In 2017, Issa Shivji delivered the Harold Wolpe Memorial Lecture at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Issa, who taught at the University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) for decades, reflected on the idea of revolutionary intellectuals. He remembered a lecture given by Ali Mazrui fifty years previously, where Mazrui defined an intellectual as someone… Continue reading

At the edge of hope lies the gunfire from what Frantz Fanon called ‘the old granite block upon which the nation rests’. At the moment of protest, when the gunfire starts, clarity arrives. One should not be naïve about the character of the elite, whose smiles camouflage the instructions given through clenched teeth to the… Continue reading

Quito’s streets tremble between aspiration and repression; the smell of tear gas and the shouts for freedom reverberating in equal measure from one part of the city to another. President Lenín Moreno’s State of Emergency (October 3) and Curfew (October 12) give the men with guns more authority, but – despite hundreds of injured protestors and… Continue reading

There is a geography to human suffering; one that subordinates the well-being of the majority of the world’s people to the interests of a small handful of billionaires. In this world, the powerful not only control social wealth; they also control the public policy discussion — and what counts as intellectually correct. In this world,… Continue reading