Red Africa
Reclaiming Revolutionary Black Politics
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Salvaging a decolonised future
Red Africa makes the case for a revolutionary Black politics inspired by Marxist anti-colonial struggles in Africa. Kevin Ochieng Okoth revisits historical moments when Black radicalism was defined by international solidarity in the struggle against capitalist-imperialism, that together help us to navigate the complex histories of the Black radical tradition.
He challenges common misconceptions about national liberation, showing that the horizon of national liberation was not limited to the nation-building projects of post-independence governments.
While African socialists sought to distance themselves from Marxism and argued for a ‘third way’ socialism rooted in ‘traditional African culture’ the intellectual and political tradition Okoth calls ‘Red Africa’ showed that Marxism and Black radicalism were never incompatible.
The revolutionary Black politics of Eduardo Mondlane, Amílcar Cabral, Walter Rodney and Andrée Blouin gesture toward a decolonised future that never materialised. We might yet build something new from the ruins of national liberation, something which clings onto the utopian promise of freedom and refuses to let go.
Red Africa is not simply an exercise in nostalgia, it is a political project that hopes to salvage what remains of this tradition—which has been betrayed, violently suppressed, or erased—and to build from it a Black revolutionary politics capable of imagining new futures out of the uncertain present.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this rigorous debut, political theorist Okoth revisits the philosophies of mid-20th-century African revolutionaries. Pointing out that the 2020 murder of George Floyd led large numbers of radicals in Africa and the U.S. to work together for the first time in decades, Okoth highlights how the internationalist politics of such figures as Eduardo Mondlane, who marshalled global support for the decolonization of Mozambique, would be useful touchstones today. Okoth traces the political movements developed by these thinkers—Third Worldism and Pan-Africanism, both characterized by internationalism and cross-cultural solidarity—from the 1930s and '40s through the pivotal 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Indonesia (also known at the Bandung Conference), the blow dealt to internationalism by the U.S.-backed 1973 coup d'etat against Salvador Allende in Chile, and the "second wave of African socialism" that emerged in the 1980s. Throughout, Okoth seeks to ward off the worst excesses of what he diagnoses as "Afro-pessimism 2.0" (a riff on the work of philosopher Frank B. Wilderson III), a rival strain of thought that assumes Black people will always be de facto barred from fully participating in politics. This stirring work of applied philosophy echoes the unprecedented optimism felt by its subjects. Activists and readers interested in leftist political history will be enthralled.
