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 newspaper’s proclaimed mission was to discuss questions pertaining to the politics of the continent and to “build bridges from Cape to Cairo, from Dar es Salaam to Accra” with a clearly Pan- African and anticolonial standpoint. In the first of three regular sections, Spearhead provided “News” from all over the continent. In its regular second and third sections, it tackled all the major political themes of the early 1960s. In “Views,” and the “Seminar,” it discussed the best forms of democracy and trade unionism for postcolonial contexts, as well as African socialism, Pan-Africanism, and liberation struggles. The occasional section “Profiles” paid tribute to notable figures like Nelson Mandela, Tom Mboya, or Hastings Banda.

In the same spirit as other Pan-African journals produced in various African “hubs of decolonization” in the early 1960s, Spearhead discussed issues of postcolonial state-building and reported on anticolonial struggles on the continent. Yet, unlike other either fully or partially state-controlled journals such as Accra’s Voice of Africa and the Spark, or Cairo’s African Renaissance (Nahdat Afriqya), Spearhead was financially and editorially independent. The numerous advertisements in each issue certainly financed part of the newspaper’s operations. The range of sponsors included Twiga Soft Drinks, a Cantonese restaurant in Dar es Salaam, Radio Moscow and the Indian Ministry for Tourism. Letters to the editor came predominantly from Anglophone countries in East and Central Africa, although the subscription information for Spearhead was also provided to readers in Great Britain and “all other parts of Africa.”

Editing Spearhead, Ginwala could draw on a wealth of experiences and her continent-spanning network. Not long after finishing her law studies in the UK and the US, Ginwala worked as a correspondent for British media. She became involved with Ronald Segal’s Cape Town-based magazine Africa South, many of whose contributors would come to write for Spearhead. They were joined by scholars and journalists such as the Guardian’s Africa correspondent Clyde Sanger, South African communist Hermann Meyer Basner or Patrick McAuslan, a radical lecturer at Dar es Salaam’s newly established Law Faculty. The publication provided a platform for high-ranking African politicians and functionaries like Kwame Nkrumah, Sékou Touré, or Ghanaian trade union leader John Tettegah to promote their views on Pan-Africanism and postcolonial statehood. Leaders of liberation movements voiced their criticisms of colonial regimes and called for support, though there were also debates on varying strategies – for instance regarding the boycott of trade with apartheid South Africa… read more

Congress Militant, paper of the Marxist Workers’ Tendency (MWT) of the ANC, was published between the late 1980s and 1996 (when it was replaced by Socialist Alternative). As the more propagandistic accompaniment to the theoretic journal, Inqaba ya Basebenzi (published in exile from 1981) the paper played a crucial role in the organisation of the MWT of the ANC inside the country. Linked to and modelled on similar papers published by national sections of the Committee for a Workers’ International, Congress Militant also drew on the experiences of revolutionary papers produced in South Africa over the course of the 20th century. Initially produced semi-clandestinely, and more openly from the early 1990s, thousands of copies of each issue were sold across the country. This presentation will reflect on two central aspects of the paper: its production and role as organiser, both of which were fundamentally influenced by radical political ideas and praxes. An Editorial Committee, comprising mainly full-time organisers, had overall responsibility for the production of the paper and its political positions. Many articles, however, were written by worker and youth activists, which process often involved collective writing exercises. Organised as sites of both political education (including literacy education) and deliberation over strategies and tactics of struggles, this programme of ‘writing from below’ was arguably the life-blood of the paper. Inspired by Lenin and Trotsky’s writings on revolutionary papers as party organisers, Congress Militant was used as propaganda tool in struggles (here the presentation will focus on two campaigns: the organisation of Self-Defence Units in the early 1990s and a campaign to radicalise the South African Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union), recruiter, fund-raiser and as the scaffolding for the organisational structure of the MWT of the ANC. The presentation will explore the dynamics inherent in the co-existence of the commitment to participatory practices in the production the paper with the objectives of articulating and propagating ‘a line’, the formulation of which ultimately rested with the Editorial Committee.

The shutting down of autonomous Black educational spaces that were started by students at universities, and the mass-popular nature of the uprisings had led to a situation where the movement wasn’t engaged in the type of critical education work that had initially been its basis. Furthermore, despite some isolated attempts by Black students to build relationships with progressive organisations beyond the academy, #feesmustfall and #outsourcingmustfall remained primarily centred on universities.

As a response to this combination of circumstances, Pathways converged as a group of people who wanted to continue the work to which we had been participating on campus; collectively discussing and planning the non-partisan movement and struggles for free education. We wanted to create a space to learn about, participate in, and contribute to the debates around free education, and through that, build relationships with people and collectives working in different sectors who were interested and committed to the project of free education. We had the position that education is something that implicates and affects everyone, and is connected to struggles around wages, disability, land, patriarchy, sexuality, housing, etc.

Pathways’ work has been based on a ‘community-building’ approach to publishing. By this, we mean gathering people and getting perspectives on free education – the movement ,histories, and debates – from people working and organising in different fields and different places. This includes students from different institutions and levels, workers and organisers from trade unions, progressive academics, social movement activists and others.

This paper considers two periodicals published by black radical activists in the United States during the “New Negro” era of the early 20th century. Amid the outbreak of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the stirring of anti-colonial movements in the global South, black Americans struggled to find new strategies for their liberation. This period in the U. S. was characterized by virulent Jim Crow segregation and discrimination, widespread racial violence, and the resulting “great migration” that fueled the movement of millions of black people from the rural South and the Caribbean to the urban North and West. Out of this maelstrom emerged a generation of New Negro Militants who deployed the press as a critical tool for organizing and critique. They forged a black radical imagination through print culture that, in keeping with the themes of this workshop, supported a black counter-public, alternative forms of cultural expression, and transnational projects.

​The Messenger was founded in 1917 by A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, young migrants from the South who sought intellectual and political inspiration in Harlem. They found it in the burgeoning Socialist Party which actively sought black participation in the quest for universal brotherhood. The Messenger brought together artists, poets, journalists, and activists who linked black American’s condition with the rapacity of empire and capitalism, and with the cause of anti-colonialism. Over time the magazine shifted its emphasis from socialist transformation to advocacy for black solidarity through trade unions. The Crusader, created by Caribbean-born activist Cyril Briggs in 1918, was a monthly magazine that blended black nationalism with Communist Party doctrine in calls for autonomy and self-determination. Briggs established The Crusader to “promote the idea of self-government for the Negro and Africa for the Africans,” he wrote in an early issue. Briggs is best known for his leadership of the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) founded in 1919, a quasi-secret society linked to the Communist Party that advocated armed self-defense. The Crusader would become the ABB’s official organ in 1921. The two magazines debated—often virulently — the merits of black nationalism vs. interracial cooperation while also sharing an overlapping network of editors and contributors who moved among ideological camps. In the process these periodicals created and sustained a radical black public sphere. These editors and their periodicals grappled with the same challenges as their 21st century counterparts — state repression, lack of resources, and disagreements within their communities.

Publica[c]tion is a Black student-driven publication – a collective process that includes but also transcends and goes beyond the independently, self-published product. Initiated in conversations at the end of 2015 as an attempt to extend and continue the work of the student movement, the publication was printed and launched in August and September 2017. In this paper we reflect on the collaborative, experimental process of public action in order to highlight our learnings and perspectives on publication and relations of knowledge production more broadly. We consider the generative dialectic of critique and creation and how our creative process emerged partly from critiques of academic production and publication. Academic production we understand as largely subordinated to the neoliberal university’s individualism and its undervaluing and undermining of practices of collective knowledge production. From our critique of capitalist publication’s fixation on the product, we fixated on process – wanting to do something collectively and collaboratively. Publica[c]tion’s process emerged as an attempt to archive the particular mo(ve)ments of intense campus struggle, to connect and think and write together as Black student activists across different campuses, and as a critical response to the mainstream media where student struggles were represented in problematic and limited ways. The paper closes by looking at some of the possibilities that the process opened up – how collective reading constitutes a generative alternative to ‘peer review’, how a refusal of the authoritative power of the editor can liberate the creativity of contributors, and how publication can be used as a process of building community.

The digital version of Publica[c]tion can be downloaded as a PDF here [file size: 11MB].

Abstract: The Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union of Africa (ICU) and its charismatic leader Clements Kadalie dominated the Southern African political landscape of the 1920s. In 1927, the Messenger periodical in New York heralded the ICU as ‘the largest economic organisation of black men in the world’, and a decade later, C. L. R. James likened Kadalie to Toussaint L’Ouverture, proclaiming, ‘It will be difficult to overestimate what Kadalie achieved between 1919 and 1926 . . . . The real parallel to this movement is the mass rising in San Domingo’. Fundamental to the ICU’s success was its widely read magazine, the Workers’ Herald (1923-29). Although the Workers’ Herald reflected the ICU’s many competing political traditions, the revolutionary message expressed in the report on the 1925 annual conference was a constant: ‘We must prevent the exploitation of our people on the mines and on the farms, and obtain increased wages for them. We shall not rest there. We will open the gates of the Houses of Legislation, now under the control of the white oligarchy, and from this step we shall claim equality of purpose with the white workers of the world to overthrow the capitalist system of Government and usher in a co-operative Commonwealth one’. In addition to tracing the revolutionary discourse of the Workers’ Herald, the paper addresses several further questions. First, the relationship between the Workers Herald and its competitors within the public and counter-public spheres is investigated. Both the white and the black South African press reported negatively on the ICU, though the impact of the black press’s hostile coverage was moderated both by the low literacy levels of its potential readership, and by the fact that the Workers’ Herald attracted many more readers. The literacy rate among black South Africans was 9, 9% in 1921 and by 1931 had risen only to 12, 5%. With circulation figures of 27,000 at its peak in May 1927, the Workers’ Herald was by far the most popular newspaper (2,300 for Imvo Zabantsundu; 3,000 for Ilanga lase Natal; 4,000 for the ANC’s mouthpiece Abantu Batho; and 3,000-6,000 for the Chamber of Mines-backed Umteteli wa Bantu). Secondly, the (critical and utopian) cartoons in the Workers’ Herald are considered. Drawn by James Christie Scott, the cartoons communicated the ICU message to semi-literate and illiterate union members. Thirdly, the relationship of the Workers’ Herald to transnational trade union, anti-colonial and anti-racist publications is discussed. By contrast to the hostile Southern African political landscape, the ICU and the Workers’ Herald received a generous reception in the North Atlantic counter-public sphere, with positive reports on the ICU appearing in Garveyite, socialist and communist publications in the United States, Britain, Australia and the Soviet Union, and articles by Kadalie published in A. Philip Randolph’s The Messenger and R. Palme Dutt’s The Labour Monthly. Finally, the ICU’s message of international socialism communicated via the Workers’ Herald is contrasted to the nationalist ideology expressed by the African National Congress (ANC), both in the 1920s and the 2020s.