All journals have a history. In 1974, ROAPE began its publication run situated against a backdrop of receding moments of political independence in north, west and east Africa and amid ongoing liberation struggles in southern Africa. The Durban Moment had just happened, sparking a renewal of labour activism in South Africa, while Black Consciousness was gaining momentum in schools and townships, culminating in the Soweto Uprising of 1976. Angola and Mozambique would achieve self-determination in a year’s time. Meanwhile, the Second Chimurenga continued apace in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, concurrent to SWAPO’s parallel efforts in Namibia. The establishment of ROAPE reflected a unifying spirit of Africa-centred Third Worldism during this multifaceted time and the need for critical scholarship that engaged with these political developments and struggles, which were born from deep histories of anti-colonial resistance but also portended mutual futures of political, economic and social justice.
It is worth noting that the first activist-intellectual cited in ROAPE’s pages is Frantz Fanon. The editorial for Issue 1 of Volume 1 cites Fanon’s remark from The Wretched of the Earth (1961) that the post-independence leadership of Africa amounted to being the ‘spoilt children of yesterday’s colonialism’ (ROAPE 1974, 1), who remained beholden to foreign influence. In short, ROAPE started with a critical stance that worked against reductive time frames of ‘colonial’ and ‘postcolonial’ or, similarly, against cultural differences of ‘Africa’ versus ‘the West’. While mindful of the usage and importance of these broad distinctions, ROAPE charted a different course of intellectual inquiry and political commitment that stressed the primacy of local material conditions among peasantries, urban workers and related demographic groups to grasp the different meanings of political progress (or lack thereof), economic development and historical change, yet without seeking to get lost amid the details of individual localities. Indeed, the second intellectual cited in ROAPE’s pages is Mao Zedong (‘No investigation, no right to speak’), which signalled the journal’s further orientation toward a global context (ibid., 2). As noted later in this first editorial, the internationalisation of capital at times rendered the salience of continental and other conventional political geographies irrelevant (ibid., 3).
In this first issue and subsequent ones, a litany of significant names followed, among them Samora Machel, Ruth First, Mahmood Mamdani, John S. Saul, Harold Wolpe, David Hemson, and many others. Yet, it is more interesting to consider this initial framing involving Fanon and Mao and how these reference points have continued to inform the journal up to the present. Fanon himself was influenced by Mao – his personal library attests to this inspiration, which would manifest in his emphasis on the peasantry as a revolutionary vanguard in The Wretched of the Earth – and Fanon’s remarks regarding the self-enrichment of the postcolonial bourgeoisie have proved all too prescient (on Mao in Fanon’s personal library, see Fanon 2018, 762–764). More surprising is how China has assisted this very bourgeoisie – a phenomenon that has been consistently documented by ROAPE over the past two decades.
This recent inter-continental trend illustrates once more the importance of stressing material conditions over political alignments and loyalties, even those that are purportedly anti-imperial and anti-Western in orientation. It also underscores ROAPE’s early position that the geographies of global capitalism matter more than those of the nation-state. It is to the credit of ROAPE’s founding editorial team that the journal positioned itself from the start as being attentive to continental concerns vis-à-vis the Third World – and today the global South – but without uncritically valorising these entities and their vantage points. The Review of African Political Economy was among the first journals to articulate a critical Third Worldism that sided with neither party, nation, nor region. In doing so, it has documented instead the working lives and struggles of ordinary people, whose political and economic fates continue to shape vitally our present political dispensation.
