These items of liberatory press in the form of the newspapers, journals and papers such as Inqaba ya basebenzi gave space for publicised and collective expression of dissent against the injustice of the dominant social order. Periodicals which highlight key engagements of critiques of current socio-economic and political ills, but also resolutions and active movements within the organisation. Inqaba ya basebenzi was produced by the underground movement in exile in English and local African languages. After 1989 the journal was transformed into a supplement and gave way for the Congress Militant, by 1990 Inqaba ya basebenzi had reached 28 issues in English and 4 other local languages with topics ranging from the political status within Southern Africa as well as international coverage.

Across 104 issues, Mediodía published a dazzling constellation of authors, including Cubans such as the anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, the lawyer and feminist activist Ofelia Domínguez Navarro, the novelist Alejo Carpentier, and the Afro-Cuban poet Regino Pedroso. They also included Latin American, US, and European writers of radical sympathies, from Langston Hughes to César Vallejo, and from André Malraux to Isaak Babel. It was initially a literary monthly before becoming a weekly magazine with a strong political and current affairs focus. Within months it had a circulation of 10,000 copies, its readership spread across the island. Mediodía was centrally concerned with Cuban domestic politics, and with the struggles for democratic representation and for racial and gender equality. But amid the ferment of the 1930s, these battles could not be disconnected from the broader turbulence afflicting the world. The magazine’s coverage reflected this sense of global interconnection: reportage on the Spanish Civil War nestled alongside essays on racial discrimination in Cuba; accounts of Chinese resistance to Japanese occupation featured next to warnings of the looming threat Nazi Germany posed to Czechoslovakia.

Mediodía provides a compelling window onto Cuban politics in the 1930s, where a populist revolution had been thwarted in 1933–34, yet the democratizing impulses the revolution had unleashed had not yet been contained. Urgent questions about imperialism, Cuba’s national sovereignty, racial inequality, and social injustice were in the air, prompting fervent and wide-ranging debates, and these were all reflected in Mediodía’s pages. At the same time, for the magazine’s editors, the boundary between internal questions and global issues was entirely permeable: the anti-imperialist, anti-fascist, and anti racist struggles were bound together into a single battle with many interconnected fronts.

Founded amidst the flames of the 1968 rebellion, BLM embarked from Malcolm X’s contention in Message to the Grassroots that “land is the basis of all independence.” As such, its program opposed both the colonial white land grabbers who profited from speculative dispossession in the ghetto and the neo-colonial Black government intermediaries who promoted urban renewal as a panacea. In their place, BLM envisioned a community-controlled and cooperatively-owned neighborhood, one which would provide an institutional base for Black liberation struggles and link up with parallel Black nationalist experiments in other cities. Beginning to create this vision, the group released an alternative comprehensive plan for the area and established a food buying cooperative for local residents. They also engaged in youth development through the YPNA, training students in carpentry and design in the mornings and teaching them African and African American history and culture in the afternoons. Confronting a white press incredulous when not outright hostile towards its organizing efforts, BLM decided to take the means of communication into their own hands, launching Black Land News within a year of its formation.

With the tagline “Unity through Truth!” on its masthead, Black Land News cast a critical eye on integrationist strategies rooted in the Civil Rights movement, instead encouraging its readership to come together as an internally colonized people in pursuit of national liberation. Operating at three distinct scales, its pages served simultaneously as an organizational newsletter, a citywide gazette, and a national forum. Columns by BLM members detailed their ongoing initiatives and greater aspirations for Shaw. Accounts from allied organizers in the city relayed public housing rent strikes and protests against police violence. Reports on political developments nationwide, such as the Republic of New Afrika’s securing of pastureland and the Black-led takeover of the Berkeley City Council, demonstrated the searching nature of the period strategically. Spreads featuring Black history and poetry, excerpts from speeches such as Amiri Baraka’s lectures at Howard University, and a lively Letters to the Editor section rounded out the paper’s coverage.

Like many underground newspapers and left periodicals, the bulk of Black Land News’ output appears lost to history, with its publishers prioritizing recruitment campaigns over preservation. The small record that remains from its 1969-1973 run, however, provides a striking portrait of US Black nationalist militancy in an era indelibly marked by Third World revolution. By tracing the role of Black Land News in the forging of counter-institutions premised on Black autonomy and the expanding of vocabularies of landed self-determination, this article aims to preserve its contributions as a resource for future struggle… read more

Christopher Ouma and Madhu Krishnan

The small magazine has held a significant but understudied effect on not only the project of imagining Africa in the long twentieth century, but also of articulating projects of solidarity, intimacy and political action. As a key node within larger ecologies of print culture, the small magazine is notable for the ways in which its flexible form and sometimes eccentric modes of circulation trouble what have come to be seen as ‘orthodox’ or received wisdom as to the nature of self-fashioning and modernity on the African continent. While the ‘smallness’ of its form underlines its context as a site-specific platform of cultural production, it’s networks of circulation and the audiences and publics it convenes point to a wider and much more ambitious intention which cannot be reduced to simplistic or one-dimensional systemic models of understanding. As ‘form’ and therefore a ‘genre’ in the long twentieth century of African cultural production, the small magazine has convened various platforms for the articulation and intersection of various projects, often in intersectional logic; anti-colonialism, pan-Africanism, Anti-apartheid imagination and broader project(s) of decolonization during the second half of the twentieth century. This project seeks to examine how small magazines are able, through the networks they create scale up and scale down their visibility through various strategies of curation and self-fashioning which evolve and transform over time and space. It is the specific nexus of scalability, in tandem with the curatorial potentiality of the small magazine through various models of formal juxtaposition and intellectual patterning, we argue, which has lent it its importance as an archive of the present with respect to African models of intellectual production. Such strategies account for the longevity, political and cultural potency of the form which has had a significant footprint in the long twentieth century of political and cultural organization and the imagination of identity in the continent. The project draws from example in magazines such Transition, Black Orpheus, Nexus/Busara, Chimurenga Chronic, Kwani? amongst many others, exploring how media, platform, visibility, publicness, form and genre come together in the small magazine to produce new understandings of African models of modernity, coalition and solidarity.

The Journal of Black Theology in South Africa was a bi-annual academic journal which ran from May 1987 until November 1998. In a context of legislated (at least initially) anti-black racism and repression, it sought to be “a vehicle of communication and a forum for exchange of ideas… (to) hasten the dawning of a new day of freedom” through stimulating “creative thought, lively theological discussion and… (reorienting) the social life and political action of the black community” (Mofokeng, 1987).

This paper will firstly situate the journal within the historical and political context out of which it emerged, mapping and positioning it within the history of black theology in South Africa. Next, the paper will go on to detail some of the journal’s particularities with regard to (among other things) how the journal began, who was involved, what it aimed to do, the role that it played, how it was distributed, its readership, why it ended and how it was structured. The paper will then engage with some aspects of the journal’s content. This of course cannot be covered comprehensively, as such, I have broken it down into the following four sections which will be covered in brief:

1. How the journal develops a hermeneutics/framework/lens of black theology through bringing scripture into conversation with the black experience.
2. How the journal uses a hermeneutics/framework/lens of black theology to explore topical issues such as land, gender, economic justice, colonialism, black identity, racism, labour, negotiations, culture, etc.
3. How the journal brings South African black theology into conversation with other historical and contemporary global expressions of liberative praxis.
4. How the journal uses a hermeneutics/framework/lens of black theology to critique and challenge dominant theology and ideas within in that perpetuate the unjust status quo.

Finally, the paper will look at how the journal imagined the future of black theology in South Africa and put this in dialogue with the actual landscape of black theology in South Africa today, concluding with some tentative thoughts about a way forward.

This paper reconstructs the connections between Du Bois and Cuban intellectuals within global south struggles for anti-racist democracies. The first section shows how Du Bois connections with Cuba occurred both at the level of intellectual collectives and through interpersonal relationships. Besides the prominent anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, Du Bois maintained contact with Gustavo Urrutia, who was an intellectual and journalist, author of an opinion column in the influential Cuban newspaper “Diario de la Marina.” Urrutia’s column Ideals of a Race focused on racism and colonialism in Cuba from 1928 to 1931.​

Urrutia and Du Bois connection was initially given through the publication of some writings by Urrutia in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) magazine, The Crisis, in 1931 and 1932. Urrutia’s ideas were anchored in a community around the Cuban periodical “Adelante” which functioned as an expression of the anti-racist struggle and denunciation of the wounds in Cuban democracy after Machado anti-popular government (1925-1933). “Adelante” not only debated the problem of blacks in the Cuban nation but also demanded economic reparation as a response to the legacies of slavery.

My argument regards the work of black intellectuals that, during the 1930s, addressed issues that were close to a Dubosian perspective (Itzigshon and Brown 2019). I analyze how these organic intellectuals worked in a Marxist-Dubosian way of analysis regarding racism, culture, and nationalism in Cuba.

In March of 1936, “Adelante” wrote a piece on W.E.B. Du Bois, in which he appears as an analyst of the historical injustices to blacks in the United States, highlighting the publications of the University of Atlanta. Although “Adelante” stands out bibliographical work of Du Bois, his work on “structural racism” was raised. This gives an account of intellectuals and activists’ nationalist and anti-imperialist perspective. In this vein, I refer not only to Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction (1935) but also to Gustavo Urrutia’s writings in “Adelante” under the title El nuevo Negro (1937) and Alberto Arredondo’s El Negro en Cuba (1939) as part of the same political-intellectual anti-racist struggle.

Focusing on Cuba is not neutral since this country played a crucial role in the intellectual production in Latin America not only because of the multiple connections with socialism in Europe and the United States but also because of an anti-racist political movement linked to the reconstruction of republicanism in the Caribbean.

The literary magazine, however fragile and limited as infrastructure, offered Caribbean writers a way to publish at home and to be circulated both at home and abroad. They made the careers of writers such as George Lamming, Derek Walcott, and Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, Alejo Carpentier, Nicolás Guillén, and many others. They made these careers by alternating between aesthetically launching the Caribbean into literary and geopolitical visibility and facilitating circulation to larger scale infrastructures in literary centers in Paris, London, Madrid, New York, and Mexico City.

Although my research is broader, I draw specifically on the following literary periodicals:

1. Tropiques (Fort de France, Martinique, 1941-1945)

Language: French (and some Kreyol)

Type: quarterly, no advertisements, subject to Vichy censorship for half-run, mostly literary publication including French literary works alongside local work and scattered work in translation from Spanish, includes literary and social theory fomenting black consciousness and increasingly evincing a Marxist political perspective, especially in second half  of run

Circulation: French Antilles, Haiti, Cuba, Curaçao, Mexico, New York, Alexandria, Chile, Venezuela

Editorial Collective: Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, René Ménil

2. BIM (Bridgetown, Barbados, 1942-1972)

Language: English (and various local dialects)

Type: semi-annual exclusively literary and programmatically apolitical periodical, financed by advertisements, demonstrating colonial self-censorship, dedicated to local literary production and becoming increasingly regional in scope in the late 1940s

Circulation: British West Indies and England

Editorial Collective: Frank Collymore & W. Therold Barnes with scouting work by George Lamming

3. Gaceta del Caribe (Habana, Cuba 1944)

Language: Spanish

Type: monthly, popular front literary critical and political periodical secretly financed by Cuban CP

Circulation: Haiti, Curaçao, Mexico, U.S., Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay

Editorial Collective: Nicolás Guillén, Mirta Aguirre, Jose Antonio Portuondo, Angel Augier

Congress Militant, paper of the Marxist Workers’ Tendency (MWT) of the ANC, was published between the late 1980s and 1996 (when it was replaced by Socialist Alternative). As the more propagandistic accompaniment to the theoretic journal, Inqaba ya Basebenzi (published in exile from 1981) the paper played a crucial role in the organisation of the MWT of the ANC inside the country. Linked to and modelled on similar papers published by national sections of the Committee for a Workers’ International, Congress Militant also drew on the experiences of revolutionary papers produced in South Africa over the course of the 20th century. Initially produced semi-clandestinely, and more openly from the early 1990s, thousands of copies of each issue were sold across the country. This presentation will reflect on two central aspects of the paper: its production and role as organiser, both of which were fundamentally influenced by radical political ideas and praxes. An Editorial Committee, comprising mainly full-time organisers, had overall responsibility for the production of the paper and its political positions. Many articles, however, were written by worker and youth activists, which process often involved collective writing exercises. Organised as sites of both political education (including literacy education) and deliberation over strategies and tactics of struggles, this programme of ‘writing from below’ was arguably the life-blood of the paper. Inspired by Lenin and Trotsky’s writings on revolutionary papers as party organisers, Congress Militant was used as propaganda tool in struggles (here the presentation will focus on two campaigns: the organisation of Self-Defence Units in the early 1990s and a campaign to radicalise the South African Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union), recruiter, fund-raiser and as the scaffolding for the organisational structure of the MWT of the ANC. The presentation will explore the dynamics inherent in the co-existence of the commitment to participatory practices in the production the paper with the objectives of articulating and propagating ‘a line’, the formulation of which ultimately rested with the Editorial Committee.

The shutting down of autonomous Black educational spaces that were started by students at universities, and the mass-popular nature of the uprisings had led to a situation where the movement wasn’t engaged in the type of critical education work that had initially been its basis. Furthermore, despite some isolated attempts by Black students to build relationships with progressive organisations beyond the academy, #feesmustfall and #outsourcingmustfall remained primarily centred on universities.

As a response to this combination of circumstances, Pathways converged as a group of people who wanted to continue the work to which we had been participating on campus; collectively discussing and planning the non-partisan movement and struggles for free education. We wanted to create a space to learn about, participate in, and contribute to the debates around free education, and through that, build relationships with people and collectives working in different sectors who were interested and committed to the project of free education. We had the position that education is something that implicates and affects everyone, and is connected to struggles around wages, disability, land, patriarchy, sexuality, housing, etc.

Pathways’ work has been based on a ‘community-building’ approach to publishing. By this, we mean gathering people and getting perspectives on free education – the movement ,histories, and debates – from people working and organising in different fields and different places. This includes students from different institutions and levels, workers and organisers from trade unions, progressive academics, social movement activists and others.