Michael D. Yates, in chapter 5 of his recently released book – Can the Working Class Change the World?– conducts an important task of assessing the power of capital. Below is a review of that chapter. 

What has the working class achieved so far in its war for emancipation? Are not the exploited of the earth encountering unfinished work in their struggles against the most experienced and resource-rich class the world has witnessed till today? These questions are apposite while examining the class struggle on the world stage.

The year 2018 ended on a high note for the Nigeria born writer Mohammed Umar who is celebrating in London after getting his books translated and published into 50 languages. 

Happy New Year Pambazuka Newsworld! Hopefully, we can all keep our New Year resolutions! This time I, too, want to maintain and excel at all my resolutions, especially, to stay here, writing forever!

To what extent has the working class been an agent of radical change? The author discusses steps, proposed in the third chapter of Can the Working Class Change the World?, that need to be taken for workers to bring about radical change.  

In this review of Can the Working Class Change the World?, the authorreflects on the question whether the working class can defeat capitalism, its chief antagonist. 

This is part two of a seven-part series of the review of Can the Working Class Change the World?.

This is part one of a seven-part series introducing the review of Can the Working Class Change the World?

In his review ofProtection, Patronage or Plunder?by Apollo Nelson Makubuya, Professor Yash Tandon concurs with the author that the “Buganda Question” is an issue that would not disappear from the records of Uganda’s history, and thus needed to be candidly debated and addressed. 

In this essay, the author deplores the current generation’s unwillingness to learn the “ways of life” from elders in African villages including the culture of reading and seeking for knowledge that characterised that generation of the 1950s and 1960s. 

The author reflects on recent passing of Professor Chris Wanjala of the University of Nairobi, at the same time thinking about other prominent African intellectuals and political figures such as Samir Amin and Kofi Annan that Africa lost in 2018. 

This work is creative non-fiction derived from what is known about the experiences of Leah Sharibu, a 15-year-old girl kidnapped alongside other schoolgirls by a faction of Boko Haram in Dapchi, in northern Nigeria.

In this review of Ayobami Adebayo’s Stay with Me, the author recounts her personal experience with friends who were affected by sickle cell anaemia, a malady that adversely affects many families on the African continent.  

The author reviews the book The Lost Boys of Bird Island, which reveals how black children in South Africa were kidnapped, violated, raped and molested by senior apartheid government ministers and businessmen in the 1980s.

Spike Lee adopted the Africana tradition of story-telling in his award-winning film about a 1970s Black detective, Ron Stallworth (played by John David Washington, son of Denzel) who, as the first black cop in the city, infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and also infiltrated a radical Black Students’ Union in Colorado Springs and eventually helped to save the life of the female president of the students’ union (Laura Harrier). 

The last 20 years is globally the Harry Potter generation—a generation that has made a philosophy of life out of wishful thinking; the narcissism of the young stemming from a class that can afford and choose to remain imbeciles, we owe it to Harry Potter novels and films among other things. 

A call for book chapters on the legacy of Fidel Castro in Africa. 

A call for book chapters on the on-going relationship between China and Africa. 

Foreign apathy towards African notions of being and belonging might be destroying African families living in Western societies.

On 13 July 2018, the 84th birthday of Olumo Wole Soyinka, the 1986 Nobel Laureate for Literature, I honour him by revisiting a debate that is raging on the Internet over what many call my misreading of his work, especially with reference to my interpretation of his play, Death and King’s Horseman. Literary experts have been marvelling about the “Author’s Note” that accompanies Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka.