Liberation Lite takes as its principal focus the limited meaning that liberation has come to have in southern Africa—despite the heroic struggles there that had so recently overthrown white racist rule. For the subsequent neocolonial recolonization of the subcontinent has not, in class and gender terms, allowed much real freedom for the mass of the southern Africa people, nor has it helped guarantee to them the expression of meaningful popular democratic voice. The book also discusses the role that Canada, like other western countries, has played in facilitating just such extremely narrow outcomes to the struggles in southern Africa; surveys the continuing scope for socialist aspiration and achievement that nonetheless survive within the region and throughout the global south; and reflects both on related debates that the author has had over many decades with his close friend and sometime author, the late Giovanni Arrighi, as well as on other relevant aspects of his own intellectual autobiography. Saul’s conclusion: the continued imperative of taking direction, personal and more broadly political, from Frelimo’s central slogan of that movement’s days of most active challenge to Portuguese overrule in Mozambique: A Luta Continua, the struggle continues.

John Saul’s reflections on the struggles for liberation to which he has devoted a lifetime of scholarship and activism—the wise lessons he draws, and his resolute refusal to be pessimistic in spite of all setbacks—should be not just read but taken to heart by everyone who cares about the future of Africa and the world.

—Colin Leys

author of The Rise and Fall of Development Theory, and Total Capitalism

“Based on his almost half century of immense political and intellectual contributions to African liberation struggles, John Saul once again shows that he is one of the few today who has the courage as well as the credentials to pose the sober question of ‘what did “liberation” mean anyway’? What is more, John Saul also shows here that he is one of the few with the confidence as well as the capacity to answer the question by drawing inspirational and strategic socialist and revolutionary conclusions.”

—Leo Panitch,

co-editor, Socialist Register

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JOHN S. SAUL is Professor Emeritus of Toronto’s York University and a well-known anti-apartheid activist from the 1970s who demonstrated against the participation in Canada of a visiting South African criket side in 1976. He is the author of some 18 books on southern African and more general development issues. He remains committed to a politics of genuine liberation, one that is both anti-capitalist and profoundly democratic.

Category

Politics, Sociology, History/AFRICA