I recently moved from Johannesburg to London. My reasons were personal, and the loss has been considerable. My own library had to be reduced by more than 50% (it would have been greater without the sympathy of my partner, who accepted a bigger cut). Hardcopy journals had to go, including, sadly, ROAPE. It does not make sense to retain them when online versions are available, at least for those of us with a university affiliation (if our institution has a half-decent library). Sorrow was mitigated by graduate students who were developing their own academic collections and took some copies off my hands.
There was, however, an exception – the first 10 issues of the journal. This was not a matter of access – they are available on the ROAPE website. It was something more important: personal identity.
The really revolutionary thing was that the journal was sold to activist students by somebody wandering around the Junior Common Room bar and the Assembly Hall at SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies, where I was a student. This was how Socialist Worker and other left-wing papers were sold. The seller was Erika Flegg, a member of the Editorial Working Group. Thank you, Erika. I was taken aback that an academic journal could be distributed this way, and suspicious that she was linked to one of the other left groups.
That would have been Issue 3, when I was in the second year. Lecturers like Richard Rathbone and Shula Marks were introducing us to the names of some of the authors and Editorial Working Group members. Here was Issa Shivji, Richard Jeffries, Peter Waterman, Bill Warren, Robin Cohen, Gavin Williams, Mahmood Mamdani, Basil Davidson, Claude Meillassoux and John Saul. Jeffries and Warren were lecturers at SOAS and Bahru Zewde, another author, was a graduate student. I knew Ruth First from an amazing lecture she gave to a workshop of the National Union of School Students and Anti-Apartheid Movement three years before, and Basker Vashee had been explaining left politics in Zimbabwe to our International Socialist Africa Group.
The first sentence in the editorial began: ‘Central to this issue are problems of the class analysis of underdeveloped African countries societies’ (ROAPE 1975, 1). There were articles on peasants, petty producers, bureaucrats and labour aristocracy. This was all so very relevant – a wow moment! The whole approach, coming as it did in an academic journal, gave legitimacy to me raising such topics and analysis in essays, and it informed some of the discussion with fellow students and in student union debate (not that I agreed with arguments about labour aristocracy or the lauding of peasants).
Then I bought Issues 1 and 2 (probably from Dillon’s bookshop). There, in the first editorial of the first edition, were the journal’s opening words – its manifesto, one might say:
This review is published with the express intent of providing a counterweight to that mass of literature on Africa which holds: that Africa’s continuing chronic poverty is primarily an internal problem and not a product of her colonial history and her present dependence; that the successful attraction of foreign capital and the consequent production within the confines of the international market will bring development; and that the major role in achieving development must be played by western-educated, ‘modernizing’ elites who will bring progress to the ‘backward’ masses. We hold these perspectives to be inaccurate and mystifying and with regard to the last it should be clear that while the African revolution needs leaders and cadres, the record suggests that the leaders who inherited power at independence have all too often borne out Fanon’s description of them as ‘spoilt children of yesterday’s colonialism and of today’s national governments, [who] organise the loot of whatever national resources exist’ – primarily on behalf of foreign interests, of course. (ROAPE 1974, 1)
Stirring stuff!
Issue 7 included a debate I have returned to many times. In ‘Class Struggle and the Periodisation of the South African State’, Rob Davis, David Kaplan, Mike Morris and Dan O’Meara advanced a neo-Poulantzian position that focused on fractions of capital (Davies et al. 1976), and Martin Legassick and Harold Wolpe (1976) proposed a more classical Marxist position in ‘The Bantustans and Capital Accumulation in South Africa.’ I sided with the latter, and it did not surprise me that Legassick was a left-wing opponent of the post-1994, pro-capitalist regime and Wolpe became a sharp critic (despite his earlier allegiance to the South African Communist Party). In the late 1990s, ROAPE was still locked behind glass doors at Rhodes University – available only to those brave enough to sign their names. The Rand Afrikaans University (now University of Johannesburg) did not even subscribe until some of us lobbied for it to do so. Despite these restrictions, articles were cyclostyled and distributed like the Russian samizdat. ROAPE had a resonance with the intellectual struggle then under way.
Fifty years on, when I heard that ROAPE would be published on an open-access basis, I was enthusiastic. Now it would not only be student activists who could read about politics, economics and class in Africa, there could be a wider readership. By using new technologies, it was possible to play an even more valuable role. The potential for this could already be seen in the three activist workshops held in 2017 and 2018 and in the articles and blogs published on Roape.net. The journal would be likely to become more African and more aligned to resistance against regimes and foreign interests that are even more anti-democratic and pro-capitalist than those back in 1974. In the process, it would be possible for a layer of activists to connect with each other and learn about structures and struggles in other countries on the continent. In this, the academic authors can play a critical role, writing articles that move beyond measuring impact in citations by other academics and in promotions within their universities, but through the readership and feedback of activists. From my own experience in South Africa, this is a sorely needed relationship.
We can return to that first editorial:
Though we do not have at hand a completely worked out analysis we do have a common starting point. We are not neutral about the kind of method that offers the best chance of coming to terms with the realities of African underdevelopment. The perspective of the Review will be in this sense Marxist – not in offering a blueprint for some future society, nor in supporting a particular type of regime, as popular usage mistakenly might indicate, but in using a method which analyses a situation in order to change it. (ROAPE 1974, 2)
It is early days, with much hard work ahead, but the Review of African Political Economy had a worthy starting point, and we must hope that it is one that resonates 50 years later. In that way, it can fulfil its ambition to bring about change that favours those who resist the terrible poverty and repression experienced by the majority of Africans today.
