day conference showcased the works of over forty researchers, exploring magazines and newspapers from countries across the world, including Algeria, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Tunisia, Yemen, South Africa, Kenya, China, the Caribbean, Europe, Palestine, Lebanon, Oman, Namibia, India, the African Diaspora and more. On April 28, following the first day of the conference, Revolutionary Papers also launched an open exhibition on anti-colonial periodicals entitled Quiet dog bite hard! Clandestine Networks of Revolutionary Papers. This vibrant evening featured an art installation by Phokeng Setai, two sonic lectures by Michael Bhatch and Nombuso Mathibela engaging with albums of anti-Apartheid and black liberation struggles, as well as protest music from South Asia by Sara Kazmi and from South Africa by Soundz of the South. Photos from the launch along with the curatorial statement by Phokeng feature in this teaching tool.

The welcome and opening remarks for the conference. L-R: Koni Benson, Paolo Israel, Mahvish Ahmad, Chana Morgenstern, Sara Kazmi and Heidi Grunebaum.

Community House in Salt River/Woodstock, Cape Town. Home for the three days of the Revolutionary Papers conference.
The conference featured seven panels, structured ‘Reflections’ from select participants at the end of each day, and each morning a conceptual ‘Framing’ presented by the lead organisers on the three broad themes of the counter-institutional, the counter-cultural, and the counter-political. The proceedings concluded with an open discussion on ‘Ways Forward’, in which possibilities for a productive dialogue between Revolutionary Papers, political organising, radical archiving, and counter-cultural production were explored, with a focus on developing and expanding the Revolutionary Papers Teaching Tools to translate scholarship on revolutionary periodicals into an instrument of political education and alternative pedagogies in the classroom and beyond.

Ben Verghese and Chana Morgenstern try out the teaching tool workstation set up for attendees in the Ashley Kriel Hall. Photo: Ruvan Boshoff.
The conference also launched a number of new teaching tools on the Revolutionary Papers website, which look at a range of leftwing and radical publications namely The Namibian Review, Dawn, The Workers’ Herald, Voice of the Children, Sawt al Thawra, Abantu Batho and Umteleli wa Bantu.

Poster for the conference.
This teaching tool of the Revolutionary Papers conference revisits the discussions and anti-colonial encounters that took place at Community House, a historic site of anti-Apartheid struggle, over three days and nights. It features short recaps of each panel along with ‘Asides’ that invite you to click Expand so as to access additional visual, written or sonic documentation.
In the words of the Revolutionary Papers founders:
It took us three years to get here. We meet at a time where a violence once contained at the peripheries makes its way back to the centre. A global pandemic, ecological collapse, imperial wars, and the destructive effects of a white supremacy are now more intensely felt in Europe and North America than when we began Revolutionary Papers. The radical periodicals that we will revisit are a reminder that this violence, so often cast as exceptional, has always been the rule for most of the world’s peoples. With all of you, we hope to think with and through these journal to imagine alternative ways of working and living together, and other more capacious futures.








Tasked with gathering songs to accompany the conference, Ben Verghese assembled a playlist for each of the three days at Community House. Songs were chosen to locate listeners in the pocket of south Africa Azania where we came together and to interact with themes in the panels/presentations (such as Palestinian Solidarity, Fallism or Black Theology).
This teaching tool includes three asides, one for each day, with selections of the selections to (re)play.

▴ Early on Day 1, Mahvish Ahmed offered the first of the conferences' counter framings with 'Framing the Counter-Political'.
Third World Socialism(s) and Solidarities in Circulation
Panel 1 drew together papers looking at a range of struggles from Indian, Kenyan, Omani, and Ethiopian contexts to examine periodicals as sites for regional articulations of Socialism and Marxism from the Global South. Patricia Hayes (CHR, UWC) moderated the discussion between the four panelists, whose names and paper titles/ journals presented are given below:

Patricia Hayes introduces the panelists. Photo: Ruvan Boshoff.
- Semeneh Ayalew (Ethiopian Studies, University of Addis Ababa): “Abyotawi Medrek/Revolutionary Forum: An Exercise in Free Expression in Revolutionary Ethiopia”
- Om Prasad: “Vijnan Karmee: Science and Solidarity: The Vigyan Karmee and the Quest for an ‘Afro- Asian Science’”
- Marral Shamshiri-Fard: Sawt al Thawra (Voice of the Revolution)
- Ruth Nyambura: “Struggling for Land in the Shadow and Afterlife of the Mau Mau Anti-Colonial Movement: An Examination of the Selected Texts of Kenya’s Marxist Underground Movement (MWAKENYA – December Twelve Movement), 1974-2002”

A page from Abyotawi Medrek/ Revolutionary Forum presented by Semeneh Ayalew Asfaw.

Semeneh Ayalew presenting (via the screen!). Photo: Ruvan Boshoff.
The panel opened with Semeneh Ayalew’s presentation, which looked at a daily column titled “Abyotawi Medrek” (Revolutionary Forum) that was published in the popular Amharic daily Addis Zemen between 1976 and ’77, during the early period of the Ethiopian revolution.
Semeneh analysed “Abyotawi Medrek” as a site for pressing political questions for those on the left: What would an African socialism look like, and how would it relate to universalist articulations of Marxist-Leninist ideology? What role could student politics play in a post-revolutionary landscape? How should leftwing activists and organisers respond to the rising authoritarianism of a popular socialist movement that had managed to capture state power? In particular, Semeneh focused on the discussion around ‘class boycotts’ and the critiques of formal education put forward by revolutionary student politics in 1970s Ethiopia against the backdrop of civil war and military rule.

Om Prasad poses with Phokeng Setai’s exhibit on anti-colonial periodicals and networks titled “Quiet Dog, Bite Hard”. A cover of Vijnan Karmee, presented by Om Prasad at the RP Conference’ 22 was incorporated by Setai. Photo: Ruvan Boshoff.

Om Prasad presenting.
This thought-provoking presentation was followed by Om Prasad’s paper on a quest for a ‘Third World science’ as articulated in the magazine of the Indian Scientific Workers Association in the period following formal Independence. Om delved into debates among socialist scientists, who sought to liberate scientific inquiry and practice from imperialist shackles, and claim modernity for themselves, wrenching it away from its limiting, Eurocentric ambit. He detailed how the magazine featured resolutions that were passed by the organisation around “developing the idea of Asian solidarity in science”, and how it positioned itself at the forefront of the anti-nuclear movement in India. Through a focus on South-South solidarities in science, the organisation and its organ Vijnan Karmee sought to rethink scientific inquiry as political work.
The next journal that was discussed on the panel was Sawt Al Thawra (Voice of the Revolution) presented by Marral Shamshiri-Fard.

“We are with you, o revolutionaries of Oman”: A special section on the Dhufar Revolution in the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO)’s periodical Filastin al-Thawra on the tenth anniversary of the revolution.
Filastin al-Thawra, no. 146, 8 June 1975. Source: Institute for Palestine Studies.
Drawing on her teaching tool, Marral introduced Sawt Al Thawra as a weekly bulletin published by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG) during the 1970s and ‘80s. Sawt al-Thawra articulated the PFLOAG’s revolutionary conception of the world, placing the Dhufar Revolution within the global constellation of revolutionary Third World, leftist and anti-colonial networks. It was written, edited, and published in the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY), which was the main support base of the revolution. Marral highlighted how the magazine self-consciously addressed a global audience through its choice to publish in Arabic and English, despite the fact that it was not commonly spoken among the cadres and the movement’s support base who spoke ‘Jabali’ or the mountain dialect. The periodical drew on Maoist influences to centre the role of its women cadres and organisers, framing women’s liberation in tandem with Third Worldist anti-imperialist and global Marxist-Leninist solidarities. The magazine connected movements across the geographies of Oman, Yemen and Palestine, and represented the movement’s internationalist outlook on Omani liberation through ‘solidarity conferences’ and ‘global support committees’.
Another journal, The Gulf Solidarity, translated and published militant bulletins published in Sawt al-Thawra in English. @sham_marral pic.twitter.com/x83OijspLp
— Revolutionary Papers (@RevPapers) April 28, 2022
The last paper to be presented was Ruth Nyambura’s study of the “underground proletarian press” of the MWAKENYA movement. The MWAKENYA – December Twelve was a Marxist-Leninist (Maoist) underground movement formed in 1974 to counter the reactionary Kenyan comprador bourgeoisie and its global imperialist alliance and to realise the revolutionary goals of the Mau Mau rebellion. MWAKENYA produced a range of underground magazines, newspapers, and bulletins that included Heche Kenya, Kenya Twendapi, and Mwanguzi, for a working class, student, and peasant readership, presenting itself as ‘the voice of the Kenyan people’. Nyambura noted that Nairobi, Arusha and London constituted the centres of the MWAKENYA movement. She discussed how questions of land, food, and freedom featured prominently in these Marxist publications that sought to claim the legacy of anti-colonial peasant movements in a post-colonial world.
Mwakenya-D12 considered themselves inheritors of the unfinished revolution of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (Mau Mau) – my focus is specifically on the movement’s engagement with land struggles & its intersections via their underground press. pic.twitter.com/SRFyO0mKuW
— Nyambura (@msnyamburah) April 14, 2022
Ruth Nyambura presenting right now on Mwakenya movement 1974-2004 at @RevPapers🔥
ahhhhh scrambling to to write down notes and tweet at the same time. 🧐
— Mi-s-ga (@MisgaWarrior) April 28, 2022

Koni Benson asks a question to the panel. Photo: Ruvan Boshoff.

Our Solidarity mural at Community House. Photo: Ruvan Boshoff.
Patricia Hayes opened the discussion with some crucial questions and insights that drew together the diverse yet related contexts discussed in each paper: What kind of publics were being created by these revolutionary journals, which were themselves embedded in “dense, complicated assemblages like political parties, solidarity organisations, and underground movements”? Did these journals generate new contexts alongside responding to them? Patricia commented on the rich aesthetic forms that emerged and were often shared across anti-colonial publications embedded in different regions. As the discussion was opened up for the floor, connections with other contexts and strands such as the Chilean Revolution and Pan-Africanism were discussed. Further, Chana Morgenstern and Idriss Jebari weighed in to reflect on the complex processes involved in decolonising political vocabularies, particularly with respect to the problem of using Eurocentric Marxisms as an explanatory framework for the very embedded, and regional ways in which Marxism was often translated into political practice in Global South locations.
In the mid-1980s, apartheid South Africa saw heightened repression, the revival of the workers’ movement and an intense struggle for liberation.
Trade unions and civic and service organisations needed a base from which the struggle could be waged. The Western Province Council of Churches (WPCC) and an NGO, the Social Change Assistance Trust (SCAT), purchased the Community House site, a dilapidated auto-workshop in Salt River. The area marks the origins of industrial unions in the province and is known for its textile and light metal factories and the site has a history of service and support to the surrounding community.
After two years of renovations, Community House was officially opened on 21st August, 1987. Agents of the apartheid state bombed it eight days later. Despite this, a base of support and collective mobilisation for a diverse range of organisations was established.
In the 1980s, a number of labour and community activists were commemorated in the halls and foyers within Community House. Their commemoration represents the histories of the thousands of others who were detained, tortured and killed by the apartheid regime. Today, Community House continues to house organisations engaged in struggles for social change. In 2010 Community House was declared a provincial heritage site.
– Wording taken from plaque outside Community House.
On the wall outside community house, artists have drawn a massive picture of Imam Haron. This anti-Apartheid activist and imam in Cape Town was killed by the Security Branch of the apartheid-era South African Police Force in 1969. They say the day he was buried, the earth shook. pic.twitter.com/nwGWWjb8y8
— Revolutionary Papers (@RevPapers) April 25, 2022
“He was loved, not only by his family but also by many of us who saw him in the embodiment of all our hopes.”-Zubeida Jaffer
It’s an honor to be in this space for our conference. The revolutionary spirit of anti-Apartheid activist, Ashley James Kriel (1966-1987) guides us. pic.twitter.com/K9tvDngbe8
— Revolutionary Papers (@RevPapers) April 28, 2022
One of the halls at Community House is named after Ashley James Kriel (1966 – 1987). It is in this hall that Revolutionary Papers hosted its conference.
Kriel was actively involved in youth and student movements in the area. At the age of 14 he joined the Bonteheuwel Youth Movement, BYM (an affiliate of CAYCO, the Cape Youth Congress). He was a founding member of the Bonteheuwel Inter-Schools Congress (BISCO).
Actively involved in civic issues as well as workers struggles in his community, Kriel assumed leadership responsibilities and was renowned throughout the Western Cape as a charismatic public speaker. Kriel was also involved in the establishment of a paramilitary, revolutionary group, the Bonteheuwel Military Wing (BMW). The group, which embarked on a program of violent resistance, had the endorsement of the United Democratic Front and uMkhonto we Sizwe operatives provided them with arms and training.
Kriel and his family were under constant surveillance and harassment by the Security Police who would frequently enter and raid their house at night, threatening to shoot him down ‘like a rabbit’ should they get a hold of him. At times, he went into hiding. Eventually, Kriel joined the ANC and underwent military training in Angola. He infiltrated South Africa in April 1987 and was living in Hazendal, a small working class suburb near Athlone. On 9 July 1987, Kriel was shot by WO Benzien of the Terrorism Detection Unit. Kriel’s sister Michél Assure found a bloodstained spare and bloodstained clothing at the scene. The TRC Commission established that the killing had been planned at Athlone Police Station. The Kriel family opposed the granting to amnesty to Benzien, but the TRC nevertheless granted Benzien amnesty.
– Wording taken from plaque inside the Ashley Kriel Hall.
Internationalism & Pan-Africanism in Print

Przemyslaw Strozek with cover of Casa De Las Americas as displayed in the Revolutionary Papers exhibition. Photo: Ruvan Boshoff.
The second panel discussed the ways in which the tropes and vocabularies of internationalism were shared across and adapted for different contexts. Featuring revolutionary periodicals that spanned geographies from South Africa, Ethiopia, and Libya to Brazil, Algeria, Poland, the presentations on this panel analysed a range of forms including political cartoons, editorials, and illustrations to explore articulations of internationalism, anti-colonialism, and leftwing solidarity. The panel was moderated by Mahvish Ahmad, and it featured the following speakers and papers/ journals:

Front cover of an edition of Souffles.
- Przemyslaw Strozek (Polish Academy of Sciences/ Archiv der Avant-garden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden): “Casa de Las Americas, Souffles, AfricAsia: Casa de Las Americas and its transcontinental network in the years of 1965-1972”
- Thandi Gamedze (Center for Education Rights and Transformation, University of Johannesburg): “The Journal of Black Theology in South Africa and its Contribution to the Struggle for Liberation”
- Corinne Sandwith (English, University of Pretoria): “Umsebenzi / Umvikele-thebe: Reading Ethiopia in Radical South African Newspapers”
- Estefania Bournot (German Forum of Art History/ Free University of Berlin): “Front Brésilien D’information: Networks of (miss)information: fighting against ‘general understanding’”
- Khalid Shamis (CHR & Department of History, UWC): Al-Inqad.

Przemyslaw Strozek presenting.
The first paper was presented by Przemyslaw Strozek, whose presentation drew on the magazines Casa De Las Americas, Souffles, and AfricAsia to show how avant-garde aesthetics and form were translated and circulated in the internationalist networks of political journals. Przemyslaw passed around copies of these magazines for the participants to glance through the stunning use of design to showcase political movements across the globe, as well as underground networks of organising and publication. Re-published articles also constituted a vital link between these magazines, creating the space for international collaboration between writers, artist, painters and thinkers across geographical contexts.

Front cover from an edition of the Journal of Black Theology (Vol 2, No. 1, 1988).

Thandi Gamedze presenting. Photo: Ruvan Boshoff.
Next, Thandi Gamedze shared her research on the South African Journal of Black Theology, which became a forum for debating and articulating a ‘black theology’ that centred the black body as ‘sacred text’ and framed the Church as a site for struggle. Emerging in the 1960s out of the university Christian movement, the intellectuals behind the journal were inspired by Latin American articulations of liberation theology and Pan-Africanist and trans-Atlantic debates on black consciousness. Thandi stressed the Journal of Black Theology as a site where South African black theology, US Black Power, and Latin American liberation theology came into dialogue with each other, through a process of appropriation targeting the bible and spiritual traditions.

Front page from the newspaper, Umsebenzi.
Following Thandi, Corinne Sandwith further expanded the discussion on Pan-Africanist and projects of black consciousness through her presented on the newspaper of the Communist Party of South Africa, Umsebenzi. Corinne analysed how ‘Ethiopia’ became a trope in the political cartoons published by the paper, providing a kind of visual pedagogy in counter-political modes of debate and participation. She stressed the affective labour performed by the newspaper through these visual depictions, alongside its detailed documentation of atrocity and its practice of “truth-telling against the lies of the state”, sharing contrasting representations of Mussolini and Zulu warriors to illustrate her point.

Estefania Bournot with cover art from Front Bresilienne d’Information as featured in the Revolutionary Papers exhibition. Photo: Ruvan Boshoff.
This imperative to expose the lies of the state in Umsebenzi / Umkeleli-thebe connected with the themes that emerged in Estefania Bournot’s presentation on the Front brésilien d’Information (Brazilian Front for Information), a publication founded by Brazilian political exiles based in Algiers who tried to combat the censorship imposed by the military regime in Brazil by mobilising internationalist solidarity and disseminating information regarding the excesses of the state. Estefania expanded on the network instituted by the Front, whose members worked underground to gather information in Brazil, and then sent it abroad, to other countries such as Algeria, for publication.

Estefania Bournot presenting.
The last paper on the panel was Khalid Shamis’s presentation on the National Front for the Salvation of Libya. Featuring snippets of footage compiled by the filmmaker and a discussion of the group’s opposition to Muammar Gaddafi, Khalid examined the effects of exile on a generation looking to support a kind of liberal nationalist movement in Libya from outside the country. Most importantly, the Front published an English newsletter titled Al-Inqad, which featured satirical cartoons, political statements, editorials and even brochures for sub-machine guns titled Al-Inqad (Salvation). Khalid was careful to highlight the Islamist anti-colonialism of the Front, distinguishing its outlook and activities from similar left-leaning movements of the time.

Ruchi Chaturvedi (Other Universals / Sociology, UCT) offered reflections to bring day 1 of the conference to a pause.

Derek Naidoo shares a comment.
After the presentations concluded, Mahvish Ahmad opened the discussion with a few comments on internationalist commonalities drawing together the five papers on the panel that spanned articulations of internationalism that were non-secular, avant-garde, exilic, strands that aren’t always analysed alongside anti-colonialism, despite their crucial links with specific liberation struggles. Other points of discussion that emerged included the role of women in the networks and creation of the anti-colonial journals presented at the conference as a whole, triggered by Kebolthale Motseothata’s question to Thandi Gamedze regarding women’s voices in the Journal of Black Theology. Thandi responded by sharing how the journal only referenced women’s issues in general, speaking about how the journal positioned itself firmly within the academy, which limited its ability to bring in certain kinds of material that could insert working class women’s voices into the discourse. Thus, the journal as a “rhetorical space” as Estefania put it, was also a fraught and contested terrain, often limited by marginalisations within movements, which scholars working on revolutionary periodicals must try to account for in their research.

▴ Chana Morgenstern opened Day 2 by 'Framing the Counter-Cultural'. Photo: Ruvan Boshoff.

▴ Chana Morgenstern opened Day 2 by 'Framing the Counter-Cultural'. Photo: Ruvan Boshoff.
Anticolonial Art Forms and Practices

Panelists for the Anticolonial Art Forms and Practices discussion prepare.
A panel on anticolonial art forms and practices kicked off Day 2 of the Revolutionary Papers Conference. Bringing together scholars as well as artists, the panel explored experiments and innovations in revolutionary aesthetics through a focus on film, music, and the periodical form, sketching the transnational flow of visual, sonic, and literary cultures of anticolonialism and leftwing struggle. The panel was moderated by Koni Benson, and featured the following speakers and papers:
- Nelson Mlambo (Language and Literature Studies, University of Namibia): “The Combatant: A Literary and Rhetorical Analysis of Selected Anti-Apartheid Discourses: PLAN’s The Combatant, SWAPO’s Pre-independence Revolutionary Magazine”
- Sarah Jilani (English, City University of London): Genç Sinema / Yedinci Sanat
- Kebotlhale Motseothata (African Literature, University of the Witwatersrand): Dawn
- Michael Bhatch (English, UWC): “Sonic Lecture: Revolutionary Records: Vinyl Set: Projecting and Shaping Black Futures Through Sound & Album Art”
- Nombuso Mathibela (Independent Cultural Worker and Writer): “Sonic Lecture: Continental Staffriders’ Liberation Bonfires and Dance”
Nelson Mlambo opened the discussion with his paper on The Combatant, the official voice of the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN) that was published during the 1970s and ‘80s. PLAN was the military wing of the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO). Nelson described how the magazine worked to construct counter-discourses against the Apartheid regime, using affective language to centre the revolutionary values of “strength, hope, and courage” among PLAN’s commanders and fighters. Another important rhetorical device or trope fashioned in the pages of The Combatant was that of “sacrifice” as mobilised against the cruelty and violence inflicted by the regime.
Next, Sarah Jilani joined the group via video link to share her research on two film journals from Turkey, Genç Cinema and Yedinci Sanat. In her presentation, Sarah focused on left-wing and critical cinematic and literary production during the 1950s and ‘60s, describing how Turkish filmmakers pushed the confines of formal cinematography, and incorporated Third Cinema perspectives into creating an art form that solidly rejected the use of cinema as a tool for profit and emphasised the collective processes behind making ‘guerrilla film’. Filmmakers associated with this movement were committed to bringing cinema to the streets, and the streets to the screen, filming tobacco workers’ strikes and student struggles to constitute a ‘parallel cinema’ in opposition to mainstream Turkish film. While Turkey is often excluded from discussions of anti-colonial and post-colonial contexts, Sarah Jilani’s work squarely located the Turkish left within the broader world of Third World, anti-imperialist internationalist networks.

Dawn, Vol. 8, No. 5 (1984)
Following Sarah’s presentation, Kebotlhale Motseothata presented a paper on women’s poetry and representation in Dawn, the journal of Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK), the militant wing of the African National Congress (ANC). Kebotlhale introduced Dawn as the counter-political platform of the then-banned ANC, which documented guerrilla attacks by the movement, and also forcefully instrumentalist culture as a weapon of struggle. Through the tropes of family, collective memory, and belonging, the magazine challenged the erasure of women in dominant representations of the movement, highlighting how “the woman question” was shaped in conjunction with counter-cultures of resistance surrounding the anti-Apartheid struggle.

Staffrider, Vol. 1, No. 3, July/August 1978.
After these three papers, the moderator invited Nombuso Mathibela and Michael Bhatch to offer brief reflections on the sonic lectures they had delivered the night before at the Revolutionary Papers Exhibition Launch event. Nombuso and Michael, who draw on their artistic practice as DJs in their scholarship, discussed how music and album art contributed to counter-cultural practices of anti-colonialism in South Africa and beyond. Nombuso spoke about her DJ set inspired by the South African Staffrider Magazine that ran between 1978 and 1993, drawing attention to how the sonic inspired the textual in the literary and aesthetic practice of the magazine. Further, she unpacked the relationship between archiving and political practice, and how it can re-constitute dominant notions of the archive. Michael spoke briefly about his set which had explored the transnational flow of revolutionary sound, exploring the web of intertextuality that connected radical musical practice across borders and contexts. He shared a number of extraordinary album covers that circulated alongside transnational revolutionary papers, connecting South Africa with geographies as varied as Mozambique, Turkey, America, Italy and Jamaica.
Michael Bhatch shares reflections on his sonic lecture the evening before, and how he wants to explore the transnational flow of revolutionary sounds, and explore the intertextuality across borders and sounds. He spends the panel sharing album covers as connected to the sonic. pic.twitter.com/OIakfntH0q
— Revolutionary Papers (@RevPapers) April 29, 2022
Once the floor was opened to questions and engagements from the audience, a lively discussion around the form of the periodical took place. Ciraj Rassool pinpointed the nature of political and aesthetic ‘claims’ being made by the form of the journal or the bulletin. Kebotlhale joined in with a comment on form via Dawn, reading it as a curriculum for comrades in militant camps who did not otherwise have access to books and magazines. At the same time, it functioned as an informal platform for dialogue and community building, through reading discussions organised as often as two to three times a week around the essays published in the magazine. Further, Koni Benson posed an important question to Nombuso: What is the ‘Staffrider ethic’ that she referred to in her presentation? Nombuso responded in detail, speaking about the journal as a medium through which people reproduce themselves in struggle, and theorise their conditions through categories that run counter to dominant frameworks. This ‘Staffrider ethic’, which shaped other anticolonial journals that were also discussed in the conference and on the panel, is a collective process of institutionalisation, of constituting a practice of archiving revolutionary articulations of identity, ideology, and culture. Connections between the textual world of the journals and traditions of orality and sound were also emphasised by Michael Bhatch in his closing remarks during the discussion.

▴ Ciraj Rassool adds to the discussion.
At the Revolutionary Papers open event, on the opening evening of the conference, a revolutionary book market-nyana took place featuring stands from Cape Town-based operations: Surplus Radical Books, Chimurenga, Clarke’s Bookshop, The International Labour Research and Information Group (ILRIG) and The Interim People’s Library. Thanks to all the vendors!
Language Politics and the Revolutionary Periodical

Heidi Grunebaum introduces panelists for the session on Language Politics & The Revolutionary Periodical. Photo: Ruvan Boshoff.
The fourth panel titled “Language Politics and the Revolutionary Periodical” unpacked the politics of language in revolutionary publishing asking, how did the shift in linguistic register shape the politics, circulation, aesthetics, audience, and transnational links of revolutionary periodicals? The panel was moderated by Heidi Grunebaum (CHR, UWC), and invited Lifang Zhang, Idriss Jebari, Sara Kazmi, Sisanda Nkoala, Mishca Peters and Marcus Solomon to share their research:
- Lifang Zhang (Art History, University Currently Known as Rhodes) and Mingqing Yuan (African Studies, University of Bayreuth): “World Literature: The Chinese Translation and Introduction of African Literature in the Journal of World Literature (1953-1966)”
- Idriss Jebari (Middle East Studies, Trinity College Dublin): Perspectives Tunisiennes / al-‘āmil al-tūnsī
- Sara Kazmi (Postcolonial Literatures, LUMS, Lahore/University of Cambridge): Mazdoor Kissan Party Circular
- Sisanda Nkoala (Media, Cape Peninsula University of Technology): “Abantu-Batho and Umteteli wa Bantu: The Early Indigenous South African Black Press: A Model for Decoloniality and Multilingualism in Journalism Education”
- Mishca Peters (History, UWC) and Marcus Solomon (Children’s Movement): “A Children’s Movement for Change: Izwi Labantwana/Die Kinderstem/ Voice of the Children”

Lifang Zhang with reproduction of a cover of Shijie Wenxue as featured in the Revolutionary Papers exhibition. Photo: Ruvan Boshoff.

Lifang Zhang presenting. Photo: Ruvan Boshoff.
The first speakers on the panel were Lifang and Mingqing, who shared their work on the 1950s/ 1960s Chinese periodical Shijie Wenxue (World Literature). Established in 1953 under China Writers Association(CWA), it was the only journal for translated literature in China at that time. The speakers analysed the editorial statement of the journal, which drew links between literature and political education, and sought to connect the Chinese people to the world through literature. In particular, African literature frequently appeared in Shijie Wenxue, including texts like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, as well as poems, folklores and short stories from all over Africa. Special issues on African literature and the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference also sought to connect the Chinese people to the world through literature. Lifang and Mingqing highlighted the tension between the journal’s stated aims to participate in global anticolonial debates and its proximity to the state. For example, in the published translation of Achebe’s iconic novel, the last chapter was excised completely to paper over the critique of local power in Things Fall Apart, presenting it as a straightforward account of a united, undifferentiated Nigerian struggle against colonialism.

Idriss Jebari with cover of Perspectives Tunisiennes. Photo: Ruvan Boshoff.

Idriss Jebari presenting.
Second, Idriss Jebari spoke about revolutionary publishing across French and Arabic in Tunisia during the 1960s and ‘70s. He analysed how languages were instrumentalised through the act of translation, emphasizing how meaning was re-worked when applied to specific contexts. Idriss illustrated this insight through a close look at two, related revolutionary concepts: the French word ‘lutte’, and the Arabic word ‘kifah’ کفاح, both of which roughly translate as ‘struggle’ in English. Although existing scholarship largely reads the transition from primarily French publishing in the 1960s to Arabic in the 1970s as two separate ‘stages’ or ‘phases’ in the counter-cultures of the Tunisian left, Idriss argued for the two to be considered together, through a multilingual framework, to sketch a history of the Tunisian left and sketch the bilingual vocabularies of struggle.

A 1975 cover of the Mazdoor Kissan Party Circular bearing a sketch of Ho Chi Minh, and the heading, “Join together the shining paths of Hashtnagar and Landhi. Bring back the memory of Ho Chi Minh!” [An industrial area in Karachi, Pakistan, Landhi was the site of a workers’ struggle during the 1970s]
The third presentation on the panel looked at a teaching tool on the MKP Circular, which was the bulletin published by the Mazdoor Kissan (Workers and Peasants) Party in 1970s Pakistan. Sara Kazmi used the Circular to read the cultural histories and politics of caste articulated by segments of the MKP against the backdrop of the continuing marginalisation of the caste question within South Asian Marxisms. The multilingual and polyphonic form of the Circular enabled perspectives rooted in regional vernacular concepts to come to the fore, despite the fact that the party’s official communication remained tied primarily to the colonial and national languages of English and Urdu. In particular, Sara analysed “Haq Mussalli” as a kind of anti-caste manifesto that drew together the historical experiences of caste, indigeneity, and class to articulate the revolutionary subject in the Punjabi countryside.
Sara begins to talk about Malik Agha Khan Sahotra, who took it upon himself to theorise the relation between caste, class and revolutionary politics. pic.twitter.com/tA0ToUppiB
— Revolutionary Papers (@RevPapers) April 29, 2022

Umteteli wa Bantu, 8 May 1920.
Following this discussion of caste and Pakistani communism, Sisanda Nkoala shifted the conversation to black journalism in South Africa between 1912 and 1956. Sisanda focused primarily on two newspapers, Abantu Batho (1912-1931) and Umteteli Wa Bantu (1920-1956) to parse out decolonial approaches to journalism and multilingualism in journalistic education. The speaker drew on her experiences of teaching with these newspapers in the classroom, working through ads, editorials, and language choices in these publications to problematise theory around the ‘public sphere’ and arrive at alternative methodologies to analyse the early black press in South Africa. Sisanda’s presentation expanded on her close reading of the two newspapers in the teaching tool: Early South African Black Press: Abantu-Batho and Umteteli wa Bantu.

Izwi Labantwana/ Die Kinderstem/ Voice of the Children, September 1999.
The last presentation on the panel was given jointly by Mishca Peters and veteran political organiser Marcus Solomon. Mishca and (Uncle) Marcus spoke about the magazine of the Children’s Movement in South Africa. The magazine was called Izwi Labantwana/ Die Kinderstem/ Voice of the Children and was a trilingual publication produced in Afrikaans, English, and isiXhosa. As also narrated in a teaching tool, the movement emphasised the role of children as agents of revolutionary transformation, and the magazine experimented with a range of editorial and publishing practices that allowed children involved with the movement to shape and curate the form of the periodical. Both Mishca and Uncle Marcus spoke at length about the magazine’s extensive engagement with questions of food, environment, and education, and Uncle Marcus in particular, shared reflections on his forty-year-long engagement with the Children’s Movement, describing Izwi Labantwana as a political experiment and a learning tool for those involved.
Marcus Solomon had the participants at the @RevPapers conference at Ashley Kriel Hall in the palm of his hand.
— Ciraj Rassool (@CirajRassool) April 29, 2022

Mishca Peters with adults from the Children’s Movement stand with the Izwi Labantwana teaching tool. Photo: Koni Benson.
The moderator Heidi Grunebaum opened up the floor for questions with a critical observation on practices of translation, noting how translation reproduced the logics of Apartheid in the South African context, in comparison to ‘polyvocal’ approaches in which languages do not map discreetly and simply onto separate communities. Further, Heidi cautioned against the relationship between language and nationalism in exploring revolutionary engagements with language politics, inviting a remark from Ciraj Rassool regarding the real, concrete relationship between translation and political work. He clarified that language translation must relate with other forms of translation, conceptual, ideological, cultural, that are being undertaken by a movement. This discussion around the politics of translation and language hierarchies was inflected by observations and experiences contributed by political activists who were present in the hall, many of whom had organised alongside Marcus Solomon, and were politicised as children and young adults involved with the Children’s Movement discussed during the presentations. It was noted that the anti-ageist framework of the Children’s Movement and its magazine Izwi Labantwana pushed existing hierarchies and binary understandings of subjectivity, agency, and organising within the South African left, an impulse that underpinned and transformed the periodical’s multilingualism into a radical practice of translation and language activism.

▴ Lifang Zhang answers a question from the room.
Periodicals of Decolonisation: Aesthetics and Consciousness
The last panel on Day 2 of the Conference was a hybrid discussion on periodicals of decolonisation with a particular focus on the infrastructures and networks of circulation and communities that made the production of these journals possible. Katerina Seligmann, Hoda El Shakry and Zaib Aziz joined those gathered at Community House via Zoom to present their research on journals connected to anticolonial struggles in India, Morocco and the Caribbean in a discussion moderated by Chana Morgenstern:
- Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann (Literatures, Cultures and Languages, University of Connecticut): Tropiques
- Hoda El Shakry (Comparative Literature, University of Chicago): “(Non-)Aligned in Print: Anti-Colonial Aesthetics in Souffles-Anfas (1966-1971)”
- Zaib un Nisa Aziz (History, Yale University): “The Masses of India: The Radical Underground: The Secret Circulation of Propaganda and the Rise of Global Anti-Imperial Consciousness 1919-1936.”
Katerina opened the discussion on the panel with insights from her upcoming book on the formation and importance of literary infrastructures and cultural capital for providing the means of production for the literary journal. Engaging critically with Benedict Anderson’s influential thesis in Imagined Communities, Katerina highlighted how Caribbean magazines in the 1940s created community imaginaries that exceeded the bounds of the nation-state in their internationalist mapping of time and space. Katerina’s presentation emphasised the importance of looking at the material conditions that went into the production of anticolonial magazines and their circulation. Further, she deployed ‘guerilla’ as a conceptual category to examine radical publishing, reading Caribbean magazines of decolonisation as a guerilla pursuit against the goliath of the publishing industry.
Next, Hoda El Shakry shared her research on Souffles-Anfas, a Marxist-Leninist magazine published from Morocco between 1966 and 1971. Hoda detailed how Souffles was initially published in French, expanding to become a bilingual journal publishing in both French and Arabic in its final years. Hoda drew on the category of ‘terrorist literature’ to explicate the radical poetics and literary of Souffles-Anfas, drawing a connection with Katerina’s deployment of ‘guerrilla literature’. Through a discussion of the journal’s navigation of the tensions between aesthetics and Marxist-Leninist ideology, language policy, and internationalist solidarities, Hoda posited that the Arabic term ‘adab’ presented a richer, generative possibilities than Anderson’s framework for sketching the infrastructures, publics, and communities created by leftwing and anti-imperialist periodicals in the Arab world.
The last presentation on the panel was given by Zaib Aziz. Zaib spoke about the multilingual literature produced by the archive of anticolonial internationalism, expanding on her research into the colonial surveillance of dissident publishing around the Indian anticolonial struggle. The material routinely published in banned publications like The Masses of India spanned English, French, German, Urdu, Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Finnish, Tartar material, suggesting that language played a key role in revolutionary internationalisms in the early twentieth century. Further, Zaib observed that national self-determination became the objective not only of national movements but also of Communist internationalism. Further, Zaib highlighted the subaltern cosmopolitanism of peripatetic labour, highlighting their under-studied role in the circulation of propaganda materials. These ‘guerrilla tactics’ involved smuggling banned publications into India into boxes of soaps, personal letters and other belongings and were part of the subversive repertoire involved in forging the world of underground revolutionary periodicals.

Graphic from Souffles spécial Palestine issue (1969).
Chana opened the discussion by invoking the concept of ‘location writing’, suggesting that practices of multilingualism and regionally-situated aesthetics allowed journals to mount an anticolonial intervention that routed the local to participate in radical internationalisms. The role of the international and the local was further explored in the discussion through the links between maritime labour and anticolonial internationalism, integrating their unions into the infrastructures of radical literary production. Further, Katerina and Hoda emphasised the importance of considering specific articulations of Palestine solidarity, Pan-Africanism, and black consciousness into networks of tricontinental and Communist internationalism, with revolutionary periodicals serving as a crucial node for examining how these imaginaries were co-constituted in a range of contexts across the Global South.
Day 3 of @RevPapers, @konibenson: “history is therapy for socialists”! pic.twitter.com/pjfurVMbZb
— marral ????? (@sham_marral) April 30, 2022
The Newspaper as Organizer

Day 3 of the conference began with Bongani Kona (History, UWC) sharing reflections on the previous day’s discourse.
The sixth panel trained attention on the specific form and function of the newspaper in revolutionary movements: How did the newspaper serve as an organiser in its own right? How did its material, aesthetic and literary form help constitute political communities and discipline cadres? The panel featured the following speakers and was moderated by Kelly Gillespie (Anthropology, UWC):
- Sam Longford (CHR, UWC): Dawn
- Noor Nieftagodien (The History Workshop, Wits University): “Congress Militant: The paper as a revolutionary organizer”
- Danah Abdulla (Graphic Design, University of the Arts London): “Publications as a Form of Solidarity Building: PFLP Bulletin”
- David Johnson (English, The Open University): The Workers’ Herald
Sam Longford presented a teaching tool on Dawn, the journal of Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK), the militant wing of the African National Congress (ANC). In particular, Sam focused on discussions of discipline, armed struggle, leadership, and democracy within the pages of Dawn, highlighting the internal contradictions around the question of violence in the movement. Further, he explored the tension between the principles of freedom, democracy, and equality espoused by the movement on the one hand, and the tactical demands for discipline, organisation, and unity on the other, which often led MK to punish internal dissenters and critics. For example, Sam drew on issues from Dawn to discuss a mutiny within the MK camp itself, all mention of which was quashed by the central command. Focusing on a close reading of a 1986 issue, Sam also discussed the mythologising of Chris Hani, MK leader and South African Communist Party chief, whose figure help draw out some of the tensions surrounding questions of violence and revolutionary organising as articulated in Dawn.
Sam was followed by Noor Nieftagodien, whose presentation on the Congress Militant further excavated alternative histories of struggle marginalised by dominant narratives espoused by the ANC since it came into power. Noor based his presentation on his own personal experiences of organising with the International Marxist Tendency in South Africa during the 1980s, which was a Trotskyite outfit that emphasised workers’ power through an oppositional engagement with the politics of the Communist Party and the ANC. Reflecting on the process of writing political histories that draw in the autobiographical, Noor stressed the importance of guarding against nostalgia in resurrecting revolutionary pasts, while also avoiding ‘hyper-criticisms’ of former radicals ‘and their sins’. He described the Congress Militant as a radical, socialist, anti-Stalinist and Pan-Africanist newspaper that contributed crucially to the production of publics and the training of a revolutionary cadre. The production, curation and dissemination of the paper was the responsibility of the cadre, becoming a means for developing political consciousness and forging student-worker links within the movement.

Danah Abdulla with reproduction of a PFLP Bulletin front cover.

Slide from Danah Abdulla’s presentation.
The third speaker on the panel, Danah Abdulla, analysed the visual form and design aspects of the PFLP Bulletin, an English magazine run by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine since the 1960s. Danah read the Bulletin through a three-part scheme for analysing the journal form, distinguishing between a ‘magazine,’ a ‘megazine’, and a ‘metazine’. According to Danah, the Bulletin functioned as a ‘metazine’, as it served as a tool for mass mobilisation, provided a documentation of the time, served as a platform for expressing solidarity, and fostered a community among its readers and authors. The magazine served as a the mouthpiece for the PFLP, issuing militant statements and disseminating the political line of the PFLP on the struggle for Palestine. Charting the transformations in its visual form, with a focus on covers, Danah concluded with reflections on and questions about the transformations in the periodical form in the digital age. What does print publication and communication mean in today’s age? How do social media platforms interact with these print forms?

David Johnson presents a comic as published in The Worker’s Herald.

J. C. Scott, ‘When He Awakes’, Workers’ Herald, 28 July 1926 [reprinted in Workers’ Herald, 10 August 1929].
The last presentation on the panel featured a teaching tool on The Workers’ Herald by David Johnson. The Worker’s Herald was the magazine of the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union of Africa (ICU) that ran between 1923 and 1929. The multilingual magazine was published in English, isiXhosa, isiZulu, and Sesotho and was the organ of the largest black organisation in the world at the time. The politics of the ICU combined influences from Garveyism, Communism, trade unionism, and popular Christianity, focalising labour activism, land reform, and the revocation of pass laws in South Africa. David shared a series of political cartoons published in the magazine to map the political issues that preoccupied the magazine’s board, which often existed in tension with the advertisements that also appeared in its pages.
In her opening comments as discussant, Kelly Gillespie identified some common themes across the four presentations. First, the preoccupation with the question of discipline in movements, and its relationship to political education as espoused through the periodical as an organising tool. Second, she observed how each of the contexts discussed in the panel confronted and tried to address the limitations of socialist political practice: What does socialism allow and enable, and what does it prevent? Third, Kelly commented on the salient concern with the politics and varying articulations of internationalism, a theme that ran through almost every single periodical presented in the conference.
“How do we ensure that academic writing does not pacify the politics of these radical periodicals.” — Kelly Gillespie
— Revolutionary Papers (@RevPapers) April 30, 2022
As the floor was opened for comments and questions from the audience, Idriss Jebari pointed out the importance of considering the ‘political economy’ of a periodical while analysing its form, to which Heidi Grunebaum added by emphasising the role of exile in intensifying political diversification and modes of struggle within movements and revolutionary papers. Further, Marral stressed the importance of considering papers and magazines as one of the many forms of communication and dialogue taking place within movements, urging all to consider radical periodicals as nodes within complex networks of revolutionary exchange and organising.
Political Education through Newspapers and Magazines

Sara Kazmi introduces the panel. Photo: Ruvan Boshoff.
The closing programmed panel brought to the front table presentations that expanded upon the discussion in panel six. Newspapers and magazines from struggles in the mid-twentieth century through to the present-day were shared. All the revolutionary publications named offer(ed) approaches for developing critical texts from inside sites of (in)formal education while also using these texts as creative pedagogical tools and popular education resources. Sara Kazmi chaired the session with the following panelists:
- Ciraj Rassool (History, UWC): “Schooling the Nation through Words: Reading and Writing in the Non-European Unity Movement, 1940s-50s.”
- Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja (Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies, University of Cape Town) and Koni Benson (History, UWC): “The Social Life of the Namibian Review.”
- Mahvish Ahmad (Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science): “On Underground Study Circles as Anticolonial Praxis.”
- Leigh-Ann Naidoo (School of Education, UCT): “Publica[c]tion: Publishing, An Alternative and the Creative Process of Critique.”
- Lorna Houston (Programme Coordinator at Brave Rock Girl): Pathways to Free Education.

Ciraj Rassool presenting. Photo: Ruvan Boshoff.
First to present, Ciraj Rassool introduced the role of teachers in three interconnected South African political formations: the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM), the Anti-Coloured Affairs Department Movement (Anti-CAD) and the All-African Convention (ACC). Central to Ciraj’s argument is how, in his own words: “the entire institutional edifice of the AAC and Unity Movement can be understood as a massive initiative in public education, which saw the creation of a body of symbolic expressions, rhetorical strategies, methods of analysis and an entire repertoire of research, knowledge creation and dissemination.”
Ciraj told how in the 1940s-50s, the NEUM and associate groups cultivated “schools as sites of politicisation” and “meeting halls as public classrooms” with “bulletins and pamphlets as worksheets.” Publications produced and instrumental to the movement building included The Torch and the Anti-CAD Bulletin. Through reading, talking, reading aloud, distinctions and hierarchies between readers and thinkers/writers were challenged. Ciraj also made reference to IB Tabata (and Jane Gool), specifically a tour through the Eastern Cape, the New Era Fellowship, the Cape Action League. and the APDUSA newsletter (later renamed Unity Newsletter)
Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja and Koni Benson began their joint contribution by narrating how they came to learn of The Namibian Review. Their journey included engagement with Neville Alexander’s popular education work, facilitating Know Your Continent sessions and episodes of what they called Radical Histories. These Radical Histories, which include interacting with The South African Committee for Higher Education (SACHED) along with figures of influence, in particular Ottile and Kenneth Abrahams. These organisations, individuals, ideas and activist education are traced in a teaching tool: Mapping the Social Lives of The Namibian Review.

Map of the life journey and movements of Ottilie Abrahams. An interactive version of this features in The Namibian Review teaching tool.
Nashilongweshipwe and Koni described their reading of and engagements with The Namibian Review as a study of critical pedagogy. Bringing the study into the room, Koni acknowledged elder comrades in attendance – including Marcus Solomon, Derek Naidoo, and Leonard Gentle – who contributed to the movements being narrated. A copy of a map of Ottilie Abrahams’ journeying and an anthology of Neville Alexander’s writing were passed around the Ashley Kriel Hall thus allowing conference participants to engage further.
As with her teaching tool on Jabal, Mahvish Ahmed transported us to Balochistan. However, whereas Jabal was produced in the 1970s, for this presentation, Mahvish introduced a contemporary publication and media platform called Sagaar. Asking how can organising still take place in conditions of extreme violence by the state, Mahvish discussed the The Baloch Students Organization – Azad.
For her fieldwork she mostly worked with women students, who shared how the production of Sagaar involved organising and mobilising with active study circles. In the study (or knowledge) circles, students would summarise an article, which when carried out in the group would boost individuals confidence. This then encouraged students to write themselves. Students who were active in the study circles shared how their involvement led to friendships and was consciousness-raising.
![Map of the 2016 Publica[c]tion journey](https://revolutionarypapers.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/2016-publicaction-journey-map.jpg)
Map of the 2016 Publica[c]tion journey.
Leigh-Ann Naidoo organised her presentation in three parts: publics, process and pedagogy. In the first of these parts, Leigh-Ann reiterated a question she and fellow editors (Thato Magano and Asher Gamedze) asked in producing Publica[c]tion: “How do we put the action back into public resistance?” Leigh-Ann mentioned once produced, they printed 4000 hard copies along with a digital PDF edition, all distributed for free [PDF available here].
![Editorial statement by Publica[c]tion collective](https://revolutionarypapers.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/publicaction-collective-statement.jpg)
Editorial statement by the Publica[c]tion collective.
Referring to the a map of a bus journey the Publica[c]tion team took in 2016, Leigh-Ann recalled how following the energy drain of violence (internal and external to student movements), partisan politics and tactics of campus shutdowns and occupations, the process of producing the paper encouraged a variety of modes of writing and contributors from across the country (and student comrades overseas). The map then became the contents page for the publication. When it came to distributing the paper, which Leigh-Ann reiterated is “not a product”, a series of launches with readings and workshops took place, one of which was at Community House in the same room – the Ashley Kriel Hall – where the Revolutionary Papers conference was taking place. To close, Leigh-Ann read from the Publica[c]tion collective’s editorial statement.
Lorna Houston was the final panelist to present, focusing on Pathways to Free Education. Produced out of Cape Town since 2016, with much shared impetus and personnel to Publica[c]tion, Lorna identified the foundations of the Pathways collective and journal as being three-fold: to offer distractions to the political education taking place on campus(es); as a space for critical engagement; and a community building approach to producing publications. When it came to assigning tasks within the production, often this division of labour would be simply be by a question such as: “who is available to edit?” With regard to editorial feedback, Lorna recalled encouragement that would “allow [a] decolonial voice to come through.”
For the second half of her presentation, Lorna read from a text she wrote published in the third edition of Pathways: ‘Reflections on Pathways to Free Education‘s Winter School 2017’ [which will soon be republished in a new teaching tool]. Echoing the cyclical process that Mahvish had earlier mentioned, Lorna recalled how during the Winter School, there would be an approach whereby actions were reflected on then adjustments made that in turn informed the next actions (and so on: action-reflection-adjustment…).

A hand-drawn map of an imagined “Greater Balochistan” carried by the weekly Al-Baloch, Karachi, in its issue of 25th December, 1932, on page 7. Source: Baloch, Inayatullah. 1989. The Problem of Greater Balochistan: A Study of Baloch Nationalism. Hamburg: Beiträge zur Süudasienforschung [Hamburg].
To bring the panel to a pause point, Sara Kazmi shared a few notes. She commented on how insightful it is to have producers of the publications present so as to speak of processes. Additionally, she added however that one limitations of written publications is the functional literacy required to engage with them and that this can impact on which publics work with the texts. Lastly, she applauded how all these revolutionary papers allow for concepts and themes to be stretched. Picking up on this last point, Nashilongweshipwe said how they’d learn that in The Namibian Review, there were fierce debates, for instance in regard to ideas of “the nation”. Mahvish also spoke to this on the (dis)agreement(s) in the The Baloch Students Organization – Azad, on what did or did not make it into the journals, and the particular challenges of infiltration into social movements with state intelligence agencies listening in.

Jacob Marengo School, as featured in The Namibian Review teaching tool. Photo: Koni Benson.
As the session was opened to the room, Estefania Bournet asked if Koni and Nashilongweshipwe know if Paulo Freire’s writings had directly reached comrades in Namibia. To this a reply came with a responding yes, with confirmation that indeed Ottilie Abrahams read Freire and used his texts as part of the Education for Liberation she was committed to. From her own active involvement in/with Fallism, Kelly Gillespie pointed out that at the time of their production, both Publica[c]tion and Pathways to Free Education were very clear to “not to be vanguardist”, however, in hindsight perhaps they can now be seen as being so. Lorna Houston responded to this reiterating that she joined the Pathways collective after it started and appreciated the solidarity across different institutions campuses. Lorna also shared that students appreciated this unity and also found Pathways to be a healing space.
‘Quiet Dog, Bite Hard’: A Travelling Exhibition on Anti-colonial Journals
Curatorial Statement by the Artist, Phokeng Setai

Covers of radical newspapers, journals and album covers installed in the Ashley Kriel Hall. Photo: Ruvan Boshoff.

The floor of the Ashley Kriel Hall was marked to map the radical networks. Photo: Ruvan Boshoff.
Quiet dog bite hard! Clandestine Networks of Revolutionary Papers is an exhibition featuring reproductions of the covers of leftist anti-colonial and anti-imperial periodicals from the twentieth century. The exhibition forms part of a three-day workshop organized by Revolutionary Papers, a transnational and transdisciplinary collaborative research project whose aim is to resurrect the periodicals in the present by emphasizing the strength of the pedagogical properties of the journals, as well as their potential to complicate the historicity of Western ideas of linear time-space. Periodicals of this kind offer us another entry point and counter-perspective into existing but historically marginalized bodies of knowledge that could possibly shape our post-imperial futures. By shifting our focus from individual(s) and directing it towards the activities of communities, organizations, theorists, activists and artists, ‘the collective’ as an autonomous unit is highlighted as a productive nucleus for the formation of multifarious genres of revolutionary praxes.

Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja and Skye Chirape in attendance. Photo: Ruvan Boshoff.

Opening welcomes from the Revolutionary Papers core team as the exhibition evening begun. Photo: Ruvan Boshoff.
The work of the revolutionary periodicals is prefigured by the historical struggles for Black freedom, the Haitian Revolution being a significant episode in this historical continuum. They therefore emanate from networks formed out of transcontinental solidarities and anticolonial political modes and modalities of their time. It was these political orientations that made many of them illicit, which meant that to circulate the literature, revolutionaries relied on the formation of covert modes of distribution. In our contemporary moment, material of this nature can be renounced as obsolete and insignificant to the urgencies of our time. However, it is evident that the thematic and historical content of the periodicals remains pertinent in our present global socio-political climate, mainly because our contemporary world-system inherits the systematic asymmetries of imperialism and colonial oppression, which lead me to ask, what is the role or purpose of alternative or adversarial political forces in our present time?

Attendees engage with the ‘Quiet Dog, Bite Hard’ exhibition and each other. Photo: Barry Christianson.

Lights shine through the larger than life cover art. Photo: Barry Christianson.
I’m obliged to contemplate this provocation by the robust activities of anticolonial and anti-imperial formations of the previous century. Dubbed the ‘short century’ by British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, to denote the seventy-eight year period spanning from 1914 to 1991, the period was characterized by incessant episodes of warfare and armed political resistance against Western imperial capitalism, beginning with the First World War in the year 1914 and culminating in the demise of Apartheid rule in South Africa in 1991. From the perspective of the imperial and colonial subjects, counter-hegemonic technologies were crucial to the invention of subversive strategies to overturn imperial sovereignty. The banned revolutionary periodicals, newspapers and magazines emanated from this political imperative. Due to their orientation toward anticolonial and anti-imperial imaginaries, the publications whose covers are displayed in this exhibition had to operate on both terranean and subterranean grounds. Thus, at the forefront of my thinking was the activation of obscuration and translucence for two distinct reasons: (1) the periodicals were produced to circulate through clandestine channels, the purpose of which was to render them difficult to capture and monitor by out-groups, (2) however, they were simultaneously intended to regain their visibility or transparency to the in-group.

African Anarchist hip-hop collective Soundz of the South energize the hall with ‘Toyitoyi Vibrations’. Photo: Barry Christianson.

Photographer Barry Christianson explores the “visibility/invisibility and transparency/opacity” the reproduced cover art allows for.
Extrapolating from Edouard Glissant’s formulation of the notions of the archipelago and relational aesthetics, I am able to envisage a line of connection between the assemblages of periodicals and their unique geographic specificity. Most importantly, Glissant contends that the imperial and colonized subjects entered into relation as a result of their shared struggles for liberation from Western subjection (Britton, 2009:5). It became crucial for me to tether my curatorial approach to a postcolonial sensibility such as the one Glissant offers, especially considering how constitutive anticolonial world-making ideals were to suturing together radicalized thought and practices of that period. Confronted by the Janus-facedness of these periodicals and the problem of how best to represent it, the choice of material on which I would reproduce the covers was vital. Bearing in mind the scarcity of these periodicals back then and their rarity holding true in the present, I was intent on devising a mode of articulation that could assist me in signaling these intricate relationships between visibility/invisibility and transparency/opacity. Ultimately, I opted to have the digital images sublimated onto a mesh-like fabric which I selected for its permeable texture—the ability to at once let light through, embodying an ephemerality that almost invites touch, whilst also strikingly demonstrating the permanence of political visuality. I heightened this dualistic experience through scale—blowing the periodicals up to larger than life.

Phokeng Setai and Ben Verghese work the levels. Photo: Barry Christianson.

Attendees interact with each other and the exhibition. Photo: Barry Christianson.
Moreover, the title of the exhibition, Quiet dog bite hard I appropriated or sampled from a song called Quiet dog by the artist Yasiin Bey (formerly Mos Def). The song opens with a spirited monologue by legendary Afrobeats musician and anti-imperial political firebrand, Fela Kuti, who says:
“One thing I want to assure them
If they think I’m gonna change or compromise
My attitude and my way of life or
In my expression or in my goal
Towards politics
They are making me stronger
And I am much stronger now…”

Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja listens to a sonic lecture from Nombuso Mathibela. Photo: Barry Christianson.
Kuti was responding to the oppressive actions of the government against him and the autonomous zone he created in his Kalakuta Republic. What I find very powerful in his monologue is the sentiment which seeks to highlight how conditions of heightened subjugation do not necessarily serve to repress the oppressed. Instead, they only make them fight back harder (further emphasizing the song title). The common aphorism of a ‘bark worse than its bite’ is true of loud, but mostly harmless dogs and certainly true of movements wielding overt force intended to intimidate but making no lasting change. The idea of a quiet dog subverts this—evoking the silent danger of a covert political movement.

Attendees interact through the evening. Photo: Barry Christianson.
Walking through the Salt River Community House, a site of living political heritage and historic importance in Cape Town and South Africa, the refrain which Bey repeats in the song (“Quiet dog bite hard, my god!”) would play on loop in my mind, inspired by the history of the site. Since the building’s inception it has been renowned as a site of political activism and continues to shape the socio-political landscape of its surrounding communities to this very day. This has led me to circle back to the provocation I put forth above about the importance of autonomous anticolonial and anti-imperial constellations in our present. What ties these formations together is also the common thread that unites Black people worldwide, and these are the ideas of pursuing liberation and independence from imperial domination on a global scale. The significance of the Black resistance struggle is underscored for us today in the radical political imaginaries emerging from the content of the revolutionary papers, which crystallize the ideals of liberty while undermining the influence of neoliberal sovereignty in the present day.