Welcome Back to Pambazuka News

In South Africa, Africans and their allies fought a socially repressive regime so extreme that its name has become globally synonymous with oppression. This form of racial oppression is seeking global revival, with the legacies and cancer of the apartheid system again coming to the forefront 30 years after the society was supposed to have transcended that sickness.  Some of the dispersed children of the apartheid system have aligned themselves with white supremacists in North America, Europe, and Australia and are seeking to give direction for the future of the planet earth. The inner circle of the mega billionaires of apartheid heritage who are currently champions of neo fascism are pushing for crude racism, ethnic cleansing and old-style military occupation and seizure of territory. The European branch of this supremacist mantra is now struggling to gain political and economic dominance while overthrowing the last vestiges of social democracy.

French imperialism and proto-fascists are becoming desperate each day as the anti-colonial forces from Caledonia to Mayotte to Martinique are calling for decolonization. The louder the call for self-determination and political independence, the more France resorts to alliances with those who carry out illegal occupation. Western imperialists have now met their match with the children of Thomas Sankara who want a new path for Africa. From Senegal across the Sahel there is the push to break from the French imperial currency and its military baggage. 

There is a new global awareness that this social system will require much more than cosmetic changes that come from electoral struggles. In Africa, the youth and working peoples are demanding real transformation. From Cairo to Morocco, from the Comoros to Equatorial Guinea, there is a search for clarity on the ways forward. 

African intellectuals, artists, griots, and cultural workers are creating platforms to resist neofascism, ethnic cleansing, and militarist extractivism. This militarist extractivism has devoured the lives of millions of human beings in the Democratic Republic of the Congo while the avowed leader of the predators of the Congo seeks to represent himself as a champion of anti-genocidal warfare. Whether it is in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Haiti, Nigeria or Cuba, there is the urgent need for information on the plans of empire and their erstwhile enablers.

It is in this context of the reinvigorated fight against racial capitalism that concerned Pan-Africanists have been labouring for the past year for the relaunch of Pambazuka News. Psychological warfare, disinformation, and psychographic profiling are so pronounced on platforms of the old and new media that many of our youth are carried away with information which seeks to dehumanize them. One has witnessed this most clearly in the painful experience of some African people, in all parts of global Africa, who have lent support to the present regime in the USA. Religious fundamentalists, those opposed to the rights of women, and working people, complement these anti people elements inside of Africa who are seeking to derogate Pan-African liberatory efforts.

Pambazuka, in Swahili, the language of the East African region, means ‘rising up’. Thirty years ago, rising up entailed fighting to overthrow apartheid and to remove crude military dictatorships, such as Mobutu Sese Seko. Today, rising up requires harnessing the political, intellectual, and cognitive skills of global Africans to hold the line against fascism, build new alliances locally and globally and to work to transform this quagmire of capitalist destruction.

Pambazuka News ran successfully from the mid-1990s to 2019 and was an important node for the network of anti-imperialists, anti-racists and anti-dictatorship forces facilitating communication, coordination, and collaboration among those who promoted a new African Awakening. 

With the spirit and energies of progressives everywhere Pambazuka News matured as an award-winning Pan-African platform engaging and mobilizing global Africa movements for social justice. For the last year, the International Advisory Board has been working tirelessly to revive the platform so that it can serve as a voice of global Africa at this critical conjuncture. A revived Pambazuka News will seek to build on its past achievements to continue playing a leading role in communications that engage and mobilize global Africa movements for human dignity and global solidarity for social justice.

We call for the revival and re-energization of the constituency of 800,000 readers from 2016-2017 to and to rebuild Pambazuka News. Pambazuka News will seek to extend its global reach, with critical and incisive commentaries that made the platform the go-to site for those involved in struggles against global apartheid and imperial violence. Pambazuka News remains committed to  the struggles for workers’ rights, the rights of exploited groups (including oppressed women and LGBTQ+ individuals), reparations, reparative justice, radical social transformation, and environmental and ecological justice and wellbeing.

Many are being paralyzed by the rise of neofascism, but we must remember that it was Pan Africanists who first sounded the alarm on fascism and were fundamental to the struggles for a new social order.

International Advisory Board and Associate Editors, Pambazuka News