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

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