These items of liberatory press in the form of the newspapers, journals and papers such as Inqaba ya basebenzi gave space for publicised and collective expression of dissent against the injustice of the dominant social order. Periodicals which highlight key engagements of critiques of current socio-economic and political ills, but also resolutions and active movements within the organisation. Inqaba ya basebenzi was produced by the underground movement in exile in English and local African languages. After 1989 the journal was transformed into a supplement and gave way for the Congress Militant, by 1990 Inqaba ya basebenzi had reached 28 issues in English and 4 other local languages with topics ranging from the political status within Southern Africa as well as international coverage.

The Escola-Piloto was founded following resolutions at the Cassacá Congress to establish schools, storehouses and local administrative bodies within the liberated areas. Blufo was part of the same politics that established the Secretariat, and the Departments of Information, Culture and Cadre Training.

The paper was made available for free at PAIGC schools and distributed in small batches from January 1966 to December 1970. It aimed to reach the party’s “pioneers”, the student body made up of the children of combatants, PAIGC militants, war orphans and other young people. Its articles were unattributed, written in Portuguese using a typewriter and printed on A4 pages. The length of each publication varied; earlier issues were shorter and reached four pages, with issues ten, eleven and twelve reaching twelve pages.

Blufo acted as an innovative pedagogical tool. It educated the pioneers in culture and politics, towards the construction of internationalist, pan-African perspectives within the struggle for self-determination. This research analyzed the 1959 Pidjiguiti Massacre in the newspaper… read more

The significance of the periodical for historians belies its short life. Far from simply a nationalist party organ, Uganda Renaissance is part of the history of Cairo’s ascendency as a radical Afro-Asian hub. Kale’s office – officially that of the Foreign Mission of the Uganda National Congress – on Ahmad Hishmat Street was one of several offices for sub-Saharan liberation movements housed here by the end of the 1950s. Resident activists shared meals and debates with Egyptian intellectuals through the ‘infrastructures of solidarity’ surrounding the recently formed African Association. The publication of a periodical was an obvious activity for such an office: Gamal Abdel Nasser’s government provided office equipment and financed printing at Mondiale Press, and from 1957 the multi-lingual periodical Nahdatu Ifriquiah (African Renaissance) served as a model for budding editors like Kale.

Kale was no stranger to publishing when he arrived in Cairo in late 1957. He had spent the previous months working for the Uganda National Congress at their office in Katwe, Kampala, where Ugandan press ventures like Uganda Eyogera were struggling to inform readers of the fast-moving political scene amid repressive permit laws under British colonial administration. Kale had been involved in publishing at Makerere University College too, where student magazines were launched and banned recurrently in the 1950s – until he was expelled in 1956 for attending a conference of the Soviet-sponsored International Union of Students. Uganda Renaissance was quickly added to the list of proscribed publications in British colonial East Africa.

The pages of Uganda Renaissance demonstrate the editorial experimentation that was possible in an ecology of print where the usually prohibitive start-up costs of publishing were met by an anticolonial patron. Far from simply reproducing dominant anti-imperialist slogans, Kale cut and pasted material from his own pamphlets and brought together eclectic content to follow his interests: the 1916 poem ‘Africa’ by Rabindranath Tagore and a liberation song from central Kenya; an account of the plight of Batutsi refugees in East Africa, and a copy of the Sanniquellie Declaration that was the basis for the Ghana-Guinea federation… read more

Founded amidst the flames of the 1968 rebellion, BLM embarked from Malcolm X’s contention in Message to the Grassroots that “land is the basis of all independence.” As such, its program opposed both the colonial white land grabbers who profited from speculative dispossession in the ghetto and the neo-colonial Black government intermediaries who promoted urban renewal as a panacea. In their place, BLM envisioned a community-controlled and cooperatively-owned neighborhood, one which would provide an institutional base for Black liberation struggles and link up with parallel Black nationalist experiments in other cities. Beginning to create this vision, the group released an alternative comprehensive plan for the area and established a food buying cooperative for local residents. They also engaged in youth development through the YPNA, training students in carpentry and design in the mornings and teaching them African and African American history and culture in the afternoons. Confronting a white press incredulous when not outright hostile towards its organizing efforts, BLM decided to take the means of communication into their own hands, launching Black Land News within a year of its formation.

With the tagline “Unity through Truth!” on its masthead, Black Land News cast a critical eye on integrationist strategies rooted in the Civil Rights movement, instead encouraging its readership to come together as an internally colonized people in pursuit of national liberation. Operating at three distinct scales, its pages served simultaneously as an organizational newsletter, a citywide gazette, and a national forum. Columns by BLM members detailed their ongoing initiatives and greater aspirations for Shaw. Accounts from allied organizers in the city relayed public housing rent strikes and protests against police violence. Reports on political developments nationwide, such as the Republic of New Afrika’s securing of pastureland and the Black-led takeover of the Berkeley City Council, demonstrated the searching nature of the period strategically. Spreads featuring Black history and poetry, excerpts from speeches such as Amiri Baraka’s lectures at Howard University, and a lively Letters to the Editor section rounded out the paper’s coverage.

Like many underground newspapers and left periodicals, the bulk of Black Land News’ output appears lost to history, with its publishers prioritizing recruitment campaigns over preservation. The small record that remains from its 1969-1973 run, however, provides a striking portrait of US Black nationalist militancy in an era indelibly marked by Third World revolution. By tracing the role of Black Land News in the forging of counter-institutions premised on Black autonomy and the expanding of vocabularies of landed self-determination, this article aims to preserve its contributions as a resource for future struggle… read more

The publications produced from exile during the period of the military dictatorships in Latin America show an advanced awareness of the ideological and political barriers produced by the distortion or invisibilization of certain facts by the media, co-opted by the dictatorial and neo-imperial powers. The FBI (Front brésilien d’Information) was a newspaper founded in 1969 in Alger (Algeria) by Brazilian refugees, which circulated through several countries in Europe and Latin America until 1973. The publication had different collaborators and delegations in Chile, Uruguay, France, Holland, Italy, Germany, where it was published at irregular intervals. It was conceived as a counter-hegemonic political tool of (un)information, aiming to unmask the crimes of the military dictatorship and the state of oppression in Brazil.​

The fact that the FBI was based in Alger, which was at the time one of the most important centers for revolutionary movements in Africa, marks the particularity of its perspective, aware of the extensive effects of imperialism and attentive to the problems and challenges common to the countries of the Global South. I am going to place a special focus on certain images, themes and recurrent terms of the FBI, which functioned as shared codes to understand and name different experiences of repression and resistance in the Southern Cone.

The Association of Scientific Workers of India (ASWI) was formally founded in 1947, the same year when India gained Independence from colonial rule. The ASWI, as a trade union organization of scientists was part of global network of individual scientists and trade union organisation of scientists organized under the aegis of the World Federation of Scientific Workers (WFSW). The Vijnan Karmee as the mouthpiece of the ASWI published a variety of issues ranging from domestic science policy, disarmament, and history of science and working conditions of scientists. The monthly magazine slowly evolved as a platform for the articulation of a progressive vision of science, especially the role that science should play in a newly Independent country. In the 1950’s, the emergence of the Third World as a political imagination triggered an articulation for an ‘Asian Science’ in the pages of Vijnan Karmee.  As the solidarities among nations of the Third World crystallized into the Non Aligned Movement the Vijnan Karmee became the arena where Afro- Asian solidarity and collaboration for science found expression. In my paper I will argue that the Vijnan Karmee holds the unique reputation of being a periodical which was trying to articulate solidarity and collaboration for a progressive common Afro-Asian agenda for science. I will further argue that articles that appeared around this theme in the magazine didn’t just include an inventory of areas of research but also articulated the cognitive and historical need for such solidarities and collaboration.

The Malayalam journal Prabhatham was launched in 1935 with the emergence of a Congress Socialist cell within the nationalist party in Kerala. From its inception it was subjected to censorship and surveillance by the colonial government as the newspaper began to create a universe of reporting that introduced a socialist vocabulary into Malayalam, evolved new words for talking about society and equality, and envisaged a new geography of revolution in the world. It was a short-lived newspaper curtailed both by the formation of the communist party as much as colonial repression.