Though short lived, Pambana had a wide circulation and it made an impact by providing a local alternative newspaper to the foreign owned dominant print media in post-independence Kenya. The first issue was published in May 1982 under the theme Cheche, in Kiswahili meaning a spark, inspired by the quote by Lenin: ‘A Spark Can Light a Prairie Fire’. Pambana was to provide a cheche (spark) to light and represent the truth to the masses of dispossessed Kenyans by Daniel Moi, the dictator who ruled Kenya from 1978-2002. Pambana was deliberate in its use of Kiswahili language, the language of Kenya’s working people and peasants who were the main audience for the publication. It also took a strong anti-imperialist position and focused on analysis of neo-colonialism on Kenya’s economy and among the working people. Pambana was inspired by Dedan Kimathi, the Mau Mau leader who fought against repression and occupation by the British and it sought to unite the poor and working people against the Kenyan ruling class and their foreign masters… read more

Initially, it was a monthly publication, but as the years passed, it transitioned to a fortnightly circulation, and finally, in 1987, it became a weekly magazine. Despite the challenges of censorship and the spacing of issues, the magazine persevered, providing profound news analysis that was a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and an inspiration to all who value freedom of information.

APSI magazine was not just a publication but a beacon of high-quality, in-depth information. Its subscribers, predominantly social sciences and humanities professionals, were hungry for international political analysis when such information was scarce due to Chile’s international isolation. Despite the editors’ expectations of international organizations and embassies subscribing, the magazine attracted many professionals seeking quality information about the world in a context where most Chilean media were censored or sympathetic to the regime.

Arturo Navarro Ceardi, a journalist and sociologist, was the first director of APSI. Navarro was linked to the leftist party Movimiento de Acción Popular Unitaria (MAPU). Navarro directed the magazine until 1982, when the dictatorship forced him to leave his post due to intense pressure from the dictatorship. Marcelo Contreras, a journalist linked to MAPU, was its second and last director. The political climate under the dictatorship was a challenge and a constant struggle for APSI’s leadership. They faced intense pressure, censorship, and even personal threats.

The magazine’s founding team, all left-leaning, included Hilda López, Eduardo Araya, Carlos Catalán, John Dinges, Rafael Otano, Marcelo Contreras, and Sergio Marras. Despite their political leanings, APSI’s hallmark was its independence from political parties.

In ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, Hawaiian language, the word huli contains multiple kaona (contextually dependent meanings) and thus evokes many layered interpretations and political overtones. In their coauthored Hawaiian Dictionary, the scholar and composer Mary Kawena Pukui and the linguist Samuel H. Elbert recorded the following definitions of huli: “To turn, reverse; to curl over, as a breaker; to change, as an opinion or manner of living. To look for, search, explore, seek, study. Section, as of a town, place, or house. Taro top, as used for planting.” More pointedly, the prominent Hawaiian sovereignty leader, anti-imperialist activist, poet, and political science scholar Haunani-Kay Trask described huli as the desire to “overturn,” or “the need to transform the current political and economic system to construct a new order, not merely soften up the existing one.” Alluding to these interdependent meanings of knowledge, agriculture, and revolution, Huli the periodical encouraged the people of Hawaiʻi to commit to shared class struggle across racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds in opposition to intensifying capital investment and military entrenchment in Ka Pae ʻĀina o Hawaiʻi, the Hawaiian archipelago, following US “statehood” in 1959.

The Escola-Piloto was founded following resolutions at the Cassacá Congress to establish schools, storehouses and local administrative bodies within the liberated areas. Blufo was part of the same politics that established the Secretariat, and the Departments of Information, Culture and Cadre Training.

The paper was made available for free at PAIGC schools and distributed in small batches from January 1966 to December 1970. It aimed to reach the party’s “pioneers”, the student body made up of the children of combatants, PAIGC militants, war orphans and other young people. Its articles were unattributed, written in Portuguese using a typewriter and printed on A4 pages. The length of each publication varied; earlier issues were shorter and reached four pages, with issues ten, eleven and twelve reaching twelve pages.

Blufo acted as an innovative pedagogical tool. It educated the pioneers in culture and politics, towards the construction of internationalist, pan-African perspectives within the struggle for self-determination. This research analyzed the 1959 Pidjiguiti Massacre in the newspaper… read more

The significance of the periodical for historians belies its short life. Far from simply a nationalist party organ, Uganda Renaissance is part of the history of Cairo’s ascendency as a radical Afro-Asian hub. Kale’s office – officially that of the Foreign Mission of the Uganda National Congress – on Ahmad Hishmat Street was one of several offices for sub-Saharan liberation movements housed here by the end of the 1950s. Resident activists shared meals and debates with Egyptian intellectuals through the ‘infrastructures of solidarity’ surrounding the recently formed African Association. The publication of a periodical was an obvious activity for such an office: Gamal Abdel Nasser’s government provided office equipment and financed printing at Mondiale Press, and from 1957 the multi-lingual periodical Nahdatu Ifriquiah (African Renaissance) served as a model for budding editors like Kale.

Kale was no stranger to publishing when he arrived in Cairo in late 1957. He had spent the previous months working for the Uganda National Congress at their office in Katwe, Kampala, where Ugandan press ventures like Uganda Eyogera were struggling to inform readers of the fast-moving political scene amid repressive permit laws under British colonial administration. Kale had been involved in publishing at Makerere University College too, where student magazines were launched and banned recurrently in the 1950s – until he was expelled in 1956 for attending a conference of the Soviet-sponsored International Union of Students. Uganda Renaissance was quickly added to the list of proscribed publications in British colonial East Africa.

The pages of Uganda Renaissance demonstrate the editorial experimentation that was possible in an ecology of print where the usually prohibitive start-up costs of publishing were met by an anticolonial patron. Far from simply reproducing dominant anti-imperialist slogans, Kale cut and pasted material from his own pamphlets and brought together eclectic content to follow his interests: the 1916 poem ‘Africa’ by Rabindranath Tagore and a liberation song from central Kenya; an account of the plight of Batutsi refugees in East Africa, and a copy of the Sanniquellie Declaration that was the basis for the Ghana-Guinea federation… read more