| | ROAPE was established at a time when critical scholarship on Africa was rare. Most Africanist journals bore the marks of their colonial origins in that they were generalist and highly empirical. In contrast, ROAPE was set up to provide a radical forum for politically engaged scholars who explicitly challenged neo-colonialism in its various guises, especially the pervasive (and continuing) tendency to privilege the voices of European scholars over those of Africans living and working on the continent.
The journal was also theoretically informed by marxist political economy which was challenging the ideologically charged, but apparently commonsensical, modernisation approaches. Marxist scholars attempted this through various theories of the world system, but what marked ROAPE out as unique was that contributors developed these theoretical insights through engaging, often practically, with struggles on the ground. ROAPE was not simply an 'armchair decoloniser' , but sought to analyze common struggles over the meaning and content of 'development' . The editors were self-consciously involved in undermining what they saw to be the causes of Africa's underdevelopment in the post-colonial, cold war cauldron ... |
