Some great information and critique here. Dominant western perspectives, even when dubbing themselves “decolonial”, still paint Africa as the Dark Continent, whose inhabitants are powerless against external forces.
Instead, Vijay Prashad and Mikaela Nhondo Erskog argue, we need to center the (re-)emergence of Red Africa, the indigenous efforts towards socialism.
Concluding section
Red Africa [a recent book by Kevin Ochieng Okoth, which this article discusses at length] offers brief biographies of several pan-African Marxists, and then abruptly suggests, “It is up to us to build a communism for our times from the ruins of Red Africa.”34 What he does not provide is a map of the current struggles—led by organizations from a range of left political traditions—to build a new possibility for the African continent. These struggles emerge out of an antipathy to the colonial attitudes and structures of the Global North that define African possibilities. In the catalog of these recent atrocities stand NATO’s destructive war on Libya; the U.S. military project called AFRICOM and its number of military bases from Accra to Djibouti; the punctual French military interventions in Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, and Niger; and the use of the International Monetary Fund to force African states to submit via austerity policies and threats of default to the will of global mining companies.35 This review does not have space to chart out the entirety of the politics, but any such map would have to include the following:
Long list
To this review must be added new institutions that have entered the battle of ideas on the African continent:
This list of movements and institutions involved in the battle of ideas on the African continent is merely indicative. They constitute a part of the actual world of Red Africa that Okoth gestures toward. There is soberness here, but also a sensibility that says more organizations need to be built, more mass platforms need to be developed, and more theories, programs, and strategies need to be debated.