When Kenya attained its independence in 1963 from the British occupation, parliament passed an act to enable the creation of the Kenya National Library Service (KNLS). KNLS was established and mandated, among other functions, to provide library service to the public. However, the attainment of self-rule did not result in transformation of the politics of knowledge as far as library services were concerned. The reading and visual material in most public libraries reflected British colonial market epistemology. The spaces and the books remained inaccessible to the majority of the Kenyan masses. They did not include other forms of knowledge, like oral, sonic, and dance. The libraries remained disconnected from the communities which produced the materials in the books and have no relationship to any initiatives working towards social justice. They remain storerooms for elitist perusal rather than centres of active knowledge production and activism.

These challenges are what brought together a group of information activists with Vita Books and the Mau Mau Research Centre (MKDTM), to set up the Progressive African Library and Information Activists’ Group (PALIAct) Ukombozi library in 2017. The idea of establishing the Ukombozi library was meant to break the old model of libraries set up under colonialism which continued after independence by the neocolonial class without any qualitative change on what a library does and how. Ukombozi library strives to provide a new vision to help create a people-oriented information service that can meet the information needs of workers, peasants and all working people. It works towards providing an anti-imperialist and a Pan African world outlook among people in the country. It also seeks to set up an alternative information service in partnership with local communities and potential service users to show an alternative approach to providing people with relevant information. Ukombozi Library seeks to contribute to awakening people who can then participate in the struggle for a better Kenya. It focuses on materials geared towards empowering the working class. For this reason, the library has formed partnerships with various grassroots movements in the country.

The library places an emphasis on books covering history, resistance, and theoretical works on socialism, Marxism and Pan Africanism. Kenyan materials held in the library include studies on the Mau Mau, and earlier struggles against colonialism. We also have material published underground by movements such as DTM (December Twelve Movement) and Mwakenya, as well as Umoja and the Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners in Kenya. The Library is not neutral in the ongoing class struggle. We have openly declared its commitment to the side of working people. The library seeks to empower working people with a socialist world outlook, challenging the capitalist and imperialist epistemologies that have come to appear as the only way of seeing the world. Its strength lies in the strong support it receives from the communities it serves. To accomplish this mission the library conducts different activities, among them study sessions and forums. These activities aim to increase awareness and raise consciousness of political, economic, and social issues.

These activities, especially the study sessions, have had significant impact. They’ve contributed to the emergence of the Organic Intellectuals Network, a network of activists who write about and document political struggles in working class areas. Network members belong to different Ukombozi Library study groups formed over the last three years. It is through study sessions organized by the library that they have acquired confidence in writing and reviewing radical books about the history and struggle of the working class in Kenya. The Network, through the guidance of the Ukombozi Library, has been able to produce four review booklets, which include:

1. 25 Years of Kenya A Prison Notebook: REFLECTIONS Grounding with Prof. Maina Kinyatti Edited by Sungu Oyoo
2. Organic Intellectuals’ Reflections on the Legacy of Pio Gama Pinto Edited by Nicholas Mwangi & Lewis Maghanga
3. Mathare: An Urban Bastion of Anti-Oppression Struggle in Kenya by Samuel Gathanga Ndung’u
4. Breaking the Silence on NGOs in Africa Edited by Nicholas Mwangi & Lewis Maghanga

At one level, the library links with community organisations and political and social justice activists. It works with several progressive organisations to facilitate political and social meetings. Another aspect of the library’s work is its close partnership with Vita Books and the Mau Mau Research Centre, which also publish progressive books.

The library’s latest project in collaboration with Vita Books and the Marx Memorial Library, is the Kenya Trade Union Study Initiative. It aims to increase trade unionists’ and activists’ awareness of the history of the trade union movement and to support the struggles of the working class in Kenya.

Ukombozi Library’s activities are similar to those of a traditional library. It also undertakes research on social, environmental and political topics relevant to people marginalised by the effects of capitalism. Its collection is also different from that of a traditional public library. Its uniqueness is in its deep roots in community organisations, mostly linked to working people and those marginalised by mainstream society, particularly women.

Here we share a reading of Kenya’s history through alternative movements and the radical publications they produced. These are some of the publications housed at Ukombozi library, and they tells a different story from the dominant narratives advanced by the right-wing post-independence regimes. This teaching tool gives an overview of the publications at Ukombozi library, which houses these radical publications which map Kenyan resistance history through the anti-authoritarian regimes in four periods which include: Colonial, Kenyatta, Moi and post-Cold War period. The teaching tool concludes with the ongoing political work by social justice activists of reading and writing back with and in movements of the past and the present.

1. Anti-colonial Resistance Publications

African publishing was thriving and in response to colonial occupation political action through writing increased between 1940-1953. During the 1930s-1940s Africans and their Asian printing press partners published local and vernacular newspapers that had wide reach in Kenya and Tanganyika (present day Tanzania). Some of the most notable publications according to (((Pugliese, C. (1992). Author, Publisher and Gikuyu Nationalist: the life and writings of Gakaara wa Wanjau. University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies (United Kingdom)))) were nation wide Sauti ya Mwafrika by the Kenya African Union Party (KAU). Nyanza Times, Avaluya Times, Dunia Yetu that were printed in Kisumu and Coast African Express, Hodi Kenya and Kenya ni Yetu that were printed in Mombasa.

Gikuyu newspapers and pamphlets were particularly active due to the presence of many Kikuyus in Nairobi and surroundings where the printing presses were located. Some of these publications were Muigwithania from the Kikuyu Central Association(KCA), Mumenyereri by Henry Mworia and later by Gakaara Wanjau, Mumenyeri and Waigua Atia. They  became more radical as British repression increased. Other publications that were banned between 1950-1956 included the Voice of the Embu, Wasya wa Mukamba and 8 vernacular Gikuyu publications. As restrictions were imposed demanding that all newspapers acquire licenses, editors and publishers such as Gakaara wa Wanjau were detained for their role in supporting the resistance through his pamphlets.

As the colonial occupation and repression of the Land and Freedom Army (Mau Mau) [graphic] intensified, publications were censored in an attempt to stop the consciousness-raising of the masses against the British imperialists. By 1950, several publishers were charged with sedition charges, like Victor Wokabi and J. Kamau for their pamphlet Hindi ya Gikuyu, in which the British colonialists accused them of writing that ‘the British had enslaved Africans after robbing their land’ (Pugliese 2004).

Many more publications were banned in the emergency period. Publishers faced many challenges including inadequate access to funding to ensure consistent output in addition to threats by the colonial government. Since many of the African publishers could not afford the printing presses, progressive Asians like Patel and Vidyarthi supported them by printing their pamphlets leading to the jailing of these Asian printers. Despite these challenges, African and vernacular newspapers were politically influential in shaping public opinion towards supporting resistance to colonial rule because they were widely read. The African resistance press was only silenced in 1952 when a state of emergency was declared, only to reemerge in postcolonial Kenya. (((Gadsden, F. (1980). The African Press in Kenya, 1945-1952. The Journal of African History, 21(4), 515–535.)))

2. Underground Publications from the 1963-1978 period of Flag Independence and Rise of the Right

Kenya gained its independence in 1963 after a protracted struggle against British colonisers since the 1920s led by Kenya Land and Freedom Army (Mau Mau). Mau Mau leadership and left leaning nationalists were sidelined by the right wing and moderates led by Jomo Kenyatta (who became Kenya’s first president in 1963-1978) because of their uncompromising stance on addressing issues affecting the majority of people, such as land and redistribution of resources and centralised power. This was within the context of the Cold War which pitted left and right ideologies against each other. In Kenya, the British colonists supported the right leaning KANU-A (The Kenya National African Union)-one of the independence political parties led by Jomo Kenyatta to take over leadership in independent Kenya. This group served British imperial interests by ensuring British economic, political and military interests were prioritised in a Cold War context. The Mau Mau leadership and other left leaning radicals such as Pio Gama Pinto, Bildad Kaggia, and Jaramogi Odinga [link to books] were sidelined and eventually detained, or assassinated as in the case of Pio Gama Pinto in 1965. Pio became Kenya’s first independence martyr whose assassination (discussed below) is attributed to his vigilance on the excesses of the Kenyatta government. After conceding power, the British colonialists continued courting and supporting moderates and conservatives such as Jomo Kenyatta, Tom Mboya, and James Gichuru.

Although the first postcolonial government was composed of both the conservative and left-leaning radicals like Jaramogi Odinga, the conservatives wielded more power and so they controlled the government, with the support of their former colonisers-the British. It was on this basis that Kenya allied itself with imperialist powers and rarely questioned the neocolonial policies that were detrimental to the Kenyan economy such as exploitation of workers by multinational companies (MNCs) and British military training partnerships including British Army Training Unit Kenya (BATUK) which continue to devastate local communities to date. Cases of pollution and exploitation of women during the training periods of British soldiers in Laikipia – a Kenyan County where the British maintains a 1965 exclusive agreement with Kenya to retain a military base – is one such example (NTV 2023).

Despite the efforts made by the Mau Mau freedom fighters, prime land remained with white settlers and the loyalists who collaborated with the colonial government. Kenyatta’s extended family alone owns thousands of acres of prime land in Kenya and is one of the wealthiest families in Africa. Jomo Kenyatta conspired with the Ministry of Lands and Settlements led by Jackson Angaine to buy the prime land previously owned by communities at very cheap prices from a settlement transfer fund scheme that was established by the British colonial government and the World Bank to facilitate the buying of land from the British settlers. (((Angelo, A. (2019). Taming Oppositions: Kenyatta’s “Secluded” Politics (1964–1966). In Power and the Presidency in Kenya: The Jomo Kenyatta Years (African Studies, pp. 179-218). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.))) The fund was a loan acquired from the World Bank for Kenya to buy back its own land in debt from the British! Kenya became indebted to the British but failed its landless population who fought for their land in Africa’s most violent and famous war of independence led by the Mau Mau in the 1950s.

The radical or left-wing politicians in the then-ruling party KANU (mentioned above) led by Jaramogi, Pinto, and Kaggia, questioned the handling of the land issue since many Kenyans had no land. To appease the landless, the Kenyan government encouraged people to form cooperative societies so that they could buy land from the settlers. Financially well-off peasants heeded the idea and benefited from the scheme. Those who could not raise money remained landless, and a majority of them were forced to sell their labour to earn their living in the numerous settlement schemes that were established across the country.

In a desperate move to align with neighbouring Tanzania in promoting socialist ideals in 1965, the government developed an African Socialism Policy paper as a governance framework which was published in Sessional Paper number 10. In reality, the paper had nothing to do with Socialism. It was attributed to American economist Edgar Edward who had been contracted by Tom Mboya to draft it. It was later reviewed and revised; first by an informal group chaired by Mboya with Mwai Kibaki, Ndegwa, Knowles and Edwards as members, and then by the Ministers sitting in the Development Committee. (((http://www.developmentstrategies.org/Archives/1977ReviewEastAfrica/rea2.htm)))

Pio Gama Pinto, with other left-leaning politicians, developed a counter paper which Pinto himself was to table in parliament and which could have possibly led to a no confidence vote for Kenyatta. But before this could happen, Pinto was assassinated on February 24, 1965. The assassination of Pinto did not deter the radical group in the government from highlighting people’s issues, such as land, imperialism, and the resulting exploitation of workers. In response to this, the reactionary wing of the KANU government convened a delegate conference meeting in March 1966 in Limuru with the aim of replacing the so-called rebel members.

Having been expelled without procedure from the only political party and government, the rebel members resigned from KANU and decided to form an opposition party named the Kenya People’s Union (KPU). The party was meant to further the people’s ideals, and when general elections were announced later that year, KPU contested and won several seats despite attempts to rig elections against them. Fearing the leftist ideological challenge it faced from KPU, the Kenyatta government decided to ban the party in October 1969 for supposedly instigating chaos in Kisumu, a city in the West of Kenya where Odinga hailed from, during a presidential function. The ban was followed by the jailing and detention of KPU leaders, among them Jaramogi Odinga and Ochieng Oneko. Rivalry among reactionaries within KANU also led to the assassination of Tom Mboya, a loyal Minister of the Kenyatta government and close American ally, who was considered by the left as serving imperialist interests in 1969.  With the silencing of the progressive forces, the government embarked on entrenching an authoritarian and capitalist system in the country. Multinational companies partnered with the Kenyatta regime and by the early 1970s, many of the multinationals faced little competition which allowed them to thrive through abnormal profits exploiting the poor. (((Leys, C. (1975). Underdevelopment in Kenya. East African Publishers.)))

In 1971, there was a conspiracy to overthrow the government of Jomo Kenyatta, and 13 military officers who were implicated were tried and jailed. In response to this Major General Joseph Ndolo, the first African head of the military, resigned and was replaced by Major General Mulinge. The clamor for land among the squatters, clamor for better wages among the workers and for better payment for cash crops produced by peasants in the rural areas continued. J.M Kariuki, a politician, former Mau Mau detainee during the colonial era, and a former private secretary of Kenyatta, became the people’s darling for articulating their issues. The Jomo Kenyatta government felt threatened by his bold resolve to protect the rights of the lower classes and he was assassinated in 1975. His death led to student protests against the Kenyatta regime but the dictatorship continued undeterred.

As Jomo Kenyatta’s authoritarian state entrenched itself it shut down physical and print media spaces for expression. Left leaning academics within the universities formed an underground party called the Workers Party in 1975. The party took a leftist stand and operated in secrecy. The party endeavored to reach the masses of workers and peasants and enlighten them. It did this through some of its members working in cultural activities. The most famous of their activities was the Kamirithu people’s theater, co-founded by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, whose play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I will marry when I want) was performed in Limuru by ordinary peasants. The play depicted the exploitation of peasants and workers in postcolonial Kenya and their agency. As soon as the government recognised the power of People’s Theater in raising consciousness of the masses, it banned it and detained Ngugi wa Thiong’o and forced his co-writer’s of the play, Ngugi wa Mirii and Prof Micere Mugo, with whom he co-wrote another critical play, the Trial of Dedan Kimathi, into exile. The Workers Party also produced newsletters and booklets, but the regime did not know the origin of the underground publications nor the people behind them. The party later renamed itself the December Twelve Movement (DTM) as a reminder of the failed independence of Kenya on December 12, 1963.

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.

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

Many of the Nigerian contributors to The Analyst also shared in common a partisan affiliation to the radical populist People’s Redemption Party (PRP), which built popular support and gained control of state governorships in Kano and Kaduna states during Nigeria’s short-lived second republic (1979 – 1983). In fact, Abdulkadir Balarabe Musa — the magazine’s publisher — had served as governor of Kaduna state on the platform of the PRP before his controversial impeachment by a conservative-dominated state assembly. The pages of the magazine provided space for participants in this short-lived project of left-populist subnational government to attempt to sustain a mass following during the military dictatorship that brought the experiment to an abrupt end.

The ambitions expressed repeatedly in the magazine’s early volumes for the ‘working masses’ to, ‘speak for themselves in their own language through The Analyst’ faced inevitable constraints trying to reach the wider population of non-literate non-English speakers while operating an anglophone print medium.

Yet, the Analyst provided a platform for dissident perspectives voicing criticism of — and alternatives to — the Structural Adjustment Programmes implemented by the Babangida military junta through the late 1980s. Moreover, the magazine’s horizons were by no means limited to the Nigerian scene. Instead, it ambitiously sought to profile issues of concern across Africa and the rest of the world, ‘especially where the struggle between imperialism and the people is sharpest’. As such the magazine remains an important resource for struggle against the profoundly anti-social economic and political agenda that remains dominant in Nigeria in across much of the world today… read more

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

The newspaper’s proclaimed mission was to discuss questions pertaining to the politics of the continent and to “build bridges from Cape to Cairo, from Dar es Salaam to Accra” with a clearly Pan- African and anticolonial standpoint. In the first of three regular sections, Spearhead provided “News” from all over the continent. In its regular second and third sections, it tackled all the major political themes of the early 1960s. In “Views,” and the “Seminar,” it discussed the best forms of democracy and trade unionism for postcolonial contexts, as well as African socialism, Pan-Africanism, and liberation struggles. The occasional section “Profiles” paid tribute to notable figures like Nelson Mandela, Tom Mboya, or Hastings Banda.

In the same spirit as other Pan-African journals produced in various African “hubs of decolonization” in the early 1960s, Spearhead discussed issues of postcolonial state-building and reported on anticolonial struggles on the continent. Yet, unlike other either fully or partially state-controlled journals such as Accra’s Voice of Africa and the Spark, or Cairo’s African Renaissance (Nahdat Afriqya), Spearhead was financially and editorially independent. The numerous advertisements in each issue certainly financed part of the newspaper’s operations. The range of sponsors included Twiga Soft Drinks, a Cantonese restaurant in Dar es Salaam, Radio Moscow and the Indian Ministry for Tourism. Letters to the editor came predominantly from Anglophone countries in East and Central Africa, although the subscription information for Spearhead was also provided to readers in Great Britain and “all other parts of Africa.”

Editing Spearhead, Ginwala could draw on a wealth of experiences and her continent-spanning network. Not long after finishing her law studies in the UK and the US, Ginwala worked as a correspondent for British media. She became involved with Ronald Segal’s Cape Town-based magazine Africa South, many of whose contributors would come to write for Spearhead. They were joined by scholars and journalists such as the Guardian’s Africa correspondent Clyde Sanger, South African communist Hermann Meyer Basner or Patrick McAuslan, a radical lecturer at Dar es Salaam’s newly established Law Faculty. The publication provided a platform for high-ranking African politicians and functionaries like Kwame Nkrumah, Sékou Touré, or Ghanaian trade union leader John Tettegah to promote their views on Pan-Africanism and postcolonial statehood. Leaders of liberation movements voiced their criticisms of colonial regimes and called for support, though there were also debates on varying strategies – for instance regarding the boycott of trade with apartheid South Africa… read more

Between 1984 and 1992, the network also produced a number of calendars with political messages and calls to action. Printed on inexpensive newsprint at Esquire Press in Athlone, where community newspapers such as Grassroots, Saamstaan, New Era, and Living Roots went to press, these now hard-to-find calendars were smuggled under t-shirts and distributed amongst the Flats community. According to “struggle printer” Prakesh Patel, this was risky, and marked by security police harassment, happening from four to five times a week, with the firm having more than 2000 printing plates seized and more than 100 criminal cases lodged against the company (Morris, 2004). The network produced its last calendar, dedicated to the then-recently deceased Dumile Feni, in 1992… read more

Six months after Algeria won its independence, an unusual group of militants gathered in Algiers. Led by a Siamese-born French lawyer, Jacques Vergès, the group consisted of French and Algerian journalists, cartoonists, photographers, and militants. Their mission? To craft a new cultural and political journal. On February 2, 1963, the first issue of Révolution Africaine (RA) was released. Over the course of the next five years, RA experienced important upheavals: editors-in-chief were hired, fired, and arrested; journalists were trained and fled political persecution; the journal was even temporarily halted in 1965 after a coup d’état.

Despite this tumultuous history, RA became one of Algeria’s foremost French-language publications in the first decade of independence. Articles covered domestic politics and culture, journalists conducted in-depth investigations on international revolutionary movements and even reprinted letters and articles from sympathetic readers abroad. The publication had an important impact on debates about culture, politics, and society in the new nation, crafting a robust public square beyond the state. This article is the first institutional study of RA, examining how it articulated a counter-hegemonic definition of postcolonial Algerian identity alongside and beyond the state after 1962.

After Algeria became independent in 1962, the Front de Libération Nationale began a series of social, political, and economic reforms. These state policies dominate studies of  post-colonial identity, yet in the first decade of independence, civil society groups contributed to debates about Algeria’s revolutionary identity in the global South. Under Ahmed Ben Bella (1962-1965) and Houari Boumedienne (1965-1978), Islam, Arabism, and socialism became central components of national identity, defining Algeria as either part of continental Africa or the Arab world. Usually portrayed as an all-encompassing discourse, everyday Algerians in fact consumed, transformed, and challenged these narratives of belonging through civil institutions like literature or education.

Though often censored, the press played an important role in these debates about Algerian identity. RA provides a lens into the negotiation of French, African, and Arab identity in post-colonial Algeria. The publication’s journalists rejected the colonial past through a new revolutionary identity, they also strategically resisted the government’s attempt to dominate debates over the country’s future. In articulating an alternative definition of Algerian identity, RA crafted a public square of discourse that both emphasized the importance of postcolonial reform and challenged the FLN’s hegemonic claim to Algeria’s future… 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.