Introducing a new pamphlet series, Censored Histories, EHF’s Leo Zeilig writes about his first experience reading a political pamphlet and the role of the agitational short text, booklet and pamphlet in Africa. EHF is excited to be publishing a range of political pamphlets in bite-size chunks, and we encourage our readers to contact us if they have ideas for pamphlets or would like to write one.
By Leo Zeilig
The first political text I ever read was a pamphlet written by the great socialist propagandist John Molyneux – it was The Future Socialist Society. Let me describe the pamphlet itself – it was about fifty pages, maybe a bit more, well formatted, and laid-out, a photograph of a man and woman on the front cover in a factory, staring directly at the camera, with an adamant expression as if to say, ‘this factory belongs to us.’ The couple were also wearing overalls smeared with grease – clearly, they had been operating the machines that were slightly out of focus behind them.
The cover image had been chosen to express the idea that if the world didn’t yet belong to us, us the toilers of the world, then soon this factory and everything else would. The confidence, the insolence, the slight smirk on the faces of the couple delighted me as a teenager. Even then, with only the most rudimentary ideas of class struggle, and capitalism, I knew absolutely and fundamentally that the world was rotten to the core and needed to be changed from top to bottom.
For me, this pamphlet was part of the journey to another world. The bold title, clear in the incontrovertible fact of a future socialist society not as it might be written today as a hugely hypothetical ‘future.’ I read the pamphlet in 1989, it was first published in 1987. Today, political hope is tempered with how far we are from victory, and winning, but then the pamphlet was an insistent, declarative future within our grasp. Then, the future socialist society was going to happen – this was not an imaginative hypothesis.
I was a confused schoolboy and although I came from a leftwing family in the United Kingdom who protested against South African apartheid, called for unilateral nuclear disarmament, and voted Labour, with very few illusions, our politics had limits. We could protest and vote but certainly not give over our lives to political activism.
I remember sitting in a corner of our lounge on a cold, late December day in 1989 curled up on our old armchair, Molyneux’s pamphlet open on my lap. The socialist dictatorships in East Europe had fallen, and the last to go was the Socialist Republic of Romania. On the 25 December, the 71-year-old communist leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu was dragged outside the military base where a hasty trial had been held, lined up against a toilet block and shot alongside his protesting wife. The cameras were rolling. The workers in cities and towns across Romania were in open revolt.
Here I was on an armchair, the images of the execution of Ceaușescu and his wife, Elena, playing on a loop in my mind (and on the TV news), reading about the future socialist society. Suddenly, on that late December day more than 35 years ago, it seemed self-evident that socialism had failed – literally shot to death by a firing squad in front of the world.
What was going on?
Molyneux wrote, ‘this pamphlet will attempt to set out in some detail a Marxist view of the future socialist society. I stress the word attempt because … the reality of socialism will differ markedly from any possible anticipation of it. This does not, however, invalidate the enterprise to try to show concretely how it is possible for humanity, through socialism, to eradicate the fundamental problems that plague it under capitalism and win real freedom.’
Interrupting my reading, my mother came into the room, saw me, unusually still, and pensive – huddled up on the chair, the hard springs biting into me.
Relentlessly my mother has always sought existence from oblivion. The invisibility of being a woman born in 1941, growing up in a house that only sent the boys to college, and hoped for marriage for the girls. In all my mother’s marriages she fought to be seen and heard. ‘I am here, and you will hear me!’ she cried. ‘I too exist.’
This battle to be seen made her difficult but even as a 16-year-old, I knew it was a necessary hardness – her way of surviving my violent father, and a society that was still ruthless to woman who stood up. My mother – her life a loudhailer – was in her way a magnificent pamphleteer, even though she never wrote a single pamphlet.
Seeing her son reading pleased her, she came up to me and asked what I was engrossed in; I held up the pamphlet, her forehead immediately creased. ‘What is this?’ she asked aggressively, but it was a rhetorical question; she snatched the pamphlet from my hands, waved it around, flicked through the pages and then declared, ‘How is this any different from an evangelical church promising to save your soul with God’s kingdom? Who are these people? This sect? What is this nonsense…haven’t you seen the news?’ She tossed the pamphlet back onto my lap, and not waiting for a response left the room.
The political pamphlet
Radical pamphlets can be subversive in so many ways – offering up a bite-size manifesto for another world, an intense criticism of a contemporary crime, a retelling of a revolutionary movement, or profile of an activist and thinker. Even the act of reading a pamphlet, leafing through the urgent text, can feel subversive – itself an act of resistance.
Often the question is asked of activists what books helped to shape their political worlds, but surely the better question is what pamphlets, booklets or short text helped to sharpen their vision of the world; establish what they would do with their lives, and what they would fight for.
There is a long history of political pamphlets which I can’t retell here through Thomas Paine to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (what was The Communist Manifesto if not the world’s most famous and explosive pamphlet?) In Africa there is also a proud history of the political pamphlet which continues today.
As the continent was fighting for freedom there were books of course, Kwame Nkrumah’s Africa Must Unite, even Patrice Lumumba’s early, moderate text Congo, My Country. Frantz Fanon’s glorious account of revolutionary transformation in colonial Algeria, A Dying Colonialism but also – when the struggle for decolonisation was underway and once formal independence had been won – agitational pamphlets, exposing crimes, and urging action and protests. My favourite is the Guyanese revolutionary, Walter Rodney’s brilliant 1969 booklet, The Groundings with my Brothers.
Rodney was particularly excited by the pamphlet and what it represented in Jamaica in the late 1960s; these were popular literary manifestations of the renewed “self-expression” of Black people—pamphlets, newssheets, and short texts and booklets represented the flowering of new voices. ‘These independent efforts are essential because of the complete control which imperialism and its local puppets maintain over the various established news media,’ he explained in his 1969 booklet.
When Africa had secured its ‘suitcase revolutions’ as Rodney characterised formal independence, pamphlets once more became the modus operandi of post-colonial agitation and criticism, for a world and a freedom not yet born (for a ‘future socialist society’, if you like).
In Tanzania as the polish was coming off Julius Nyerere’s socialist government in the late 1960s and 1970s, it was to the short text and the pamphlet which activists turned – producing an extraordinary array of analysis and criticism, from Issa Shivji’s pathbreaking 1970 article The Silent Class Struggle, which was published by the radical, socialist student magazine, Cheche, at the University of Dar es Salaam. It was republished as a standalone pamphlet in 1974 by the Tanzania Publishing House, accompanied by responses from Rodney, John Saul, Tomas Szentes, and Kassim Guruli. Many other pamphlets, and short political texts emerged, tackling topics such as tourism and socialism, and the meaning of development etc.
Tanzanian socialism was analysed for what it really was by revolutionaries arguing for a socialism rooted in class struggle, not a fantastical dream of a mythical African communalism. After Nkrumah was overthrown in a coup in 1966, it was from exile that he wrote his scathing analysis of post-colonial African society Class Struggle in Africa as a pamphlet – to maximise impact. Out of government, Nkrumah saw himself as a pamphleteer, and political agitator and he listed six pamphlets in his last book under this distinct category.
Criticism of structural adjustment in the 1980s which destroyed huge swathes of the continent, crushed millions of lives, was also most effectively challenged in pamphlets (or what CODESRIA called ‘Working Papers’). One effective example of this form of writing as adjustment bit down hard, was Jimi Adesina’s 1992 CODESRIA working paper Labour movements and policy making in Africa.
The relentless and urgent need for analysis – and hope – has repeatedly sent activists, publishers and authors back to the pamphlet, booklet or short agitational text. Two great recent examples have been Chinedu Chukwudinma’s magnificent short text on Walter Rodney produced in the pamphlet series Rebel Guides. In Chinedu’s pocket-size booklet we have a full account of Rodney’s world, writing and life – who says it can’t be done in 20,000 words?
Another startlingly original piece of writing was Lila Chouli’s pamphlet charting the origins of the popular struggles in Burkina Faso before the mass insurrection that toppled Blaise Compaoré in 2014, Enough is Enough! – Burkina Faso 2011. Popular Protests, Military Mutinies and Workers Struggles (another important publication which remains out of print). I recall the excitement of selling dozens of these pamphlets outside political meetings in London in 2012 with Lila – who had to be gently cajoled into selling her own pamphlet to an interested crowd who knew little of Burkina Faso and its impressive history of struggle.
Censored Histories
This lengthy preamble is a way of introducing Editor House Facility’s news series, Censored Histories. We plan to produce a radical series of short texts, booklets or pamphlets on the stories, politics, movements and individuals in Africa. These are all ‘censored’ histories because they do not normally make it into the daily mainstream of writing and analysis in the media, and onto college and school curriculums. Our series will be telling revolutionary histories and stories from the radical borderlands of the continent.
In the coming months and year, Censored Histories, will publish on Senegal’s new government – coming to power on an immense wave of popular protests, and great human sacrifice for change. We are commissioning a short, readable account of the revolutionary life and writings of Issa Shivji. There will also be a volume on Kenya’s youth uprising last year, and much more. Then further texts on the military juntas in West Africa and a short text on Africa’s lost revolutionary subject – the continent’s working class.
Each of these will form part of EHF’s new series.
Pamphlets have a distinct, simple advantage over the book or monograph – they are quicker to write, produce, print and distribute. A pamphlet can also be read more quickly – in one sitting (and much can be learnt from them, see the recent pamphlet Sudan’s Popular and Revolutionary Movements).
Our series will vary in length, but the ‘booklet’ will not be more than 40,000 words. Censored Histories will be available to buy in hardcopy and eBook editions, elegantly written, and a pleasure to read, easy to carry, to slip in a pocket and bring out on a bus, train or demonstration, and pass enthusiastically to friends and comrades. As a longtime fan of the French bande dessinée – the beautifully drawn comic strip, frequently produced on political subjects – where possible we will be illustrating our series with photos, drawings, graphics and art.
But be warned these will not be academic texts rated in university ranking systems, or useful as career progressing publications for the authors. This is revolutionary proselytising that one would probably be advised to keep off their CV (but boldly show to your mother!)
We hope the series will be read with the same eagerness that we will be producing the pamphlets– with urgency, anger, immediacy. Read and shared by activists, the pamphlets bent back, the text smeared with finger-marks, comments, underlying and notes written on the page.
If you have an idea for a Censored Histories pamphlet and want to be kept up to date on our forthcoming titles, or you are keen to produce one of the texts yourself please get in touch – submissions@editorhousefacility.com.
Leo Zeilig is a writer and editor, and has written extensively, including biographies of some of Africa’s most important revolutionaries, he has also written several political novels. Zeilig is a commissioning editor for Editor House Facility.
