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In late 1978, South African Defence Force troops raided southern Angola's Cassinga settlement. They rounded up dozens of alleged SWAPO-PLAN combatants and held some for more than a decade. The resu...

Representative of similarly positioned Frontline States, Botswana became a negotiated space during the twentieth century’s second half. Within a continent where leaders often imagined regional and continental unity, the realities of late-stage colonialism just as often undermined these visions. This chapter investigates the country’s difficult positioning and the sometimes-positive, sometimes-adverse space within, betwixt, and between its citizens and neighbours. Utilising sources from Botswana’s National Archives, as well as from liberation movement archives emanating from the ANC and SWAPO, it seeks to understand how parties constrained under Total War imagined Pan-Africanist ideals within their physical realities.

Former South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts’s 1930 European and North American tour included a series of interactions with diasporic African and African American activists and intelligentsia. Amo...

In the wake of Marikana, a former freedom struggle participant now based in Washington DC, expressed that, for the first time following a tragic public event, she felt hopeless: ‘This was supposed ...

Fidel Castro's meta-narrative of Cuban history emphasizes the struggle – and eventual triumph – of the oppressed over their oppressors. This was epitomized in Nelson Mandela's 1991 visit to the island, when his host took him to the northwestern city of Matanzas, and the pair gave speeches titled “Look How Far We Slaves Have Come!” The use of Matanzas as a site of public political memory began in 1843, and the memory of slavery soon became a surrogate for Cuba's flawed liberation movement. One-hundred and fifty years after the execution of Carlota, one of the enslaved leaders of the Triumvirato Rebellion in Matanzas, Cuba began Operation Black Carlota in Angola. Castro had come to power 20 years earlier and publicized his own storming of a former slave – and by then prison and Army – barracks at Moncada in Santiago. The naming of the mission, and the subsequent emphasis on slaves overcoming their neo-colonial “masters,” illustrates the vividness of Cuban memories of slavery, as well as its emotional resona...