PRAGOTI

In October, a three-member delegation of Australian unionists visited the Western Saharawi refugee camps in the Hamada desert, South West Algeria. Western Sahara has been illegally occupied by Morocco since 1975. 

PRAGOTI reproduces first chapter of Walter Rodney's classic book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, published in 1973.

This chapter and the entire book can be found at http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney-walter/how-europe/index.htm

I have had a rare privilege of traveling around and living and working with black people in a lot of contexts. This has sensitized me to ways in which we need to understand the specificity of different situations. To talk about Pan-Africanism, to talk about international solidarity within the black world, whichever sector of the black world we live in, we have a series of responsibilities. One of the most important of our responsibilities is to define our own situation. A second responsibility is to present that definition to other parts of the black world, indeed to the whole progressive world. A Third responsibility, and I think this is in order of priority, is to help others in a different section of the black world to reflect upon their own specific experience.

PRAGOTI publishes two excerpts from the writings of Walter Rodney on the 40th anniversary of the Rodney Riots in Jamaica in October 1968.

The United States Africa Command (USAFRICOM or AFRICOM) is a Unified Combatant Command of the United States Department of Defense that is responsible for U.S. military operations in and military relations with 53 African nations - an area of responsibility covering all of Africa except Egypt. This organisation is now operational in these countries. Two articles, one by Frida Berrigan (courtesy ZNET) and the other by Vijay Prashad (courtesy: Counterpunch) point out to how this organisation only serves American strategic interests (read imperial interests) in this region; amounting to destabilise it further. Ed: The articles are analytical pieces and are a tad dated; but are still relevant as Africom became operational recently

Declaration of the African Left Network Meeting: Johannesburg Platform

As exploitation intensifies, resistance increases.

Robert Mugabe's authoritarianism takes Zimbabwe into a downward spiral

The basic tragedy of the African continent whose natural wealth has generally brought about even greater misery for its own people because of the rapaciousness of native and expatriate profiteers may not end so easily. It might be worth keeping this in mind the next time we look at those soft-focus advertisement photographs of women wearing those gleaming stones as symbols of lasting love. Economist Jayati Ghosh writes.

May 25th marked African Liberation Day. In the words of brother Elombe Brath, Chairman of Patrice Lumumba Coalition, "African Liberation Day is a symbolic day to mobilize the broad masses of African and all progressive peoples around the issue of totally liberating the African continent and those African people still remaining in colonial bondage or under other oppressive regimes and repressive conditions".

May 25, 2008 was the 45th anniversary of the founding of the Organization of African Unity in 1963, by the then independent 32 African states. Coincidentally, it was May 25,1958, exactly 50 years ago, that Cuban revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro won a decisive victory after 74 days of intense combat against soldiers of the Batista dictatorship.

That victory signaled a strategic turnaround in the war that would eventually revolutionize Cuba. Later on Cuban Internationalist forces would assist African peoples in ways that no other nation on earth has ever duplicated or surpassed.