Yusuf Serunkuma and Leo Zeilig write about Editor House Facility’s forthcoming titles. The objectives of the Kampala based pan-African press is to produce books and pamphlets that rage at a world of genocide and exploitation. By providing analysis, hard-hitting politics, fiction, poetry and history the titles speak the language of radical revolution for a readership who are determined to rage and bloom.
By Yusuf Serunkuma and Leo Zeilig
From the start EHF desired, when it was set-up in 2015, to reach a wide audience. The idea was to empower readers who are anxious for revolutionary action – not scholars in gated communities across university campuses. To us, knowledge isn’t a product for sale or an acquisition of metric points as captured in the ironically disempowering phrase, ‘knowledge production.’ Rather, knowledge is a weapon for a warrior: it is knowledge in use – easily accessible, readable, easily distributed, biased towards the ‘wretched of the earth.’ Thus, our aspiration is to return to the pamphlet tradition, marketplace literature, hard-hitting studies, and people’s theatre. This is the platform for the Steven Feierman’s peasant intellectuals obsessed not only with giving their compatriots – the wretched – discourse and empowerment, but also eager to join them in the trenches.
We pride ourselves on being angry, but like the title of Lena Anyuolo’s collection of poetry we published in 2021, Rage and Bloom, we believe that you can be angry and thrive. There is a power in being angry and only then will you shine. We aim to publish texts that draw together rage and creativity with historical and political texts that analyse succinctly and clearly while expressing an aspiration for another world free of mass killings, exploitation, genocide, and destruction.
We want to see books that express a desire to understand and make sense of the world; the Algerian-Martiniquan revolutionary Frantz Fanon had a knack of expressing the rage of the word, and we hope to do the same. We want our readers to be seized by the collar and held there – forced over the edge of the world, to stare at the drop, to understand the fall, and the reality that is being communicated. This is our aspiration. We believe we are at a precipice: how do we produce written material that will equip us with the rage, hope, and analysis which is needed?
For a time, hope was an easy companion wherever you were on the left. We may have seen things very differently, and the competing ideas and politics on the left were dizzying. But the near total bafflement today at the possibility of worldwide socialist change, would have been greeted in the 1970s with bemusement – to say the least.
Though these questions – reform or revolution, as Marxists put it – have always been geographically bound. So, revolutions – uprising, revolts, popular insurrections – are a yearly reality in the Global South. Take 2024 in Africa for example: there was a mass uprising in Kenya in June and July – that continues today – which one activist, Njuki Githethwa (and future EHF author) noted at the time:
the youth led by the Gen-Zs know that now is their time to bask in the sun of change. The future is theirs. They are seizing the time. The working class are fighting for their survival, the middle class for their security. An anti-establishment social movement is coalescing, led by the vibrancy, energies and dynamism of youth. A new and fresh political order is emerging in Kenya, as elsewhere in Africa. Everything must fall. Everything must change.
Elsewhere in Senegal, a street movement ensured the election of a radical reforming government in April 2024. In the years immediately before this, there were a vertiginous array of struggles and revolutions – in Sudan, Algeria, Burkina Faso, Nigeria and elsewhere.
The actuality of revolution is a living reality in Africa, though the success of these revolutions is another matter. Even the phenomena of revolutionary pessimism tends to be Eurocentric!
For some years, the titles that came out of EHF centred on Ugandan political economy, and as the publishing project grew there was always the ambition to provide a home to pan-African books, and militant perspectives from every part of the continent. The first foray into creative work was Kenya’s Lena Anyuolo’s brilliant collection of poetry, with a title as powerful as her poems. In the coming year 2026, we have a range of great books – that express our ambitions as a publisher with a pan-African reach, and a breathless anger at the world coupled with impeccable analysis.
Three books that we are pushing next year as part of a series provisionally titled, Echoes of Revolution, includes Njuki Githethwa study on revolutions and social movements in Kenya – based on extensive research and interviews with many of the activists involved in Kenya’s rich, militant history of uprisings. Githethwa asks how do we understand revolutions, and how do we sustain and grow social movements into a prolonged period of system change and, ultimately, into revolutionary transformation? And how do activists engaged in action on the street, in workplaces, and in their communities understand the processes of change themselves?
Another book in the series, also out next year, is Tafadzwa Choto’s book on working class struggle in Zimbabwe from 1995-2000 – arguably the highpoint of popular struggles on the continent in the 1990s. Based on extensive interviews, Choto – a well-known Zimbabwean socialist – investigates the role of ideology and revolutionary organising and the developing political consciousness of the country’s working class, in a period described by one activist, ‘you could smell working class power on the streets.’
Finally, we will be publishing Peter Dwyer’s oral history of South Africa’s transition. The militancy and ferocity of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa – which for those involved had socialist change in its sights – was tragically tamed by the African National Congress and the neoliberal settlement in 1994. Dwyer explores the huge hopes, and how they were dispersed and eventually broken.
In early 2027 we are publishing the memoirs of Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja – the great historian of modern Congo. The People’s Historian: memoirs of Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja will not only cover the body of work on Congo’s history, but also the author’s childhood growing up on the American Presbyterian Congo Mission (APCM) station of Kasha, politicisation and activism as the Congo reached for independence, and then his prolonged and profound involvement in the country’s politics for decades (including self-imposed exile from Mobutu’s Zaïre). It is a tremendous honour to be publishing the memoirs of one of our heroes.
We also have two volumes which we expect to publish later this year. One is Jörg Wiegratz’s 2016 study of Uganda’s transformation into a neoliberal protectorate of the Global North, from early post-independent development. His book Neoliberal Moral Economy is a tremendous demolish job on the structural reforms that have devastated the continent. Wiegratz’s argument is that the (moral) transformations that have taken place in Uganda have been reshaped by neoliberal capitalism. The book will be republished with a fresh introduction, and at a price affordable to readers on the continent.
One of Uganda’s most remarkable Marxist is Kalundi Serumaga – for more than four decades he has been writing against the grain, as an activist, scholar, cultural commentator and political militant. His writings on Uganda, socialism, political change has always ruffled feathers – challenging shibboleth of the Marxist left and rattling the powers that be. Before the end of the year, we are publishing a collection of Serumaga’s writings which will bring his work to a larger continental audience, and to those who have the misfortune of not living in Africa!
Then on to our pamphlet series – whose launch was received with much excitement when we announced it recently. Censored Histories will be bringing out pamphlets on Kenya’s 2024 uprising; new democratic forms and practices from Sudan’s revolution by Muzan Alneel; a reissue of John Molyneaux brilliant and bold What is the Real Marxist Tradition, with a fresh introduction, and later next year, Natasha Shivji will be writing on the African working class.
EHF is an anti-capitalist publisher who wants to make the continent see colonialism again and to show how we remain ‘surrounded’ (the title of Yusuf’s new collection) by renewed forms of colonial domination. We do books that speak the language of radical revolution and pride ourselves in making the struggles of the continent visible. This is what we will continue to do for a readership who like us are determined to rage and bloom.
Yusuf Serunkuma is a columnist in Uganda’s newspapers, scholar and a playwright. In 2014, Fountain Publishers published his first play, The Snake Farmers which was received with critical acclaim in Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda. In 2015, Yusuf founded Editor House Facility.
Leo Zeilig writes on African politics and history, specializing in radical transformation and change on the continent since independence. He is also a novelist, a commissioning editor of EHF and has written extensively on Africa’s most important revolutionaries and thinkers.
Featured Photographs: Picture of protestors during the anti-SARS (Special Anti-Robbery Squad) uprising in Nigeria, 2020 (Tope Ayodeji Jesuyon Asokere, 31 October 2020).
