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Babu lived in the age of national liberation and revolution. The period after the Second World War to the defeat of US imperialism in Vietnam in 1975 was characterised by what, the then Chinese Communist Party, described as, 'Countries want Independence, Nations want Liberation and People want Revolution'. Babu belonged to the first generation of African Marxists who participated in the struggle for independence, national liberation, and people's revolution[ 2 ]. This was also the age of great intellectual and ideological ferment. Every revolution and liberation struggle had its theoreticians, its thinkers, its arsenal of articulated ideas, not just arsenal of weapons. Young activists and cadres began by mastering the 'Weapon of Theory', to use Amilcar Cabral's phrase, before turning to theories of weapons ( Cabral, 1969). The clarion call of our journal, Cheche , produced by the University Students African Revolutionary Front (USARF) was: 'Struggle to Learn, Learn to Struggle'. Political leaders of liberation movements and revolutions were giant intellectuals and thinkers in their own right. Nehru's prison letters to his daughter constituted a tome called Glimpses of World History . Nkrumah wrote the influential Neocolonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism ( Nkrumah, 1968 Frantz Fanon combined in him a professional psychiatrist, a revolutionary activist and the author of the great ) . The Wretched of the Earth Fanon, 1967), whose mastery was a necessary entry qualification to our Sunday Ideological Classes at the Hill (see generally Shivji, 1995 ( ). Babu's own African Socialism or Socialist Africa? was written in Ukonga prison in Dar es Salaam and the manuscript smuggled out for 'ruthless criticism', (to use Marx's phrase from a wellknow quote), by young comrades and the young comrades ruthlessly criticised it without regard to the fact that this was a manuscript of an older, much more experienced, comrade. As a matter of fact, the youthful critics so overdid their, rather dogmatic, criticism, that Babu was moved to retort: |
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