Blufo

Mishca Peters — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 20:12:24 +0000

The Blufo newspaper was printed by the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, and played an important role in the struggle for decolonisation and political re-africanisation. Its production was overseen by Luís Cabral, from the Cassacá Congress onwards. The Blufo archive contains all 22 editions produced by the Escola-Piloto in Guinéa Conakry.

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

Dawn: Journal of Umkhonto wa Sizwe

Rectangle — Thu, 06 Jan 2022 12:49:41 +0000

This paper focuses on the poetry produced by the women of Umkhonto WeSizwe (MK), the armed military wing of the African National Congress (ANC) in the pages of its magazine, Dawn, These poems serve as an archive of women’s individual and collective thinking about their role in the liberation struggle. As a monthly MK journal which was first published in the 1960’s and was later revived in 1977, Dawn magazine documented guerrilla attacks on strategic targets within apartheid South Africa. However, the magazine goes beyond this description by providing a window into the collective thoughts and struggles of rank and file MK members, including its women. This paper seeks to make visible the ways in which the poetry published in Dawn played a role in not only the mobilisation and resistance against apartheid, but also in the ways in which MK women soldiers exercised their agency and envisioned their role in the struggle, as well as in the future South Africa. In reading their poetry, we are invited to imagine the affective dimensions of their lives in the struggle, where the personal is political. For instance, one of the poems published in the journal, titled Forget Not Our Mothers, by Ilva Mackay with an illustration by Judy Seidman, chronicles the frustration of remembering loved ones while in exile. Not only that, but these loved ones are in one way or the other, struggling with the daily oppression of apartheid while battling their separation with their exiled family members. In this poem, Mackay further invites her fellow comrades to “forget not our mothers awaiting us with an assured patience”. The gloom of apartheid is thus adequately captured in this poem as Mackay further calls on her exiled comrades to “forget not our fathers languishing in jails, toiling in the mines.” Through the lines in Mackay’s poem, we are reminded of the pain felt by exiles who were separated from their loved ones under a harsh and tumultuous political climate. In addition, this poem, along with the other poems published in Dawn, have the power to reveal these women as more than combatants, but as people with personal histories, families, intimacies, hopes and dreams. It is for this reason that Dawn magazine plays a vital role in challenging the erasure of women’s participation in the struggle for liberation.

guerrilla attacks – Revolutionary Papers

Blufo

Dawn: Journal of Umkhonto wa Sizwe