The Militant (logo)  

Vol. 75/No. 1      January 10, 2011

 
Keen interest in revolutionary
books in South Africa
 
BY WILLIE COTTON  
PRETORIA, South Africa—“I think it’s vital to know about the struggle for socialism in other countries,” Melusi Nzimande, from eThekwini on the eastern coast of South Africa, told young socialists who were distributing books by Pathfinder Press here to participants in the 17th World Festival of Youth and Students. “A friend of mine bought eight or 10 books yesterday, so I had to come today,” Nzimande said.

Festival participants bought more than 380 copies of Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power by Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States. The book explains how the revolutionary conquest of power by the working class will make possible the final battle for Black freedom—and open the way to a socialist world.

The festival was dedicated to Fidel Castro and Nelson Mandela. Young Socialists sold all 160 copies they brought of Pathfinder’s How Far We Slaves Have Come, which contains speeches by both revolutionaries from July 26, 1991, when Mandela visited Cuba.

More than 100 copies of Is Socialist Revolution in the U.S. Possible? and 228 various issues of New International, a Marxist magazine of politics and theory, were also sold at festival workshops and conferences.

Many visited the stand of the U.S. delegation, which was shared by the Young Socialists and the Young Communist League. Young socialists displayed a poster with photos and captions illustrating their participation in various aspects of the U.S. class struggle and an assortment of Pathfinder books. “It’s important to get information about struggles, so you can link them together and fight better,” said Abdulla Boiya, a 22-year-old from Western Sahara.

Word got around as delegates were introduced to Pathfinder books on women’s liberation and speeches by Thomas Sankara, leader of the 1983-87 revolution in the West African country of Burkina Faso. Ninety-one women's liberation titles were purchased along with 173 Sankara books. Also sought after were The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and books by V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, two central leaders of the Russian Revolution.
 
 
Related articles:
S. Africa: Youth share experiences of struggles
Sahrawis explain fight against Moroccan rule  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home