The sound is always there. Hmmm. A low, continuous, mechanical hum that never stops. It is the sound of drones—circling above Gaza at all times, surveilling everything below, a permanent reminder that someone is always watching. It has been there since before the students could remember. Since childhood, when it disrupted their favourite cartoons. It is the backdrop against which Gaza’s students refused to stop learning.</p> Beneath the Hum of Drones tells the story of those students through their own words and paintings—and the story of how their voices reached the world.It begins with a single conversation over coffee in England. A young Gazan scholar asked: What can we do? Not governments. Not international bodies. We, the two of us, here, with what we have. What could be done for the students of Gaza, right now?What followed was a grassroots movement that nobody had planned. Seventy English teachers volunteered to teach through WhatsApp voice notes, listening to recordings made with the constant sound of surveillance overhead. Academics from across the UK delivered recorded lectures to medical students who walked miles through rubble for a signal. A community in Brighton and Hove raised funds for tuition fees and devices, sold student artwork as tote bags and stickers, and packed rooms for readings that left strangers weeping. A gallery in Hailsham hung the students’ paintings free of charge. A publisher brought out We Are Still Here, an anthology of poetry and prose by fifty-eight Gazan students writing from displacement tents and bombed-out neighbourhoods. But this book is not only about what was built. It is about who built it—and who they built it for.
Beneath the Hum of Drones: On Solidarity and the Courage of Gaza Students is a powerful testament by Professor Zahid Pranjol about his journey building educational solidarity with students and academics in Gaza during the ongoing genocide. The book documents how a simple question—”What can we do?”—sparked a movement that grew from one conversation over coffee into an international network of educators, students, and activists.
The book chronicles the systematic destruction of Gaza’s higher education system—universities bombed, professors killed or displaced, laboratories destroyed—and the extraordinary determination of students and academics to continue learning against all odds. Palestinian educators rebuilt laboratories from rubble, taught from displacement shelters, and maintained academic continuity through will alone.
What began as a WhatsApp group with 800 international academics grew into a comprehensive support network:
Teaching Materials: Recorded lectures and resources in medicine, applied sciences, engineering, and business, aligned to Gaza’s actual curricula
English Language Programme: 70 volunteer tutors teaching approximately 1,000 students via voice notes and Zoom
Mental Health Support: One-to-one and group sessions for students experiencing trauma, grief, and suicidal ideation
Tuition Fee Fundraising: Community campaigns ensuring students remained enrolled
Device Provision: Laptops and phones for students whose equipment was destroyed
Students from Gaza contributed 108 poems and prose pieces—written from displacement, under drones, through hunger and grief. The collection features work from 58 named authors, translated into English, French, German, and Spanish. The book’s royalties support students’ education directly.
Paintings created in Gaza—vivid with colour despite the destruction—were exhibited in Gallery North (Hailsham) and Sussex University Library. Artists like Hala Alshanti, Sara Kamal, Farah Ajour, and Lama Deeb created work that bore witness to displacement, famine, and loss while insisting on beauty and humanity.
The initiative provided art workshops for children who had experienced two years without play, without safety, without childhood. Facilitators offered paint, paper, and attention—giving children afternoons of normalcy in the midst of genocide.
A grassroots community—booksellers, venues, individual donors, Palestinian organisations, and volunteers—organized events, fundraised, and sustained engagement month after month. Every pound raised went directly to tuition fees and devices.
Mohammed Al-Ajez: The student whose question began everything
Saad Muhana: A mechanical engineering graduate who grew up under drones and contributed to We Are Still Here
Rula Ibrahim Abu ElKhair: A medical student who climbed rooftops for signal and described choosing to “live as a survivor not as a victim”
Obay Jouda: Inspired by murdered poet Refaat Alareer, he helped bring the book to life
Hala Alshanti: Painted “We Are Still Here”—a family pulling a handcart forward while a bombed building stands behind them
Lama Deeb: Drew a starving child from life, rendering every rib with devastating precision
Hind Rajab: A five-year-old killed in Gaza, whose story haunts the book as a symbol of thousands of children lost
Education as Survival: Learning is not a secondary concern but an existential act—a refusal to accept erasure
Dignity Over Pity: Solidarity means standing beside people, not above them; respecting agency rather than offering charity
The Sound of Drones: The constant, inescapable hum of surveillance that has been the backdrop of Gaza’s children’s entire lives
Scholasticide: The systematic destruction of educational infrastructure as a strategy of genocide
Palestinian Leadership: The work was always Palestinian-led—internationals only amplified and supported
The Right to Be Ordinary: Every child deserves a childhood free from fear—this is the minimum, not a luxury
The book concludes with a chapter challenging educators and institutions to “decolonise our silence”—to:
Use precise language: genocide, occupation, apartheid
Centre Palestinian voices in academic and public discourse
Rebuild Gaza’s educational system on Palestinian terms
Advocate for Palestinian freedom of movement and academic participation
Normalise the conversation about Palestine in every institution
The book features powerful endorsements from:
Norman Finkelstein and Deborah Maccoby: “We were partners in a teaching collaboration that happened to be operating across a genocide.”
Ilan Pappé: “This book testifies to the resilience of Gaza’s younger generation.”
Caroline Lucas: “An inspiring story of what happens when individuals decide to make a difference.”
Vusi Madonsela (South Africa’s ICJ Agent): Describes the work as an inspiring story of individuals making a difference.
Professor Dr. Omar Kh. Melad (President of Al-Azhar University, Gaza): A “remarkable testament to the enduring power of education, compassion, and courage.”
The book ends with this: They are still teaching. They are still painting. They are still hoping. They are still here.
The work continues. The genocide continues. But so does the determination of Gaza’s students and the solidarity of those who choose to stand with them.
“The people of Gaza were never waiting to be saved. They were already doing the work. They asked only that the rest of us not leave them to do it alone.”
Royalties from this book go to the students in Gaza.
Professor Zahid Pranjol is Professor in Biomedical Sciences at the University of Sussex. He is a leading voice in inclusive science education and curriculum reform, leading efforts to decolonise the biosciences curriculum by challenging Eurocentric biases and diversifying reading lists.…
| Book Format | Print Book, PDF |
|---|
There are no reviews yet.
Only logged in customers who have purchased this product may leave a review.
This book collects four decades of writings on dialectics, a number of them published here for the first time, by Kevin B. Anderson, a well-known scholar-activist in the Marxist-Humanist tradition. The essays cover the dialectics of revolution in a variety of settings, from Hegel and the French Revolution to dialectics today and its poststructuralist and pragmatist critics. In these essays, particular attention is given to Lenin’s encounter with Hegel and its impact on the critique of imperialism, the rejection of crude materialism, and more generally, on world revolutionary developments. Major but neglected works on Hegel and dialectics written under the impact of the struggle against fascism like Lukács’s The Young Hegel and Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution are given full critical treatment. Dunayevskaya’s intersectional revolutionary dialectics is also treated extensively, especially its focus on a dialectics of revolution that avoids class reductionism, placing gender, race, and colonialism at the center alongside class. In addition, key critics of Hegel and dialectics like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Antonio Negri, Pierre Bourdieu, and Richard Rorty, are themselves analysed and critiqued from a twenty-first century dialectical perspective. The book also takes up the dialectic in global, intersectional settings via a reconsideration of the themes of Anderson’s Marx at the Margins, where nationalism, race, and colonialism were theorized alongside capital and class as key elements in Marxist dialectical thought. As a whole, the book offers a discussion of major themes in the dialectics of revolution that still speak to us today at a time of radical transformation in all spheres of society and of everyday life.
A piercing historical explanation of poverty and inequality in African societies today and the social impact of resource-driven growth, Extracting Profit explains why Africa, in the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century, has undergone an economic boom. Rising global prices in oil and minerals have produced a scramble for Africa’s natural resources, led by investment from U.S., European and Chinese companies, and joined by emerging economies from around the globe. African economies have reached new heights, even outpacing rates of growth seen in much of the rest of the world. Examined through the lens of case studies of the oil fields of the Niger River Delta, the Chad-Cameroon Pipeline and the East African infrastructure boom, this period of “Africa rising” did not lead to the creation of jobs, but has instead fueled the extraction of natural resources, profits accruing to global capital, and an increasingly wealthy African ruling class.
Extracting Profit argues that the roots of today’s social and economic conditions lie in the historical legacies of colonialism and the imposition of so-called “reforms” by global financial institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The chokehold of debt and austerity of the late twentieth century paved the way for severe assaults on African working classes through neoliberal privatization and deregulation. And while the scramble for Africa’s resources has heightened the pace of ecological devastation, examples from Somalia and the West African Ebola outbreak reveal a frightening surge of militarization on the part of China and the U.S.
Yet this “new scramble” has not gone unchallenged. With accounts of platinum workers’ struggles in South Africa, Nigerian labor organizing and pro-democracy upheavals in Uganda and Burkina Faso, Extracting Profit offers several narratives of grassroots organizing and protest, pointing to the potential for resistance to global capital and fundamental change, in Africa and beyond.
And in an updated Preface, the author analyses the implications of the Covid-19 pandemic and escalating climate emergency, as both the crises and resistance to extraction accelerate across the continent.
“Lee Wengraf’s Extracting Profit – Imperialism, Neoliberalism and The New Scramble for Africa is at once historical and contemporary. It unpacks ongoing resource crimes by analytically exposing its historical roots and pointing to ways by which the oppressed can cut off the bonds that lock in their subjugation.” —Nnimmo Bassey, Director, Health of Mother Earth Foundation
“Lee Wengraf provides an important reminder that Africa’s position within the world economy is heavily determined by its unequal insertion into the global capitalist system and ongoing manifestations of imperialism.” –James Chamberlain, Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute
“Lee Wengraf’s Extracting Profit provides a breathtakingly detailed account and analysis of some of the major socioeconomic ills that have been plaguing Africa for centuries. Amongst the host of issues she tackles, arguably the most consequential are mass poverty in African societies, their indefensible economic inequalities and the steady plundering of the continent’s resources, starting from the slave-trade era up till the present-day.” –Remi Adekoya, Review of African Political Economy
“Extracting Profit offers several narratives of grassroots organizing and protest, pointing to the potential for resistance to global capital and fundamental change, in Africa and beyond.” –Developing Economics
“Evidently, this book is well-researched and it contributes to the expansion of the frontiers of Marxist scholarship on Africa’s development dilemma within the global capitalist order. This book lends credence to the pioneering works of such notable radical scholars as Andre Gunder Frank, Walter Rodney, and Samir Amin among several others. It should be read by students and teachers of political economy, development studies, Marxism and philosophy.” –Marx & Philosophy Review of Books
“Extracting Profit provides a great arch of scutiny from the earliest carve-up of the African continent, through colonialism, war, imperialism, to the recent neoliberal takeover. The book demonstrates the continued importance of Marxist analysis on the continent, asserting the centrality of class analysis and a project of revolutionary change. Wengraf provides us with a major contribution, that highlights contemporary developments and the role of China on the African continent that has perplexed and baffled scholars. An indispensable volume.” —Leo Zeilig, author of Frantz Fanon: The Militant Philosopher of Third World Revolution
“The history of resource frontiers everywhere is always one of lethal violence, militarism, empire amidst the forcing house of capital accumulation. Lee Wengraf in Extracting Profit powerfully reveals the contours of Africa’s 21st century version of this history. The scramble for resources, markets, and investments have congealed into a frightening militarization across the continent, creating and fueling the conditions for further political instability. Wengraf documents how expanded American, but also Chinese, presence coupled with the War on Terror, point to both the enduring rivalry among global superpowers across the continent and a perfect storm of resource exploitation. Wengraf offers up a magisterial synopsis of the challenges confronting contemporary Africa.” —Michael Watts, University of California, Berkeley
“One of the most well-known stylized facts of Africa’s recent growth experience is that it has been inequality-inducing in ways that previous growth spurts were not. Lee Wengraf, in her new book Extracting Profit , expertly utilises the machinery of Marxian class analysis in making sense of this stylized fact. Along the way we learn much about Africa’s historical relationship with imperialism and its contemporary manifestations. This book should be required reading for all those who care about Africa and its future.” —Grieve Chelwa, Contributing Editor, Africa Is A Country
“In recent years countries in the African continent have experienced an economic boom—but not all have benefited equally. Extracting Profit is a brilliant and timely analysis that explodes the myth of “Africa Rising,” showing how neoliberal reforms have made the rich richer, while leaving tens of millions of poor and working class people behind. Lee Wengraf tells this story within the context of an imperial rivalry between the United States and China, two global superpowers that have expanded their economic and military presence across the continent. Extracting Profit is incisive, powerful, and necessary: If you read one book about the modern scramble for Africa, and what it means for all of us, make it this one.” —Anand Gopal, author, No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes
“Thorough and thoughtful, Wengraf’s book has a radical depth that underscores its significance. It’s definitely a must-read for anyone who cherishes an advanced knowledge on the exploitation of Africa as well as the politics that undermines Africa’s class freedom.” —Kunle Wizeman Ajayi, Convener, Youths Against Austerity and General Secretary of the United Action for Democracy, Nigeria
“Extracting Profit is a very important book for understanding why the immense majority of the African population remain pauperised, despite impressive growth rates of mineral-rich countries on the continent. It continues the project of Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. And in several ways, it also goes beyond it, capturing the changing dynamics of global capitalism 45 years after Rodney’s magnus opus.
In this book, Lee Wengraf debunks the myth of “Africa Rising” and the supposed expansion of an entrepreneurial middle-class, revealing “reforms” imposed by international financial institutions as mechanisms for fostering imperialism in an era of sharpening contradictions of the global capitalist economy. The adverse social, economic, political and environmental impact of these are elaborated on as a systemic whole, through the book’s examination of the sinews of capital’s expansion in the region: the extractive industries.
But, Wengraf does not stop at interrogating the underdevelopment of Africa. Her book identifies a major reason for the failures of national liberation projects: while the working masses were mobilised to fight against colonial domination, the leadership of these movements lay in the hands of aspiring capitalists, and intellectuals. The urgency of the need for a strategy for workers’ power internationally, she stresses correctly, cannot be overemphasized.
Reading Extracting Profit would be exceedingly beneficial for any change-seeking activist in the labour movement within and beyond Africa.” —Baba Aye, editor, Socialist Worker (Nigeria)
Written in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University, this publication celebrates the birth of Black studies as a liberated academic zone. Professor Mũgo reflects upon the significance of Africana studies, specifically within the context of America’s predominantly White universities, revisiting the hers/his/torical context that birthed Black studies as a field of knowledge. She reflects on the ownership of knowledge, its production, dissemination and custodianship while proposing utu/ubuntu as imperatives in defining transformative education. The hypothesis and heart of the argument is that knowledge and scholarship can either be colonizing, alienating and enslaving; or, alternatively, they can be conscientizing, humanizing and liberating, creating new human beings with the agency to transform life and the world, for the better. he dismisses the false myth of dominating, colonizing and imperialist cultures that claim to have a monopoly of knowledge and whose purpose is to justify the dehumanization of the conquered, the attempted erasure of their knowledges, heritages and ultimately, entire cultures.
The collection of essays in Partisan Universalism celebrates the work of Ato Sekyi-Otu, a scholar, teacher and friend, marking his extraordinary contribution to the philosophy, politics and praxis of liberation. As Ato Sekyi-Otu has argued in his recent book, Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays (Routlege 2019), universalism is an ‘inescapable presupposition of ethical judgment in general and critique in particular, especially indispensable for radical criticism of conditions of existence in postcolonial society and for vindicating visions of social regeneration’. Universalism must and can only be partisan.
“Responding to the invitation ‘to re-member severed but shareable things’, these lovers of truth, freedom, and dignity celebrate the searing intellect, generosity, wit, and compassion of the person and the scholar Ato Sekyi-Otu. … this is a precious contribution. Not to be missed!” —Jane Anna Gordon, author of Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement and co-editor (with Drucilla Cornell) of Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg. /
“Critically engaging Ato Sekyi-Otu’s notion of partisan universalism, this timely volume of essays speaks directly to the onto-metaphysical issues that will give Africana thought the new foundations that will enable it to move beyond the linguistic turn, brush aside the ashes of Afro-pessimism. … A must read for all concerned with the future of Africana theory and praxis.” —Paget Henry, author of Caliban’s Reason/
“Ato Sekyi-Otu’s thought is one of the most important and exciting in Africa today. The texts compiled in this volume celebrate and engage with the work of Sekyi-Otu … They bear eloquent witness to Sekyi-Otu’s stature as a thinker and to his consistent commitment to the universalization of humanity in both theory and practice.” — Michael Neocosmos, Emeritus Professor in the Humanities, Rhodes University, South Africa.
A wave of mass protest movements has spread across North Africa and West Asia, including Sudan, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon and Iran. The mass protests have much in common, from opposing authoritarian regimes and worsening economic situations to demanding radical changes in social relations. Despite their similarities, each protest movement operates under different conditions that cannot be ignored. The specific historic, political and economic contexts of each country have determined who the key actors of the uprisings are and their location across old and new divides. This book elaborates on these similarities and differences to paint a clearer picture of these movements and draw out lessons to inform future struggles.
Student activism and cultural activism go hand in hand on Indian campuses. Over the last few years, especially after 2014, student movements in the country against social injustice have increased in numbers and tenacity. Cultural modes of expressing dissent have played a key role within this new wave of student movements that have gripped the nation. This book takes the reader through a journey into the ways cultural activists analyse cultural modes of protest, especially in the context of student movements in the Global South. The book delves into the political and ideological contours set by organisations such as the Indian Progressive Theatre Association (IPTA) and the Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA), and by figures such as Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Habib Jalib, Hemanga Biswas and Safdar Hashmi. The book locates them within the contemporary wave of cultural protests, analyses their continued relevance and argues for a revival of theoretical and practical engagement with the early progenitors of the progressive cultural movement in India.
As the oldest (and arguably best-known) university in Uganda and the wider eastern and central Africa region, Makerere University looms large in the history of higher education on the continent. Alma mater to presidents, public intellectuals and pundits of all disciplines, Makerere has attracted considerable scholarly and popular attention, both in respect of its prominence and achievements, and well as with regard to its failures and foibles. The proposed book focuses on a particularly understudied aspect of the place of higher education in the African context, i.e. the relationship between a public university of unique historical importance and the contestations over democratization that have taken place both within campus and outside of it. It is built around the late-1980s struggle by the Makerere University Academic Staff Association (MUASA) for improved living conditions against the backdrop of the early programs of structural adjustment and economic reform that the National Resistance Army/Movement (NRA/M) government adopted soon after taking power in 1986. Although seemingly introverted in focus, in many respects the MUASA action represented the earliest forms of political struggle against a regime of governance that promised a great deal, but disappointingly delivered considerably less.
The focus on MUASA provides a critical entry-point to a wider debate about the place of organized democratic action by academics in a post-conflict context where the traditional institutions of political and civil society, i.e. political parties and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have either been severely compromised or discredited, or where they are too weak and inorganic to provide any form of significant counter-juxtaposition to the government in power. By organizing the first strike by academic staff in the sixty-seven (67) year history of the university, for a time MUASA became the focal-point for democratic organizing against a regime that was yet to fully expose its nefarious and anti-democratic colours. The book examines the broader issues concerning the relationship between organized academic action and democratization; the place of the Media in reviewing these struggles; the position of students as a critical component of academe; “big P” and “small p” politics affecting female academics, and finally, the paradoxical role of the School of Law in both aiding and inhibiting the struggle against dictatorship in a country which has enjoyed
There has been a rise in the use of strategic litigation related to seeking equality for lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) persons. Such developments are taking place against the backdrop of active homophobia in Africa. The law and the general public should, argues the author, treat LGB persons in the same way that heterosexuals are treated. In the past two decades,30 strategic cases have been fi led by LGB activists in the Common Law African countries, namely in Botswana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Uganda. While the majority of the cases have been successful, they have not resulted in significant social change in any of the countries. On the contrary, there have been active backlashes, counter-mobilisations, and violence against LGB persons, as well as the further criminalisation of same-sex relations and constitutional prohibitions on same-sex marriages in some of the jurisdictions. The author argues that activists in Common Law Africa have to design LGB strategic litigation in such a way as to fi t within the actual social and political conditions in their countries if strategic litigation is to spur social change.
Adrian Jjuuko is an exceptional scholar. A rare combination of intellectual brilliance, commitment and hard work. The book is born of this. It reflects his incisive analytical skills, anchored in solid knowledge of the law and jurisprudential developments in the field. His ventures into political theory, philosophy, and the social sciences give the analysis additional clarity and empirical grounding.
In Strategic Litigation, Adrian Jjuuko has hugely succeeded in bringing to light pertinent issues regarding LGB rights in the African context today. By making reference to various scholarly works and critical analyses, the author has cleverly driven home the message that progressive decriminalization of LGB relationships and constitutional protection of LGB persons in Common Law Africa should be deliberate steps towards demystifying the erstwhile taboo of LGB persons’ equality and social justice. Yet, Jjuuko throws in a word of caution; societal attitudes towards LGB persons still remain largely negative, as exemplified in pervasive disapproval (including religious) of their rights. This implies that a lot is still required from all stakeholders to demystify and accommodate the social position of the LGB community in Common Law Africa today. Kisito, J. M. (2022). Book Review: Strategic litigation and the struggle for lesbian, gay and bisexual equality in Africa by Adrian Jjuuko. Feminism & Psychology, 32(4), 584-587. https://doi-org.proxy.library.carleton.ca/10.1177/09593535221104876 (Original work published 2022)
DarajaPress uses Accessibility Checker to monitor our website's accessibility.
