In 2020, Kevin Ochieng Okoth, who lives in London, published a broadside in the magazine Salvage, where he is also an editor. The essay, “The Flatness of Blackness: Afro-Pessimism and the Erasure of Anti-Colonial Thought,” argued that contemporary writing on racism and colonialism has undertaken a deliberate detour around an entire tradition of largely African and Caribbean Marxist writing, a “Red Africa,” or an “Afro-Marxism,” as he called it, which comprised people such as Amílcar Cabral of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, Agostinho Neto of Angola, Samora Machel of Mozambique, and Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso. The school of thought known as Afropessimism, Okoth wrote, describes a world in which people of African heritage are condemned by modernity to “social death” (to borrow the sociologist Orlando Patterson’s phrase), and in these social conditions can never be seen as or act as political subjects. This tradition of thinking, Okoth argued, means that there is no possibility of any transcendence of the social conditions in a modern world. Such a form of thought, he persuasively contended, immobilizes those who would like to confront racist structures and attitudes; neither can it transform the world into one where humanity can finally exist without hierarchies and qualifications. 

　　A year and a half later, Okoth returned to the pages of Salvage with another powerful essay, “Decolonisation and its Discontents: Rethinking the Cycle of National Liberation.” In this essay, Okoth took on the approach called Decolonial Studies, which, delinked from an assessment of political economy and political theory, rejected the idea of colonialism, and instead focused on the idea of “coloniality,” which these theories, led by the late Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano, suggested was a “mode of power,” and not rooted in the neocolonial structures around the world. For Okoth, Decolonial Studies, like Afropessimism, diminishes the economic and political structures of the world and minimizes the fact of the class struggle—if not going so far as to dismiss it altogether. Again, like Afropessimism, the field of Decolonial Studies skips the tradition of national liberation Marxism, or, as Okoth put it vividly, Red Africa. 

　　These critiques of Afropessimism and Decolonial Studies showed Okoth that there are several epistemologies that focus on issues of race and racism, but evacuate any space in their theories for praxis. There is simply no room to maneuver, no agency afforded to people of African descent or colonized peoples to struggle to change the world. These epistemologies have become influential in the academies of the Global North, and that social location operates as a powerful social force—including through private and public research foundations—to impose itself on the academies of the Global South; and these theories have had an equally negative impact in increasing the bewilderment in social movements that have emerged out of the spontaneous struggle against the neocolonial structure. Still, even in the Global North academies, these are contested approaches that have not been able to suppress the traditions that they seek to malign and overshadow, such as national liberation Marxism. 

　　Okoth has taken these two essays from Salvage and extended the argument to give us a brief, but punchy book called Red Africa: Reclaiming Revolutionary Black Politics. The book opens with a memory of the #RhodesMustFall campaign in South Africa in 2015, when students demanded the erasure of the symbols of the old colonial-apartheid past (or else, demanded that the presence of colonial relics not be normalized) as part of a fight to establish a post-austerity educational system in South Africa. Okoth found that one of the dominant theories propelled by some activists into the protests there, and later in the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States, was bewildering: why would people make arguments from the traditions of Afropessimism that suggested that Blackness “is an eternal condition that precludes Black people’s participation in politics”? 

　　The debates he began to have, which would later be published in Salvage and now in Red Africa, were not idle, but, as he puts it, were about “the very possibility of a revolutionary Black politics.” It was clear to Okoth at that time, now further clarified in his book, that the erasure of African politics and philosophy that dates back centuries before colonial conquest, the erasure of the national liberation legacy on the African continent, and the erasure of Marxism in its anticolonial form from the Global South forced a kind of surrender to reality that created an “attitude of despair.” Part of this erasure is a consequence of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore called the “formation of private intellectuals,” cohorts of people trained in the academies and cut off (almost deliberately) from the side of the dialectic pushed by the working people of the world.8 The work of scholars such as Gilmore provides the necessary bridge that links the resources of national liberation Marxism and the imperatives of Okoth’s book. Indeed, through his readings and his assessment, Okoth feels that “the politics of Red Africa have not been exhausted, and that anti-colonial futures might yet be imagined anew.” This is a necessary thesis that Okoth defends in Red Africa with verve and credibility. 

　　From: Monthly Review 2024 76 (2) 

　　Editor: Wang Yi