Across 104 issues, Mediodía published a dazzling constellation of authors, including Cubans such as the anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, the lawyer and feminist activist Ofelia Domínguez Navarro, the novelist Alejo Carpentier, and the Afro-Cuban poet Regino Pedroso. They also included Latin American, US, and European writers of radical sympathies, from Langston Hughes to César Vallejo, and from André Malraux to Isaak Babel. It was initially a literary monthly before becoming a weekly magazine with a strong political and current affairs focus. Within months it had a circulation of 10,000 copies, its readership spread across the island. Mediodía was centrally concerned with Cuban domestic politics, and with the struggles for democratic representation and for racial and gender equality. But amid the ferment of the 1930s, these battles could not be disconnected from the broader turbulence afflicting the world. The magazine’s coverage reflected this sense of global interconnection: reportage on the Spanish Civil War nestled alongside essays on racial discrimination in Cuba; accounts of Chinese resistance to Japanese occupation featured next to warnings of the looming threat Nazi Germany posed to Czechoslovakia.

Mediodía provides a compelling window onto Cuban politics in the 1930s, where a populist revolution had been thwarted in 1933–34, yet the democratizing impulses the revolution had unleashed had not yet been contained. Urgent questions about imperialism, Cuba’s national sovereignty, racial inequality, and social injustice were in the air, prompting fervent and wide-ranging debates, and these were all reflected in Mediodía’s pages. At the same time, for the magazine’s editors, the boundary between internal questions and global issues was entirely permeable: the anti-imperialist, anti-fascist, and anti racist struggles were bound together into a single battle with many interconnected fronts.

Many of the Nigerian contributors to The Analyst also shared in common a partisan affiliation to the radical populist People’s Redemption Party (PRP), which built popular support and gained control of state governorships in Kano and Kaduna states during Nigeria’s short-lived second republic (1979 – 1983). In fact, Abdulkadir Balarabe Musa — the magazine’s publisher — had served as governor of Kaduna state on the platform of the PRP before his controversial impeachment by a conservative-dominated state assembly. The pages of the magazine provided space for participants in this short-lived project of left-populist subnational government to attempt to sustain a mass following during the military dictatorship that brought the experiment to an abrupt end.

The ambitions expressed repeatedly in the magazine’s early volumes for the ‘working masses’ to, ‘speak for themselves in their own language through The Analyst’ faced inevitable constraints trying to reach the wider population of non-literate non-English speakers while operating an anglophone print medium.

Yet, the Analyst provided a platform for dissident perspectives voicing criticism of — and alternatives to — the Structural Adjustment Programmes implemented by the Babangida military junta through the late 1980s. Moreover, the magazine’s horizons were by no means limited to the Nigerian scene. Instead, it ambitiously sought to profile issues of concern across Africa and the rest of the world, ‘especially where the struggle between imperialism and the people is sharpest’. As such the magazine remains an important resource for struggle against the profoundly anti-social economic and political agenda that remains dominant in Nigeria in across much of the world today… read more

The Evening News was established by Dr. Kwame Nkrumah and the Convention People’s Party in 1948 and served as a vehicle to expose Ghanaians and Africans to Pan-African Consciousness. As the mouthpiece of the CPP, the paper spoke directly to three main constitutes‒members, the public and fellow freedom fighters. As the center of revolutionary activity in Ghana the paper is a resource that linked the leadership of the CPP to the masses. Campaigns, key decisions and shifts in strategy were reported in the Evening News. In 1950, the paper announced the launch of the Positive Action Campaign. The campaign was comprised of acts of civil disobedience aimed at destabilizing colonization and concretizing the larger populist.

In 1957, Ghana gained independence and the Evening News’s focus expanded to include articles, editorials and illustrations that interrogated the benefits of Socialism, highlighted ongoing Liberation struggles, and debated the absolute necessity of Pan-Africanism. The liberation struggle in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the role of Patrice Lumumba were regularly featured in the Evening News. Particularly the assassination of Lumumba was covered extensively to display solidarity, express outrage, and directly confront those responsible. The paper also covered key Pan-African conferences and programmes that were essential to the movement. The All-African People’s Conference (AAPC) the first Pan-African conference held on the African continent was hosted by the CPP in December 1958. The AAPC attracted over 300 delegates including freedom fighters, leaders of governments and Pan-Africanists. The AAPC was a watershed moment in the history of independence in Africa and ushered in a forward march towards Pan-Africanism. It was at the opening ceremony that Kwame Nkrumah said, “This decade is the decade of African Independence‒Forward then to Independence‒to Independence Now‒Tomorrow the United States of Africa” (Nkrumah, 1958).

This project will analyze on the role of the Evening News in the success of the 1958 All-African People’s Conference. It will examine articles, illustrations, and editorials on this conference between November and December 1958. The study contends that the Evening News as a state apparatus supported the CPP’s strategy to politically educate Ghanaians and Africans to expedite the actualization of the United States of Africa. The coverage of the AAPC is no exception and the tested the limits of the paper’s reach. As a site of resistance and focal point for knowledge production and distribution this research argues that the CPP newspaper was instrumental to Ghana’s success a as Pan-African nation. In thinking about the use of popular education as a source of political education in the 21st century the Evening News is situated as a foreground to contemporary manifestations of Revolutionary news.

Abyotawi Medrek was a column published in in the Amharic newspaper Addis Zemen, during the early years of the Ethiopian revolution. It was a forum that came out in the Amharic daily, Addis Zemen that was the most widely circulated paper in the country. Abyotawi Medrek was launched with the aim of promoting public debate and free exchange between revolutionaries of contending political organizations and revolutionary tendencies. The publication of the forum began in early 1976 and continued until the end of 1977. Abyotawi Medrek was thus a revolutionary paper within a government daily that was otherwise the mouthpiece of the state. It facilitated debates not between revolutionaries of a single party but between different parties, revolutionary tendencies and points of views. The column provided a platform for civilian and military left parties including the EPRP, Meison Seded as well as individuals to debate in public, their political views and positions. However, it also served as a forum where latent meanings of revolution were exposed and disparate aspirations and social visions are divulged, not only by political organizations and their members but also by party unaffiliated individuals. While some tried to articulate what socialism should be like in an Ethiopian context and contended with the debate on “African Socialism” in other parts of the continent, others zealously advocated for the implementation of ‘scientific socialism’ and insisted that socialism has a universal application. In this unique experiment in free expression, it can be argued that those who wrote in this forum were primarily concerned with what the new revolutionary society should look like. In this sense, Abyotawi Medrek represented one of those rare moments in the history of Ethiopia and its revolution where authors expressed their ideas freely and registered their alternative views about common themes. This moment was however rudely interrupted by the horrors of the Terror Years that not only stifled free political deliberation and debate, but also threw the country into the carnages of authoritarian military rule. This presentation will explore the outstanding issues that are engaged in Abyotawi Medrek with a view to expose the diversity of views that the rubric of revolution encapsulated.

This paper analyses the socialist magazine Yön published in Turkey between 1961 and 1967. The foundational influence of Yön, which was published weekly for six years, was to shatter the taboos that smothered the words Marxism and socialism and gain visibility for them. Yön and its chief editor Doğan Avcıoğlu frequently defined socialism by referring to developmentalism and positioned it as a populist doctrine of development. Based on this account, Turkey would owe its rapid growth to socialism. Avcıoğlu’s feature articles and Yön’s encouragement were the “national awakening” of the Atatürk youth. With this national awakening, the youth would say no to “foreign petroleum, Coca-Cola, Sana and Vita [two brands of margarine],” and foreign beers, because all these were correlated with a massive network of capitalist interests that implicated states, merchants, and professors. Yön frequently conveyed to its readers news from non-Western regions with a Third-Worldist perspective. Readers would find in the magazine responses that Jean-Paul Sartre gave to the question of “How Do We Combat Imperialism?”
The magazine also notably brought the “Kurdish Question” to its cover page, in line with its taboo-breaker position. In a piece he wrote in 1966 (Yön issue 194), Avcıoğlu argued that nobody, including the socialists, had summoned enough courage to discuss the taboo of the Kurdish question and that dissolving the cultural values that an ethnic group possesses violates the foundational philosophy of socialism. According to Avcıoğlu, the time had come for socialists to consider this key issue.
The proposed paper has three parts. The first part deals with the rise of the left in Turkey in the 1960s. The second part focuses on how Yön perceived and portrayed imperialism and anti-imperialism. The third part discusses the road map offered by Yön towards a socialist revolution in a skeptical attitude towards democracy. In doing so, the paper also problematizes the nativism embedded in Yön’s synthesis of nationalism and socialism.