Introduction
As a founder and existing member of the Editorial Working Group (EWG), it is a privilege and even a duty to contribute an article to this issue reflecting on the journal’s role in knowledge production for the liberation of the peoples of the African continent.1 However, after this length of time, I understand there is something of a contradiction in engaged scholars based in the global North being involved in knowledge production for African liberation from the neocolonialism of global corporate and military power. How African indeed is the Review of African Political Economy?
The original purpose of ROAPE was defined by the liberation struggles mainly in southern Africa, and the attempts by some African governments, most notably Tanzania, to transform their newly independent countries by means of a socialist development strategy. In this article I shall reflect on this journal’s history as a project to disseminate knowledge produced by engaged scholars for those active across Africa in their struggles to liberate and transform their countries.2 I shall consider some of the central questions around such a project: why was it felt to be necessary and is it necessary now?; who was to produce this knowledge, and for whom then and whom now?; how effective could we have expected such a project to be, and how effective has it been in fulfilling its objectives? There is a burgeoning debate, on which I shall liberally draw, around these issues of knowledge production among African scholar-activists based on the continent.
A brief history
They were committed to critical and engaged teaching and research practices, and believed in research that had a transformative impact.
The above quotation, from a recent celebration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of the Mozambican academic-activist Aquino de Braganca, and referring not only to Darch but also to his colleague at the Centre for African Studies in Maputo, Ruth First, could also be ROAPE’s motto. Ruth was a founding editor without whose practical and intellectual input ROAPE would not have got off the ground as successfully as it did.
Even then, what did we think we were doing? It was Lionel Cliffe who suggested starting a journal on Africa which would publish articles explicitly supporting both the liberation struggles in the continent’s remaining colonies and progressive forces and governments that were seeking a transformation of their countries in a socialist direction. Such a journal would be quite different from existing academic journals that published articles which ‘studied’ the continent but did not seek to transform its economies and societies. It would be Marxist in orientation. Lionel did check with like-minded African comrades based on the continent and reported support for such a journal and for it to be based in the UK until African comrades had the resources and political strength to sustain it. Serendipity brought together a group of people who were to comprise the core of the founding EWG – returnees from Nyerere’s Tanzania and exiled South Africans who had researched and/or worked in Nigeria.
The idea for a new journal was discussed with some enthusiasm and resulted in the production of a typewritten flyer with the heading ‘Journal of African Development and Underdevelopment’ (See Appendix 1 ), circulated to everybody each of us knew.3 It noted that by then ‘only the Portuguese colonies of Guinea, Mozambique and Angola and the white regimes of Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa remain to be liberated, and in all these countries a protracted guerrilla struggle is underway’. However, it noted that coups and counter-coups in independent Africa, the growth of ‘privileged bureaucracies’ appropriating ‘the surplus from peasant producers and workers’ and failures to industrialise and transform agriculture had all diminished the promise of freedom. African economies were dependent on Western capitalism and open to ‘neo-colonial manipulation and control’, its ruling bureaucracies ‘providing the role of intermediary between imperial capital and the masses of the African people’.
The document went on to argue that there was
a need … for a cold, hard look at the internal structures and the external forces that have brought this about, for a more thorough understanding of the historical dynamics and the contemporary nature of African domination by imperialism and the prospects for total liberation. …
A journal could serve this need by providing the focus through which appropriate tools of analysis and concrete studies of the particular contours of African reality can be developed, … [offering] a forum for debate within a context which situates African attempts at development within the structure of a global system of imperialism.
This perspective would offer analyses of both the ‘dynamics of [the] metropolis in its impact on Africa’ and ‘of African societies … [to document] how the interaction between pre-capitalist social formations with colonially induced class structures have created both the present neo-colonial patterns and the forces out of which a revolutionary alternative must be created’.
The authors concluded by hoping that such a journal would ‘draw on other groups and individuals with similar perspectives to provide editorial guidance and contributions’ and would
involve the growing number of concerned African scholars, students and activists that in our experience are seeking alternative modes of analysis than are offered by the inherited perspective of colonial ‘science’ and who are often constrained by their own political isolation and heavy workloads from taking the initiative in such a venture.
The journal would bring together a ‘shared perspective and common debate about the two ends of the imperialist system’, thus making ‘some small contribution to the forging of those bonds that are necessary between the struggle in the peripheral areas and the centre if the system is to be destroyed and replaced’.
From this proposal and its underlying world view, it was clear that the authors had been heavily influenced by the writings of Andre Gunder Frank and the Latin American school. It also reflected an internationalist perspective stemming from the long tradition of metropolitan socialist left support for anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggles in whose various solidarity groups in the ‘metropole’ we had all been participating.
We were not the only academic activists trying to offer an alternative journal in their subject area. As one of our founding editors noted in a recent blog (Cohen 2024), some 11 journals founded with the objective of challenging the received academic orthodoxy appeared between 1967 and 1976.4 They had ‘radical’ or ‘critique’ in their title and were sometimes an output of a left-oriented academic organisation. None of the journals that Cohen lists had ‘socialist’ or ‘Marxist’ in their titles, even if some mentioned a leaning to Marxist approaches in their aims or content. (Capital & Class, which first appeared in 1977, and the Journal of African Marxists in 1984 were more explicitly Marxist socialist in their titles and analytical approaches.) All were part of a movement that emerged alongside the evident crises of capitalism of that era, as well as US imperialist wars and interventions throughout the global South. The later domination of the hegemonic project that was dubbed ‘neoliberalism’, while destroying livelihoods and some economies, fed the critical content of these journals.
In August 1973, we issued a progress report (see Appendix 2 ) in which the purpose of our project was expressed more sharply: to ‘confront basic issues that orthodox western scholarship seldom raised’; to bring together those who shared ‘an anti-imperialist stance’, with non-Africans augmenting the ‘contributions of those radical African writers’ who contributed to the journal; to refine ‘abstracted academic concepts’; ‘to relate to the ongoing struggle by trying to reach an audience not just confined to intellectuals or to the already committed’; and to contribute to ‘an analysis which will show the logic of a socialist alternative to capitalist domination’. The journal would be ‘informative, seriously argued and thoroughly documented while avoiding specialist jargon, heavy footnoting and the turgid unreadable prose typical of most purely academic publications’. It would have articles by francophone Africans and Africanists in French, recognising that as pan-Africanists we could not ignore a substantial part of the continent. In doing so, we developed links with French scholars of a similar persuasion and met in Paris with a group centred around Claude Meillassoux.
But first we had to give the journal a name. ‘Journal of African Development and Underdevelopment’, the title of our initial flyer, was too long and did not indicate a Marxist-oriented ‘Journal of African Political Economy’, another title we considered until we realised its inappropriate acronym. Then came ‘Review of African Political Economy’, with the acronym RAPE. We thought this might be a problem, but Lionel Cliffe suggested, mostly seriously, that this was a model of the relationship between imperialist powers and Africa. Ruth First was equally enthusiastic. So, our title was established with an acronym that we frequently used. I recall when promoting the journal at the World Sociological Congress in Toronto in the summer of 1974 meeting a male American who was unhappy with the acronym, while feminist Canadians and Americans thought it very appropriate. However, as the EWG expanded to include more women, we learned that there was much disquiet among British feminist Africanists about our acronym. So we added the ‘o’ as a capital letter and became ROAPE, pronounced as in ‘rope’, no longer explicitly pointing to colonial and neocolonial abuse, exploitation and plunder.5
Before we could produce an issue we needed finance. We circulated a letter to our contacts and distributed it at various conferences, stating a price tag of £1.50 for three issues a year, proposing details of contributors to the first issue and the names of those involved in establishing and supporting the journal. They formed the basis of the EWG and the Overseas and Contributing Editor groups. The latter two groups included Basil Davidson, Thomas Hodgkin, Archie Mafeje, Mahmood Mamdani, Claude Meillassoux, Ken Post and two Afro-American activists, Robert van Lierop and Prexy Nesbitt. This breadth of support enabled us to raise funds from advance subscriptions and donations which paid for the typesetting, printing and postage of the first issue, which itself generated subscriptions for subsequent issues.
Our first issue came out in November 1974. We again set out our stall, this time in the shape of an editorial not usually found in a ‘regular’ journal. We had a view, each issue had a theme, and the EWG’s collective view was a part of the process of expressing solidarity with progressive forces across Africa. The editorial made the journal’s position clear. Ray Bush quotes from that editorial in this issue (360) on our diametrically opposed view to the orthodoxy at the time regarding the cause of Africa’s problems and how they could be solved. To continue that quotation:
We hold these [orthodox] 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)
A set of questions followed, around which the journal would provide a forum for ‘sharpening analysis’ and ‘facilitating the fruitful accumulation of experience’: ‘why is Africa’s productive potential not realised? Why are most of its people still poor? Why is the continent still dependent, its future controlled by outside forces?’ (ibid.). To answer the questions required not an alternative ‘emptily academic’ analysis, but a need to address ‘the actions needed if Africa is to develop its potential’. The editorial made its ‘ideological perspective’ clear: it would be Marxist because ‘that [method] offers the best chance of coming to terms with the realities of African underdevelopment’. This would not mean we had a ‘blueprint for some future society’, nor would we support a particular type of regime, but we would be using ‘a method which analyses a situation in order to change it’ (ROAPE 1974, 2).
The content of the first issue set the tone, with Samir Amin’s model of global accumulation, Claude Meillassoux asking whether the Sahel famine of that time was ‘good for business’, John Saul assessing the revolutionary potential of the peasantry and Lionel Cliffe writing on the social and economic origins of the Ethiopian famine. An innovation was Chris Allen’s Radical Africana, later Current Africana: extraordinary bibliographies of all kinds of publications on Africa which ran for the first 10 years, over 24 issues.6 The first five issues were single themed, covering development theory, multinational corporations, class, class struggles and liberation, and the state. No. 7 on South Africa was our first country issue. There were several subsequent issues devoted to individual countries, including an issue on Kenya (no. 20 in 1981), largely produced from Nairobi. It took five issues for the Debate feature of the journal to get off the ground, with contributions by Basil Davidson taking issue with the Editorial in the previous issue (Davidson 1976) and by three members of Moscow’s Africa Institute critiquing Samir Amin’s article in the first issue (Rubinstein, Smirnov and Solodovnikov 1976). Debate then became a regular feature, perhaps most notably soon afterwards, in no. 11, with the critical response from Ruth First (1978) to the article by Archie Mafeje on the implications for liberation strategy of the 1976 Soweto uprising.
An important element of our collective initiative was that the editors would get their hands dirty in the production and distribution of the journal. So, when the page proofs had come from our typesetters, we set about pasting up the 16-page sheets in the right order so that they could be printed and bound. This involved weekends in London, or later Sheffield, where we would gather round a big table with the right glue (the dirty bit) and get the task done. Then there was typing labels, packing journals into envelopes, sticking on stamps and airmail labels, and the trips to the post office. This saved some of the production costs and gave us the feeling that we were producers of a physical product of knowledge, giving us a flavour of class identity with our fellow workers in struggle. This was the 1970s, after all.
We also did our own bookkeeping and took copies of the journal to be sold in major bookshops around the country. We had opened a bank account with the Cooperative Bank, then banker to all left-wing groups and parties, and processed all the cheques and cash received. We had importantly, thanks to Ruth First, gained the support of the well-known left publisher Martin Eve, whose Merlin Press (then and now publishers of Socialist Register) hosted us and gave us technical support and a reputational boost. It really was a case of everybody contributing what they could, wherever they were based. As an editorial working group, we met regularly and discussed all the articles that were submitted, eventually adopting a pro-forma review process that assigned articles to specific editors.
The new journal was by any estimation a success. Our first print run was set – optimistically, we thought – at 1,000 copies, and they quickly sold out, so we had to reprint. By the third or fourth issue we were printing 3,000 copies. We had around 300 institutional subscribers and roughly the same number of personal ones. We were delivering copies for sale in university and left bookshops. By our thirtieth issue in 1984, we had over 1,000 subscribers, of whom 45% were institutions, and a print run of 4,000. In 1986, we became a registered cooperative. However, by our fiftieth issue in 1991 we had lost just over 250 personal subscribers while gaining 16 institutional ones, and had accumulated a debt to our printer, who was giving us generous repayment terms. Our bookshops sales had fallen too. We were running a precarious small business. A report we were able to commission from a cooperative whose main activity was to support cooperatives such as ours – coincidentally, authored by one of our subscribers, later an EWG member – raised several issues regarding purpose and achievement, as well as small business management. The report (SCDG 1991) noted our original stated purpose but also noted that the membership of the EWG was after 16 years still mainly white European, that very few articles were authored by Africans of colour either based on the continent or in the diaspora, and that the journal sold very few copies there.
The move to a commercial publisher in 1993 broke with the collectivism of the early 1970s. It was a gradual process during which, as the SCDG report noted, the EWG was supported by low-paid and unpaid workers who sympathised with the journal’s aims and politics.7 Editors’ partial involvement in physical production did not last very long as, thanks to Lionel Cliffe and his friendship from student days with Ken Coates at the Bertrand Russell Foundation, we moved to Russell Press in Nottingham. Slowly the academic and partly activist EWG separated from the administrative and commercial side of the journal. We also started publishing books on our own and in association with sympathetic publishers on, for example, Ethiopia’s revolution (Hiwet 1975), popular struggles in South Africa (Cobbett and Cohen 1988) and the Politics of Transition (Mohan and Zack-Williams 2004). However, all this cost money. Our pricing policy was always to make the journal accessible, but our resulting income did not match increasing expenditure.
Accumulated debts, along with a degree of exhaustion among those with specific responsibilities to make sure the journal was produced roughly on time, resulted in our move to Carfax, later swallowed by Routledge, itself part of the US corporate Taylor and Francis. They priced the journal at a much higher and profitable level and put its finances on a stable footing. We retained management of production to the point of typesetting and full editorial control. By the time of leaving Taylor and Francis we had over 1,200 library and other institutional subscribers, although most of those did not subscribe to us directly but received ROAPE online as part of bundled packages. Because of its consequent wide availability and the high price, we had fewer personal subscriptions.
Even though our editorial independence was respected by our publisher, there was a view we had lost our way and were becoming an academic journal with the very characteristics that back in 1973 we intended to avoid. We had not developed a base on the African continent in one or more of the countries about which we published research articles. Were we just a progressive academic forum or were we that and a vehicle for progressive action? This uneasiness about purpose continued throughout the first two decades of this century. However, the income channelled to us had secured our financial independence. Most importantly, it facilitated a move towards relieving our uneasiness about purpose by establishing a very lively website and pump-priming the funding of a series of ‘Connections’ workshops across the continent, initiated in 2017 but sadly interrupted by Covid-19. Both initiatives have drawn in many more contributions and editorial participation from African scholars and activists.
However, growing unease about belonging to a stable of journals published by a global corporate and about the move by it and other publishers to the limited open-access ‘pay to publish’ model that we felt directly contradicted the journal’s founding principles strengthened our decision to leave the comfort of our publisher and return to independent publishing. Our related decision to go fully open access without a paywall at least decommodifies the journal and increases our coverage, especially across Africa. In the first five months of 2024 we were on track to reach our institutional subscriptions target for the 2024 Subscribe to Open (S2O)8 model and we had 10 times the number of personal subscribers to online or print versions paying under this model for 2024 than were paying in 2023 to our publisher. Our move is looking sustainable.
So how well is ROAPE being used? Taylor and Francis’s own data told us that we had almost 34,000 article download requests in the first three months of 2023. The number of such requests on our new ScienceOpen website totalled some 90,000 in the first three months of 2024, adding to the 30,000 that Taylor and Francis had from their perpetual subscribers for that period.9 Moving to a new model of journal accessibility, as well as returning to our old model of journal production, has been successful so far, even if our first issue of 2024 came out three months later than scheduled. We are now on track to catch up production with the 50th anniversary issue (September 2024). The larger issue is how does independence and recommitment to radical political economy affect what we publish and in what style? This recalls discussion at our beginning.
At that beginning we wanted to drop some of the conventions of academic publishing. We did not have footnotes or a list of references, but included a ‘bibliographic note’. We tried to avoid jargon, but inevitably we had to use words in Marxist political economy that were not in common use, and so, in the first issue, we had a glossary. This soon disappeared as we realised that some jargon was inevitable and in use not just in academia but also among like-minded activists. However, we wanted to make the journal’s content available to a readership much wider than the academic community, so we tried to ensure that articles were as readable as possible. Before that we needed a method of analysis derived from
a theory of social change which focuses on the agents of change. Amilcar Cabral understood how this kind of theory was a necessary ‘weapon’ and echoes Lenin’s phrase that ‘there can be no revolutionary struggle without a revolutionary theory’. … acquiring the tools and applying them to make an analysis should not be seen as an end in themselves or the separate task of full-time intellectuals. They are necessary in the practical business of working out a strategy for carrying on the struggle. (ROAPE 1974, 2)
We recognised that there were disagreements among radical African scholars about both analysis and solutions. The journal’s purpose here was to provide a forum for debate around analysis and policy while not offering a ‘line’. The editorial continued:
Appropriate analysis and the devising of a strategy for Africa’s revolution must be encouraged and we hope that the provision of this platform for discussion will assist that process. Ultimately the specific answers will emerge from the actual struggles of the African people, on the continent and throughout the world. (ibid., 2)
Nonetheless, we did have a line, or at least were perceived to have one. Having recruited the late Bill Warren to our group of contributing editors, he criticised our view of the negative impact of imperialism on African development as misguided. He had already published his famous article (Warren 1973) a year before that issue, arguing that the data on the growth of manufacturing industry in developing countries showed that several developing countries were industrialising through capitalism and that while imperialism undeniably continued to exist, it was instrumental in accelerating the development of capitalist social relations around the world, as Marx himself and other famous Marxists predicted.
Of course, ROAPE’s position in the first editorial did not deny that capitalist social relations were developing across Africa, especially in the rural areas, and that there was evidence of capitalist industrialisation too. Our eighth issue was devoted to the subject, following on from our second issue, which was critical of the role of multinational corporations in not making the backward linkages that would expand industrialisation much more rapidly. Interestingly, Warren’s article was relatively thin on data for Africa. However, he resigned from the EWG after the first three issues, even though the third was devoted to the very questions of class and class formation that he thought were evidence of developing capitalist social relations. Our position on the development of capitalism in Africa was put very well by Gavin Williams in his editorial of issue no. 13:
That [capitalism] enriches the few by impoverishing the many should occasion no surprise; that, as Marx pointed out in Capital, is the nature of capitalism and not of the lack of capitalist development. As socialists we need to understand the specific forms taken by international capitalism, the better to oppose it. (Williams 1978, 7)
Another early example of having a line that we said we did not have was on the Angolan civil war, which followed the country’s independence from Portugal. There is little doubt that the majority of the EWG supported that group of African liberation movements that were not only closely aligned with each other but also with South Africa’s African National Congress and therefore with the state socialist countries led by the USSR. The increasing influence of China – in Africa as well as among Marxists both in the global South and North during that period – led to some division within the EWG between the majority line and that of a small minority who were in sympathy with China’s position. My recollection is that this division was managed very well with several compromises until it came to the development of the civil war between the MPLA government of Angola and the rival liberation movements of UNITA, led by Jonas Savimbi and backed by China, and the FNLA, led by Holden Roberto and backed by the US. Then we were faced with a choice: back the MPLA as the genuine Angolan liberation movement that would follow a socialist transformative path, or back UNITA as the genuine anti-imperialist movement aligned with China, which had experience of a successfully pursued people’s war; or else not take sides between the MPLA and UNITA, arguing that it is a matter for the Angolan people to manage their own affairs and we should be calling for peace and unity. This last was the position of the minority group on the EWG.
By the fourteenth issue we had another resignation. Jitendra Mohan’s (1978) article in no. 11, calling for the unity of all rural and urban classes in mass struggle against imperialism and racism in a people’s war, was significantly criticised in the editorial of no. 14. It persuaded him that he and ROAPE had different views about peoples’ struggles and so he resigned from the EWG. But three years later he was persuaded that our position was now closer to his and he came back, happily and effectively taking on the task of Book Reviews Editor until his untimely death in November 1984 while editing no. 32. This issue was to be about ‘political practice and socialist intellectuals’ and was finally titled ‘Intellectuals and the “Left” in Africa’. Rereading Mohan’s carefully crafted editorial of no. 4, his polemic in no. 11 and the obituary Cliffe and I penned in no. 32, as well as the editorial of no. 32, raises several questions relevant to the discussion of ROAPE’s audience and the role it could play in the struggles of the peoples of Africa against imperialism and for transformative change. Key questions for us are for whom, by whom and how knowledge acceptable for publication in this journal contributes to these struggles. I shall consider these questions in the second part of this article, as well as several other issues that have been raised, especially by African scholars, concerning knowledge production in African Studies and the implications for ROAPE.
ROAPE and knowledge production: some key issues and challenges
There are four key issues in the production of knowledge published in this journal but they apply generally, whatever the claimed objective of the publication. The first concerns the relationship between knowledge and power and what becomes acceptable knowledge. The second is how this knowledge is produced and by whom, while the third is the question of the intended recipients. These issues are of course interrelated, as knowledge production cannot be separated from the social relations of its production. It is no accident that the production of knowledge through books and journals, for example, is big business with some powerful global players, reflecting power relations in the global economy. That knowledge production is not independent of power might appear obvious to a Marxist political economist, but it has taken the work of major theorists, Foucault for example, to develop a reasoned argument for such a position (Foucault 1980). What is acceptable knowledge for production in the literature especially in refereed journals is also rather obviously socially determined through the refereeing process for journals and research grants.
The hierarchy of power in knowledge production, generally reflected in the structure and culture of academic institutions, affects how knowledge is produced and who produces it. The current hegemonic ideology of neoliberalism brings these issues into stark focus. The monetisation of knowledge production and the increasing commercialisation of academic institutions, accentuated by league tables with their construction of disciplinary exclusivity and of hierarchies of quality, are built on the neoliberal view of valuation. The execution of this valuation and categorisation is in the hands of those who are either true believers or resigned to accepting the neoliberal order.
Articles in the last two issues of ROAPE have pointed us in important directions as far as knowledge production in African Studies is concerned. In the first issue of our 50th anniversary year, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2024) covered much of the literature tackling the issues surrounding knowledge production on Africa in the context of the decolonisation and reconfiguring of African Studies. In this section, I reflect on the past and future of ROAPE through the lens of African writers who have addressed issues around the decolonisation of the study of Africa. The second issue of 2024, a special issue celebrating the work of an African scholar-activist with articles written by fellow Africans, exemplifies what a journal of Africa should look like, and I shall comment on it at the end of this part.
The colonial origins of African Studies
Although ROAPE’s Marxist-oriented political economy has already been a challenge to mainstream African Studies, it may also need some rethinking. African Studies, after all, began as a colonial enterprise. Its genesis was as the African Society in the UK in 1788, re-established in 1901, with its regal prefix granted in 1935. Its journal, Journal of the Royal African Society, renamed African Affairs in 1945, published the Society’s rules in its first issue, stating that its purpose was ‘to investigate … usages, institutions, customs, religions, antiquities, history, and languages of the native races of Africa’ and ‘to facilitate the commercial and industrial development of the continent in the manner best fitted to secure the welfare of its inhabitants’ (African Society 1901, xxi). However, the Marquis of Ripon, a former Colonial Secretary, in a speech at the Society’s inauguration, queried giving the colonised ‘doses of (European) civilisation’ without
careful and scientific investigation to [gain] a real knowledge of … that vast Continent – of the feelings, the religions and the laws of the people … of all that relates to its natural history, to the diseases to which it is subject, … to everything that concerns the circumstances under which that country exists. (African Society 1901, vi)
Following on, Frederic Shelford, introduced as ‘the largest employer of labour in West Africa’, argued for the restriction of the Society’s reach to West Africa and for it to ‘educate men [sic] who go to West Africa about West Africa … inform the manufacturers at home what the native requires or will require’ so that ‘he can get it from England’ and not have to go to other countries (African Society, 1901, xii). The Society continued to cover the whole of Africa, but with the interests of British manufacturing in mind. Its early espousal of a holistic pan-African perspective was repeated 62 years later by Kwame Nkrumah at the inauguration of the Institute of African Studies in Legon, when he stated that it ‘would always conceive its function as being to study Africa – in the widest possible sense – Africa in all its complexity and diversity, and its underlying unity’ (Nkrumah 1997, 136).
The Royal African Society today on its website (https://royalafricansociety.org) describes itself as more inclusive and pan-African, with Africans in its governance structures and its journal, and its former Director argued that the Society was now more ‘of Africa’ than ‘about Africa’ (Westcott 2021). One of its stated missions ‘has always been to facilitate mutual understanding and dialogue between people in the UK, Africa and the rest of the world, acting as a catalyst for positive change’ (Royal African Society 2024a), although on its own admission that was less the case under colonialism. Its journal claims to ‘appeal to a wide audience … [to be] … read by academics, policy-makers, business leaders and interested members of the public who want a deeper insight into developments on the continent’ (Royal African Society 2024b).
The other major African Studies journal, the Journal of Modern African Studies, also covers
current issues in African politics, economies, societies and international relations … intended not only for students and academic specialists, but also for general readers and practitioners with a concern for modern Africa, living and working both inside and outside the continent. Editorial policy avoids commitment to any political viewpoint or ideology, but aims … to promote a deeper understanding of what is happening in Africa today. (Cambridge University Press n.d.)
ROAPE does not avoid a political viewpoint or ideology, but challenges existing ways of looking at the world by focusing on material that could be put at the service of socialist revolutionary and progressive movements on the African continent. Thus, it is not about mutual understanding nor aimed at a wide audience, including business. Its purpose was to understand and analyse what was happening across the African continent, uncover the historical roots of current conjunctures and inform progressive forces in and outside the continent in their struggles for sustained emancipation from colonialism and neo-colonialism.
We also had the key objective of ‘coming home’ (ROAPE 1974, 2), moving to a base or bases on the African continent when resources there allowed for sustained production. This would of course be enabled by the content of the journal being increasingly produced by African scholar-activists based on the continent as well as in the diaspora. Of Africa, yes, but more crucially of African engaged scholars. There has clearly been increasing participation in the journal of African scholars as editors, authors and sometimes as both, whether based in their country or in the diaspora. We have been successful in establishing the journal and its associated website as a widely read and cited product respected by engaged academics and by non-academic activists. With the more activist website and with its more immediately relevant content, ROAPE is moving towards becoming an African journal.
By whom and for whom?
When we started ROAPE, we expected that the journal would have ‘come home’ by now and would be an African journal in which predominantly African Marxist scholars would produce knowledge of African political economy for African countries’ liberation. While we are moving more rapidly towards this expectation, we are not there yet. However, we have published many articles which come out of research by African scholars and Africanists bringing to bear in their analyses theoretical frameworks in the Marxist and left progressive traditions, and we have received much encouragement from engaged scholars across the continent to continue doing this.
The journal’s content was intended to be read by African activists and engaged scholars on the African continent, and those temporarily elsewhere in the world, hired by or invited to spend time in African or development studies centres or departments in the global North.
For Yusuf Serunkuma this latter group’s existence (and he has been a regular member) raises several issues. He sees invitations to African scholars to participate in ‘western-based outlets’ as reflecting implicit ‘racialised assumptions’ that the work of these scholars cannot be ‘world-reflective’ if produced from their bases in Africa and that work produced and published there is not ‘global enough’ and therefore not part of the ‘global knowledge commonwealth’ (Serunkuma 2024, 12). Becoming part of ‘this “global audience”’ is not decolonisation, but rather ‘cultural exchange, diversity, educational tourism, or employment in Europe and North America’. A ‘decolonial scholar’ should be addressing a ‘home audience’ and in the same way scholars of the global North, whenever they produce knowledge about Africa, ‘also ought to be understood as speaking to their own audiences’, which they term global because they are based in spaces that are ‘running the global world order’ (2024, 12). In this context, ROAPE is increasingly publishing work by African engaged scholars from their spaces as well as by engaged non-African scholars who work in African spaces with which they have developed a degree of solidarity.
Languages of the colonised or the coloniser?
Do we need to publish in a language other than English to widen access to our articles? From the start we hoped to publish articles in both English and French to recognise the importance of francophone Africa. We started with abstracts in French. Although we have published several articles based on research in francophone Africa over the years, we have yet to publish whole articles in French, other than occasional briefings. We have also, for a special issue, had abstracts in Portuguese, but not in any African languages. Is that as far as we can realistically go?
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s solution to the language issue is a challenge to a journal of solidarity with African workers and peasants’ struggles against capitalist imperialism. In the 1980s, wa Thiong’o decided to write only in Gïküyü or Kiswahili, as these were the languages of the very peasants and workers with whom he grew up. If African writers wanted to be read across the world, or the world wanted to read their work, they could have it translated (wa Thiong’o 1986). He argued that Africanists based in the global North wrote in their own languages for those mainly living in the global North that understood those languages.
While these languages of the main colonisers of Africa are those of the scholar-activists on the continent and in the diaspora, they are not often the languages of the activists on the ground involved in local struggles for such necessities as housing, safe water and sewage infrastructure and effective power supplies; or those involved in socialist political struggles. Especially in the rural areas, they are unlikely to be the languages of those struggling against land grabs. These and other struggles are ones about which ROAPE has published articles over the last 50 years, hoping to inform and inspire English-reading cadres in progressive left movements across the continent, already a step forward.
Following wa Thiong’o we have a choice: we can be an English-language journal publishing articles about the development of the global capitalist system and the place and manoeuvrability of African governments within that system – useful for activists and radical governments, perhaps, but still limiting; or we can continue to publish research on African political economy but develop an African editorial base, with a longer-term objective of publishing articles in major African languages.10 Producing an edition of the journal translated into Kiswahili, for example, could subvert the monopoly of the knowledge it produces for the educated elite and give Kiswahili readers a more level playing field on which to build their struggles. Even the inaugural meeting of the African Society heard pleas for the colonists to learn Kiswahili, Arabic and Zulu and other African languages (African Society 1901). Of course, whichever language we publish in, we are still informing global corporate capital how better to exploit the labour and resources of the continent!
Historical roots: how far back to go?
ROAPE is concerned with contemporary issues, but in many cases the present cannot be fully explained without reference to the past. Recognising the relevance of African political economies from at least as far back as historians of Europe go is reliant on a largely oral and archaeological history with few written sources. Focusing on a past that long preceded colonialism is still a task for African historians and an argument for enabling Africans and Africanists better to understand how the continent got to where it was before colonisation. It is also an argument for restoring Africa’s place in the world as the origin of human civilisation. It might also question the perception of Africa as a country, an important issue for a journal such as ROAPE that seeks to cover the whole of the continent. The historical connections between Egyptian civilisation and much of the rest of the continent suggest that including Africa north of the Sahara is important to an understanding of countries to the south. However, the very different societies and economies of West and East Africa suggest that lumping them together does not help an overall analysis and understanding of what is going on today in specific countries or areas.
Indeed, as noted above, this was an issue raised at the founding meeting of the African Society not only by Shelford but also by others, with references to Africa south of the Sahara as ‘Africa proper’ (African Society 1901, xvi). As the countries of Africa do not map languages and ethnic groups or nations, there will always be issues around the territories of analysis that are chosen as the ‘space of thought’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2024, 126). ROAPE has often embraced the spaces established by the African Studies traditions with special issues on specific countries or their regions or one or other of the continental regional groups. Whichever space is chosen, the issue is surely and always ‘why this area?’ and ‘to what end is the knowledge produced?’
An African epistemology?
So, what is African about African Studies and, by extension, what is African about ROAPE? The question of an African epistemology has been occupying the thinking of several African writers. For the colonisers’ story was always that before they arrived on the continent there was nothing, or that even if there were societies that had a culture and socio-political character which had to be understood, it was inferior to that of the colonisers. African cultures were thus marginalised through the ‘internalization and the acceptance of the dominant discourses’, instead of engaging ‘with indigenous knowledge discursive frameworks and anticolonial and transformative learning theories to pave the way for a clear understanding of the process of knowledge production’ (Akena 2012, 604–605).
Nabudere’s concept of Afrokology, the idea of an African epistemology, derived from the writings of North African scholars before colonial conquest, places the emphasis on indigenous historical knowledge and culture. As he argues, this is necessary to provide ‘an authentic history of the world’, impossible ‘without having an authentic history of Africa’. Noting that Egypt is being re-evaluated by scholars from the West because of its ‘historical significance to the rest of humanity’, he argues that for Africa this task should be undertaken by African scholars who ‘cannot … leave [it] to [others] to interpret Africa’s past and their knowledge for them’ (Nabudere 2006, 30–31). As Oyewumi argues, the ‘real unmined gems are African concepts, ideas, values, ways of being and systems of knowledge and episteme’ (Oyewumi 2022, quoted in Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2024, 123).
Where do ROAPE’s Marxist approaches to the study of Africa fit here? Is Marxist methodology relevant to Africa as a universal tool of analysis of how societies and economies are organised around production? The noted Guyanan Marxist activist Walter Rodney (2022), who spent many years at the University of Dar es Salaam teaching history, noted that Marx applied his theories of production and value not only to capitalism but also to pre-capitalist formations. In the end the central question was always how production is organised and how power over production is distributed. Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaa was one early attempt to make a connection between the traditional cooperation of agricultural producers as the basis of the precolonial rural formation and producer cooperatives as a starting point for socialist agricultural development in a post-colonial context. Rodney argues that because of the universality of the issues around production and distribution, a Marxist political economy approach is appropriate in the African context. Articles written from this standpoint must demonstrate the appropriateness and validity of such an approach.
Theory and description
Such an approach to the analysis of African social formations may overcome the often-cited view of a division of labour regarding theory and empirical description, theory being the prerogative of scholars in the global North and empiricism the work of those in the global South, even to the extent that data are collected by global South scholars to test the theories of those from the North (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2024; Serunkuma 2024). However, if this was ever the case it is contradicted, first, by African scholar-leaders such as Nkrumah (consciencism and neocolonialism) or Nyerere (Ujamaa) and, second, by so many African scholars working in Africa or the diaspora, some referenced here.
Serunkuma (2024, 11) has drawn attention to one publisher’s proposal that ‘journals focused on Africa were reconsidering their peer-review guidelines and standards in ways that would open more spaces for African scholars’, the bulk of whose work is considered as ‘non-analytical and simply descriptive scholarship’ and therefore ‘as lesser scholarship’ and is therefore often rejected for publication. Consequently, ‘most journals in the field of African scholarship end up publishing mostly non-African scholars who engage in the acceptable form of scholarship.’ One journal he cites was ‘adjusting their guidelines to accommodate the African scholar’s distinctive mode of scholarship – which is descriptive and less analytical … crucial for scholarly production capturing narratives on items that may be entirely new and necessary’.
Ironically, the publisher referenced by Serunkuma is the one ROAPE has just left, but not for that reason. The combination of theory and empirics has been central to this journal’s approach. While it is the case that we have judged articles on, first, their closeness to the journal’s remit, but then on the strength of the analysis and the evidence presented and the usual references to other work on the subject, we have not found the division of labour in terms of theory and practice as the norm. Where we have received submissions that are largely descriptive of events which we think are important to highlight, we have a briefings section, but even there expect to find some analysis reflecting the power relations that affect the outcome of whatever major event is being described. We have also embraced pure theory from the beginning.
Gender
Ndlovu-Gatsheni notes the rise of androcentricity, which
has taken the forms of ignoring and marginalising women’s contributions to society, legitimising the subordination of women within existing male-dominated social orders, and keeping women academics and intellectual interventions and productions on the periphery of the knowledge domain. (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2024, 127)
This challenges African Studies and this journal too. His privileging of African scholars in his references to scholarship on gender omits reference to the hundreds of contributions on women and gender in ROAPE and three special issues. The strong participation of women in the EWG throughout ROAPE’s history has ensured a good proportion of contributions by and about women, and increasingly from the continent, but also that, where essential to understanding the issue at hand, gender is foregrounded. The first special (double) issue of the journal (ROAPE Volume 10, Issues 27–28, published in 1983) addressed not only the subordination of women in class struggles but also the relationship between feminism and socialism and the political implications for women in avowedly socialist regimes in Africa. The second special issue (ROAPE Volume 20, Issue 56, 1993) moved the focus to gender relations: women’s social relations with men in the context of the societies being researched. The editorial of the last special issue on gender not only recognised that women have been in struggles long into African history but that recent studies of social movements in Africa ‘have tended not to focus on specifically women and/or gender’ (Bouilly, Rillon and Cross 2016, 338). The issue offered ‘an exploration of women’s mobilisations throughout Africa by using gender as an analytical tool’. The issue thus ‘encompasses very different kinds of activism and mobilisation’ from, for example, ‘poor and illiterate rural women to urban elites’ in ‘very different political and economic contexts from, for example, ‘peaceful countries’ to ‘conflict and “post-conflict” settings’ (Bouilly, Rillon and Cross 2016, 339). There is undoubtedly more to be done, but ROAPE has made some progress in this area.
Interdisciplinarity
As a journal of political economy, ROAPE has had editorial groups with different disciplinary backgrounds largely in the social sciences. What brought us together was a Marxist-oriented political economy – and specifically the analysis of power relations in African social formations. In that sense our analytical framework does not relate to some form of interdisciplinarity but starts as a disciplinary whole with political social, economic and cultural dimensions. Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2024, 129) argues that ‘the configuration and reconfiguration of African Studies’ has been ‘characterised by a desire to engage in a common endeavour across disciplines on the one hand, and on the other to maintaining disciplinary differences’. African Studies has therefore not been reconfigured ‘into a cohesive discursive and epistemological field’.
However, despite arguments for the universality of Marxist analysis as advanced by Rodney and others, there will always be nuanced political economy analyses dependent on African variations in social formations and relations and exercise of power. Those of the founding editors learned that lesson when involved in the faculty and curriculum reorganisation on interdisciplinary lines at the University of Dar es Salaam. They and their colleagues saw the changes, which had already been accepted for the first year and were for the remaining two years, as helping students join up the disciplinary dots to get a broader understanding of their country and its political objectives within the structure of global capitalism. Yet opposition came not only from the academically conservative expatriate staff but also from leading Tanzanian academics, but also most notably from Walter Rodney who, as an expatriate himself, felt it was not for expatriates, whether black or white, to tell Tanzanians how to organise their university or curriculum, however much the changes were ostensibly in support of Nyerere’s Ujamaa: expatriate staff needed to listen to their Tanzanian colleagues and remember that they were guests in the country. Establishing a journal in collaboration with radical African scholars that started with an interdisciplinary analytical framework provided a basis for the development of an epistemology different from mainstream African Studies journals. Even so, the issue of what makes ROAPE of Africa rather than just for Africa remains.11
Canon and library
The hegemonic literature of African Studies has for too long been curated in the libraries of the global North, now increasingly electronic and still behind a paywall that ensures the exclusivity of those libraries – and especially those in the institutions with a strong African Studies centre. The canon of methodologies of research and styles of publication, as well as the range of publications, is dominated by the methodologies and output of the scholars of the global North, and that of African nationals whether on the continent or in the diaspora who have to accept the criteria by which such output is considered publishable. So that as Ndlovu-Gatsheni puts it, ‘decanonisation and decolonisation … open up space for African intellectual and academic productions and the recovery of those knowledges that have been subjugated’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2024, 130). Or, as Mbembe has argued, the hegemonic ‘Western epistemic’ tradition ‘actively represses anything that actually is articulated, thought and envisioned from outside’ (Mbembe 2015, 9–10).
ROAPE has succeeded in creating space for the ‘academic and intellectual’ productions of which Ndlovu-Gatsheni writes, and certainly must ensure that the increasingly large cohort of engaged African scholars publish their work in this journal. Of course, many are academics trapped in the world of ‘metrics’ and the hierarchies of journals and publishers that determine their career prospects, not only retaining their jobs but being forced to do the research that the hegemonic canon requires and that brings in lucrative grants. Rising in the league tables of universities has become a global requirement. As Mbembe notes, ‘Excellence itself has been reduced to statistical accountancy’ (2015, 8), and
We have to change this if we want to break the cycle that tends to turn students into customers and consumers.
We have to change this … if the aim of higher education is to be, once again, to redistribute as equally as possible a capacity of a special type … the capacity to make disciplined inquiries into those things we need to know, but do not know yet; the capacity to make systematic forays beyond our current knowledge horizons.
…
… our institutions must undergo a process of decolonization both of knowledge and of the university as an institution. (Mbembe, 2015, 8, 10, original emphasis)
A radical left journal should be able to break out of the world of metrics and hierarchies in which engaged academics have been trapped and to make those ‘forays beyond our current knowledge horizons’.
Decolonisation of knowledge and universities means, in Mbembe’s view, the acceptance of the university as a ‘pluriversity’, a place where the process of decolonisation
does not necessarily abandon the notion of universal knowledge for humanity, but which embraces it via a horizontal strategy of openness to dialogue among different epistemic traditions … with the aim of creating a less provincial and more open critical cosmopolitan pluriversalism … The problem of course is whether the university is reformable or whether it is too late. (Mbembe 2015, 19, original emphasis)
Such pluriversities would not be inappropriate in the global North either.
The second of ROAPE’s last two issues referred to above celebrated the life and work of a South African scholar-activist and one of our contributing editors, Lungisile Ntsebeza. In that issue we gained an insight into the life of an engaged scholar through articles written by fellow engaged South Africans and southern Africans, and not always written in the standard academic style of European heritage. The emphasis was on engaged scholarship and the ways in which Ntsebeza’s life experience had trained him to analyse texts forensically but also to write in an accessible way for those communities in which he was involved. This recalls discussions in the formation of ROAPE regarding style and the academic obsession with references, footnotes and complex jargon. It is not clear that we can describe our articles as free of even ‘unnecessary’ jargon. To what extent we can argue that there are universal rules for scholarship and that these are central to any canon and, in much the same way, that the methodology of Marxist political economy is universal are issues for our Debate pages, but they are very much live questions for engaged scholars.
Another lesson from the articles about Ntsebeza’s work is that engaged scholars of the radical left need to listen to what the people in the communities in which they are working and researching are saying rather than come with a fixed view of what is to be done (see Sinwell 2024 in this issue). Seeing Ntsebeza at work is a lesson in how to engage with the people who are active in their communities with appropriate humility and willingness to listen. Creating an African Studies Centre space to change the canon and library where African epistemes and indigenous knowledge and tradition can be a focus of research is an important initiative in creating knowledge production for genuine liberation.
Conclusion
These reflections have raised some uncomfortable issues for those of us who see ourselves as engaged activists in solidarity with radical left movements on the African continent. Much has changed on the continent since ROAPE started. The struggle for liberation from colonialism has morphed into a struggle against the neocolonialism of corporate capital and the imperialism of the military domination of the world by the USA. ROAPE was born in a spirit of solidarity facilitating the dissemination of new knowledge which brought the method of Marxist political economy to bear on exposing class relations in African states, in whose interests power was being wielded and the possible strategies to put that power in the hands of the peasants and workers. These were lofty aims and remain so in the face of an increasingly powerful international plutocracy which now includes a few citizens of African countries. In the end we can only continue to provide analyses of a high quality and to engage with other scholar-activists across the continent to inform not just about what is happening on the ground but also what is developing around the empire of capital and how that has an impact on African countries. The more we are a journal of Africa looking out as well as in, the more we will fulfil our originally stated objectives. The struggle continues!
