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

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.

The Evening News was established by Dr. Kwame Nkrumah and the Convention People’s Party in 1948 and served as a vehicle to expose Ghanaians and Africans to Pan-African Consciousness. As the mouthpiece of the CPP, the paper spoke directly to three main constitutes‒members, the public and fellow freedom fighters. As the center of revolutionary activity in Ghana the paper is a resource that linked the leadership of the CPP to the masses. Campaigns, key decisions and shifts in strategy were reported in the Evening News. In 1950, the paper announced the launch of the Positive Action Campaign. The campaign was comprised of acts of civil disobedience aimed at destabilizing colonization and concretizing the larger populist.

In 1957, Ghana gained independence and the Evening News’s focus expanded to include articles, editorials and illustrations that interrogated the benefits of Socialism, highlighted ongoing Liberation struggles, and debated the absolute necessity of Pan-Africanism. The liberation struggle in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the role of Patrice Lumumba were regularly featured in the Evening News. Particularly the assassination of Lumumba was covered extensively to display solidarity, express outrage, and directly confront those responsible. The paper also covered key Pan-African conferences and programmes that were essential to the movement. The All-African People’s Conference (AAPC) the first Pan-African conference held on the African continent was hosted by the CPP in December 1958. The AAPC attracted over 300 delegates including freedom fighters, leaders of governments and Pan-Africanists. The AAPC was a watershed moment in the history of independence in Africa and ushered in a forward march towards Pan-Africanism. It was at the opening ceremony that Kwame Nkrumah said, “This decade is the decade of African Independence‒Forward then to Independence‒to Independence Now‒Tomorrow the United States of Africa” (Nkrumah, 1958).

This project will analyze on the role of the Evening News in the success of the 1958 All-African People’s Conference. It will examine articles, illustrations, and editorials on this conference between November and December 1958. The study contends that the Evening News as a state apparatus supported the CPP’s strategy to politically educate Ghanaians and Africans to expedite the actualization of the United States of Africa. The coverage of the AAPC is no exception and the tested the limits of the paper’s reach. As a site of resistance and focal point for knowledge production and distribution this research argues that the CPP newspaper was instrumental to Ghana’s success a as Pan-African nation. In thinking about the use of popular education as a source of political education in the 21st century the Evening News is situated as a foreground to contemporary manifestations of Revolutionary news.

Abyotawi Medrek was a column published in in the Amharic newspaper Addis Zemen, during the early years of the Ethiopian revolution. It was a forum that came out in the Amharic daily, Addis Zemen that was the most widely circulated paper in the country. Abyotawi Medrek was launched with the aim of promoting public debate and free exchange between revolutionaries of contending political organizations and revolutionary tendencies. The publication of the forum began in early 1976 and continued until the end of 1977. Abyotawi Medrek was thus a revolutionary paper within a government daily that was otherwise the mouthpiece of the state. It facilitated debates not between revolutionaries of a single party but between different parties, revolutionary tendencies and points of views. The column provided a platform for civilian and military left parties including the EPRP, Meison Seded as well as individuals to debate in public, their political views and positions. However, it also served as a forum where latent meanings of revolution were exposed and disparate aspirations and social visions are divulged, not only by political organizations and their members but also by party unaffiliated individuals. While some tried to articulate what socialism should be like in an Ethiopian context and contended with the debate on “African Socialism” in other parts of the continent, others zealously advocated for the implementation of ‘scientific socialism’ and insisted that socialism has a universal application. In this unique experiment in free expression, it can be argued that those who wrote in this forum were primarily concerned with what the new revolutionary society should look like. In this sense, Abyotawi Medrek represented one of those rare moments in the history of Ethiopia and its revolution where authors expressed their ideas freely and registered their alternative views about common themes. This moment was however rudely interrupted by the horrors of the Terror Years that not only stifled free political deliberation and debate, but also threw the country into the carnages of authoritarian military rule. This presentation will explore the outstanding issues that are engaged in Abyotawi Medrek with a view to expose the diversity of views that the rubric of revolution encapsulated.

Tunisia’s post-French colonial era was dominated by the political and social imagination of the one, President Habib Bourguiba, and his vision for a bourgeois colonial modernity. The most resilient voice of opposition (political and cultural) came from university campuses, and a nebulous leftist organization, Perspectives Tunisiennes or Amel ettounsi in colloquial Arabic, which the regime blamed for “corrupting the minds of youth with foreign ideas”. Their eponymous publication was widely read on campus, and survived government repression in 1968 and 1973. The journal shifted from a Paris-inspired Maoist tone in French in the 1960s, to a pro-Palestine guerilla and pro-workers leaning in Arabic in the 1970s, as the Paris-trained founding generations passed the torch to a homegrown, more provincial generation. As it is currently remembered and celebrated, this journal allowed young Tunisians to broaden their horizon from the restricted nationalist frame of analysis and envisage the terms of a Tunisian revolution.​

This paper considers how this publication shaped the Tunisian post-independence generation of leftists and their horizon of thought through the medium of language and ‘translation’. We will consider it as a multidimensional process: first, the linguistic operation that exposed Tunisian student audiences to leftist debates taking place in Paris and Beirut; second, by theorizing the Tunisian reality in terms of class struggle against the national bourgeoisie; third, we will ask about the impact of multilingual publishing from French, to classical Arabic to darija (spoken Tunisian), and how it was accompanied by a conceptual evolution of the journal’s message. Underneath these changes stood a constant effort to free Tunisia from a the colonial horizon of progress and come up with an alternative and appropriated language. As such, this abstract speaks to the material history of this periodical (area 1) and its modes of cultural resistance (area 3).

This case offers an opportunity to witness the conceptual and semantic evolution across languages in an underexplored country. This paper will first evoke the thematic components of the shift from French to Arabic, namely the topics of economic and social critique levelled against the regime on agrarian reform and the role of the petty nationalist bourgeoisie, to a focus on direct action, the Palestinian guerilla and the cost of everyday life. It will then revisit these issues with examples that highlight the overall “untheorization” of the journal’s prose. Finally, it carries out a diachronic conceptual analysis of “revolution” throughout the journal’s two phases, as we assess how it expanded Tunisian imagination of independence.