As ROAPE celebrates its 50th anniversary, my reflections revisit my articles and also the great meeting of intellectuals, the second ROAPE Connections workshop, organised jointly by ROAPE, the University of Dar es Salaam Convocation and the Nyerere Foundation, and held at Dar as Salaam University in April 2018 (Bujra et al. 2018). In the multi-authored debate special issue that came out of the Connections 2 workshop, my paper, titled ‘Reflections on Struggles: Building Grassroots Social Movements in Kenya’ (ibid., 644–652), spoke about my lived experience over a period of 15 years and my passion over that period in building a network of organic intellectuals in the grassroots social justice movement – a network to think creatively and participate in the battle of ideas and in anti-imperialist resistance.
In the workshop, we established a powerful intergenerational connection and built alliances. Comrade Issa Shivji was inspirational in his contribution, evoking the battle of ideas:
This is where, in my view, the crucial problem of the Left lies. How to win the battle of ideas, the battle for hegemony, at the level of civil society? In other words, how to do politics where the masses are – and not simply where (state) power resides. (Bujra et al. 2018, 618)
Shivji also noted what Antonio Gramsci taught us, ‘that the bourgeoisie does not rule by force or propaganda alone. Its rule is rooted in the hegemony of its world outlook and ideology’ (ibid.). In our grassroots social movements, in this battle of ideas, we struggle in shaping our collective struggles as working-class people in Africa within emerging social movements. Today we celebrate ROAPE’s founding spirit of 1973, a pan-Africanist intellectual platform committed to anti-imperialist and socialist development, and its 50 years of amplifying these ideas, nurturing new cadres and ideas in social movement struggles in Africa.
The intellectual moment of Dar was a great connection with many activist-scholars from social movements, from academic communities of diverse universities, and from grassroots social justice movements. There were great memories of the history of Dar es Salaam University, recalling the Guyanese revolutionary intellectual Walter Rodney’s teaching and writings against imperialism in the early 1960s and 1970s. The battle of ideas on people-centred pan-Africanism inspired by Caribbean social movements that took shape in Dar in 1974 was absolutely critical in shaping my own path, creating spaces of organic intellectuals in the grassroots social movements convened by Mathare Social Justice Centre. We made a video about the development of the network (Mathare Social Justice Centre 2021).
ROAPE has prepared fertile ground, helping to form grassroots organic intellectuals by publishing reflections, community research and social movements’ human rights press statements. These continue to challenge the crisis of capitalism and to advance the struggle for social justice in Kenya and Africa. Members of the Organic Intellectuals network have published in ROAPE, and the journal continues to inspire politics of the mass movements and ideas in defence of social justice and human rights. I wrote about how I became active in my interview, which was published on Roape.net in 2019 (Gachihi and Zeilig 2019). I also published my reflections on Maina wa Kinyatti’s Kenya: A Prison Notebook on the journal’s website (Gachihi 2021). This article was about the notebook written by Professor Maina wa Kinyatti during his six-year detention in a Kenyan prison. He was jailed in 1982 for being a member of the December Twelve Movement. This was a workers’ and peasants’ underground political movement inspired by embryonic anti-imperialist revolutionary intellectuals in the University of Nairobi and Kenyatta University in early 1960s, following the betrayal of Mau Mau (Kenya land and freedom army) struggles by the Kenyatta neo-colonial state which assassinated the leading socialist and pan-Africanist cadre, Pio Gama Pinto, in 1965.
As the journal marks 50 years in the battle of ideas, it is very important to continue on the path of building and shaping ideas against imperialism and for social justice. We need to avoid the pitfalls of commodification of knowledge. In the light of this, the great decision and move in this 50th anniversary year to open-access publication, making the journal’s articles and reflections easily available to activists and scholars in grassroots movements, is cause for celebration.
We hope that the journal will continue convening intergenerational connections and seminars as a part of nurturing intellectual cadres to continue with ROAPE in the struggle against imperialism, advancing the struggle for social justice.
