Africa is a Country – Revolutionary Papers

We are producing, they are eating

Mishca Peters — Thu, 11 Jul 2024 22:59:45 +0000

Nigeria does not typically figure prominently in the global history of anticolonial radicalism, leftist revolutionary movements, or Pan-African solidarity. Nor is this entirely unfair. Nigerian independence leaders, including Nnamdi Azikiwe and especially Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, provided some of the staunchest opposition to Nkrumah’s proposals for an Africa-wide political union… read more

An unfinished project

Mishca Peters — Thu, 16 May 2024 19:13:39 +0000

Writing in 1987, in the first edition of The Journal of Black Theology in South Africa (JBTSA), of which he was the editor, and at the peak of apartheid repression, Takatso Mofokeng poignantly depicted the context into which black theology in South Africa emerged, and to which it responded. Through its reappropriation of Christianity and the bible toward black liberation, black theology represents a resistance to the theological domination described… read more

And do not hinder them

Mishca Peters — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 20:24:00 +0000

In an atmosphere of suffocatingly thick oppression on the southern tip of Africa, a group of anti-apartheid organizers gathered in 1979 to launch the Children’s Movement (CM). At the time, South Africa’s apartheid regime led a blanket assault on all Black opposition. Then prime minister PW Botha’s fears of student mobilization, labor organization, and the Black Consciousness Movement motivated the suppression or outright banning of resistance against the state. For children, this meant removing an element of critical thought at a crucial stage of development… read more

Between struggle and national history

Mishca Peters — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 08:32:30 +0000

On August 3, 1959, at the docks of Pidjiguiti, in the Port of Bissau, on the banks of the Geba River, there was a strike of seafarers and dockworkers of the Manjaca ethnic majority. Their grievances revolved around the poor working conditions and requests for wage increases, echoing a political and economic dissatisfaction with the Portuguese colonial administration at the time…read more

The man behind ‘Uganda Renaissance’

Mishca Peters — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 19:28:51 +0000

Uganda Renaissance was something of a one-man magazine. This little-known political periodical, published in Cairo between 1958 and 1961, was largely the initiative of its founder and editor John Kalekezi, or Kale. An activist in his 20s from the Kisoro district of western Uganda, Kale was responsible for most of the dense articles and energetic opinion pieces on African anti-colonial struggles that greeted Renaissance readers. These pieces formed a conversation between subjects discussed in Cairo during the city’s heyday as a radical Afro-Asian hub and Kale’s own experiences of colonialism from his home near Uganda’s border with present-day Rwanda, as well as during his student days in Kampala… read more

Wathinta abafazi, wathinta imbokodo

Mishca Peters — Sat, 14 Oct 2023 13:24:57 +0000

The soldiers of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) [the African National Congress’s military wing in the struggle against Apartheid] used publications as tools of mobilization, cultural expression, and political education. Produced through a printing press in MK camps, Dawn Magazine was a monthly journal that can arguably be read as a feminist text. Featured in the pages of a 1988 issue of Dawn, Beauty Khuzwayo’s poem “Advance” mobilizes women into fighting against Apartheid while simultaneously highlighting their role in the struggle for liberation. Khuzwayo’s poem evidences the notion that the courage to take up arms was not reliant on gender but instead, required the will to fight. This is echoed in the lines, “Don’t stop until we have completely eradicated this brutal monster/massive as it is, it’s also mortal/always bear that in mind!” … read more

The struggle has come to land

Mishca Peters — Sat, 29 Jul 2023 17:12:18 +0000

On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was struck down by an assassin’s bullet while standing on the balcony of a Memphis motel. Within hours riots broke out in more than one hundred US cities; by midnight the streets of Washington, DC were in flames. The four-day uprising that followed was finally quelled by sweeping arrests and the deployment of 13,000 federal troops—the largest military occupation of an American city since the Civil War. In the end, 13 people lay dead and more than 1,800 buildings were destroyed, putting to rest any claims that the Black-led rebellions which had engulfed the nation’s cities over the previous four years, would not reach the capital… read more

Transient literatures and maps

Mishca Peters — Sun, 23 Jul 2023 08:17:59 +0000

“Staffriders” are young working-class men who hang their bodies on the sides and on top of moving trains. By doing this they are playing with ideas of death and danger in attempting to avoid the electricity and the force of the moving train’s speed that moves the train. Staffriding is rooted in apartheid’s extractive economy and its demand for cheap black labor. Staffriders are the byproducts of an overcrowding influx of human labor moving from platform to platform in a rush against time to stamp their clock sheet ahead of the boss…read more

Editing pan-Africanism

Mishca Peters — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 06:49:10 +0000

On April 12, 1960, a few weeks after the Sharpeville Massacre, the South African lawyer and journalist Frene Noshir Ginwala arrived in Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanganyika. In that year, British-ruled Tanganyika was already transitioning towards independence with internal self-government. This transition provided the country’s subjects with more opportunities for political activities than most other countries in Southern and East Africa could provide…read more

An annual awakening

Mishca Peters — Mon, 01 May 2023 14:08:53 +0000

Two years after the 1982 Culture and Resistance Conference of Gaborone, Botswana , a group of around 20 “cultural workers,” carrying the emancipatory seeds that germinated during the landmark conference, took to producing posters on their own turf and on their own terms. Not only did they carry the iconic Medu torch handed to them by two of the event’s key-note speakers, Thami Mnyele and Dikobe wa Mogale Martins, but they also took to making art as a social activity, producing and smuggling subversive calendars—despite the banning orders on these materials. The collective, known as the Vakalisa Art Associates, used their calendars to turn what is otherwise a violent European unit of measure, used to compute industrial time vis-à-vis the indigenous lunar month, to serve in the struggle against racist domination, calling for daily and monthly defiance in the oppressive face of apartheid… read more