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Red Africa

Reclaiming Revolutionary Black Politics

Kevin Ochieng Okoth

$22.99

Paperback

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English
Verso Books
03 January 2024
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.

By:  
Imprint:   Verso Books
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 198mm,  Width: 129mm, 
Weight:   154g
ISBN:   9781839767371
ISBN 10:   1839767375
Series:   Salvage Editions
Pages:   176
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Kevin Ochieng Okoth is a writer and researcher based in London. He is part of the Salvage Editorial Collective and is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books. He holds an MPhil in Political Theory from the University of Oxford and regularly participates in conferences, speaking on themes related to anti-imperialism and twentieth century anti-colonial movements. He is a founding editor of Nommo Mag.

Reviews for Red Africa: Reclaiming Revolutionary Black Politics

Provocative and polemical, Red Africa probes the limits of contemporary discourses of Black Studies and returns to the neglected histories of Marxism on the continent, finding resources for charting new emancipatory futures. -- Adom Getachew, author of <i>Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination</i> A fiercely argued case for looking to the anticolonialism and Marxism of Red Africa in our current engagements with decolonisation. Okoth's critical assessment of certain variants of 'decolonial studies' and 'Afro-Pessimism' is welcome. -- Priyamvada Gopal, author of <i>Insurgent Empire</i> This is an important defence of the emancipatory politics of Eduardo Mondlane, Amilcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon, and Walter Rodney from the reactionary perspectives of Afro-pessimism and African nationalism, raising the question of whether things might indeed have turned out differently had radical women such as Andrée Blouin been more intimately connected with the struggle for self-determination. -- Firoze Manji, co-editor, <i>Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amilcar Cabral</i>


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