Kevin Ochieng Okoth (2023): Red Africa

Red Africa is a thoughtfully composed and valuable introduction to the history of Marxism in Africa. Even though it is written with contemporary politics in mind, readers will get an overview of the most important events concerning African liberation. The contemporary perspective is at the same time the book’s main weakness: Okoth sets out to criticize Afropessimism and the spectres of post- and decolonial studies, but fails to fully grasp the actual origin and arguments implied by Afropessimism. The foci are therefore its being derived from the specific experience of Black Americans, and its vocal anti-political stance. Wilderson has repeatedly shown, in the South African context of his biographical works, as well as in public conversations, how anti-Blackness is a truly global phenomenon, still lingering in the late Soviet Union, Cuba, Palestine, and the African continent itself. What appears as a criticism or supposed impossibility of solidarity is nothing more than the understanding that various historical and present liberation movements fall short of Black liberation, while Black liberation would take the form of universal liberation.

Read in this way, the tradition that Okoth calls Red Africa, comprising of genuinely Marxist thinkers like Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney, A. M. Babu, Maryse Condé, and Andrée Blouin, is both characterized by a sharp analysis of the global African predicament (relentlessly so), and an emblematic internationalism that could be at the same time be at home in Dar es Salaam, Algiers, Kinshasa, Dakar, Haiti, Guyana, Paris, or Harlem.

His discussion of Afropessimism and the different historical slave economies, sparking resistance in the form of maroonage and rebellions is impressive in that it compares histories of slavery in a global perspective and shifts the focus away from the US. Likewise, Okoth poignantly recounts the radical critique of Nègritude as a philosophical concept of Blackness and African cultures, and points to the contradictions of a regime like Senghor’s, and the demands of the opposition and the student movement—a similar confrontation like the standoff between Nyerere and Marxist students in Tanzaniam, who wanted to go beyond the hollow promises of African Socialism.

Alas, both the moderate and the radical wings of African liberation were brought to a halt by Western intrigues and conspiration by the new nations’ traditional or emerging elites. Fanon and other thinkers had warned about “the pitfalls of national consciousness,” and the dangers of orienting Africa toward the West. Examples of the liberated zones created by FRELIMO in Mozambique and by the PAIGC in Guinea-Bissau during their armed struggle stand out as promising attempts to organize education, labor and political participation differently than the way they actually manifested after decolonization.

Okoth notes the importance of the women involved, even while structurally and individually hampered by the players of patriarchy. In this regard he remarks Andrée Blouin’s criticism of Patrice Lumumba, who, facing the decision to leave behind his family or his country, chose his family and lost the opportunity to get away to safety, while he was still instrumental for the Congolese people.

The kind of activism she would have advocated for, it seems, would at the same time be of greater care and consequence, carefully but consciously balancing individual and collective freedom, while trying to save both.

Red Africa is a comparatively short book and makes for a brief read. It provides a strongly opinionated overview of central figures and their development without providing the depths of comparison and historical discussion a more comprehensive study would merit.

Even though I have some reservations about its discussion of Afropessimism, I would nonetheless recommend this book to everyone who is looking for a serious engagement with Marxism in Africa.