Critical scholarship on travel writing in Africa has largely concentrated on texts by European travelers or Eurocentric manifestations of the genre in Africa. A consequence of this is the inference that Africa has a scant body of travel texts or lacks a tradition of travel writing. This chapter disrupts this view and traces the genre of travel writing in Africa by circumventing the rigid generic boundaries. It maps the many dis/continuities of forms and shapes of the genre in Africa from before the twentieth century to date. This study offers a survey of the generic characteristics of African travel writing informed by a multitude of conditions and realities of writing and positionality. It explores the tradition of African travel writing complicated by the conflicting histories of imperialism and the writers’ cultural realities and engagement with space; the triangulation of travel, labor, and leisure in African travel writing; the politics of deconstructing a Eurocentric form; and the transformation of the genre in the digital space in Africa. In this chapter, African travel writing serves as a basis for theorizing travel and the African continent functions as a point of departure and arrival in networks of travel and writing.

The Afterword brings together the various strands of the complex encounter between the Black Atlantic and the Red October. It argues for the dynamic and mutually complementary connection between the ideals of social and economic justice put forth by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the emancipatory aspirations of the historical victims of Western racism and imperialism. The relationship between the Soviet experiment and the experiences of the Black Atlantic was far from unproblematic. There were numerous points of convergence, especially when it came to the critique of European and North American racism and colonialism. Yet the appeal of the Soviet claims to colour-blind internationalism and the class-based analysis of history had its limitations, as it would come to compete with a variety of other emancipatory visions, which privileged racial solidarity and black nationalism. It is common to talk about the impact of the Russian Revolution on the colonised majorities in the developing world and the racial minorities in the West. However, the encounter was certainly not a one-way street – it functioned as a vehicle for the forging of Soviet Socialist identity, but it also generated its fair share of challenges to the Soviet status quo. Many of the actors and sojourners of the Black Atlantic found themselves inspired by the Soviet rhetoric of anti-racism and anti-colonialism, but their very engagement with this discourse could, on occasion, put pressure on the Soviets to modernise and to encourage Soviet society towards change and even reform.

This chapter focuses on African students in Moscow during early African decolonisation and Cold War. It responds to three major questions: 1) What were Africans seeking in the USSR in human-resource development that they could not find at home? 2) What did they actually discover during their sojourns in the USSR?3) How were the Soviet formal-education programmes important in the Africans’ struggle for full decolonisation (cultural, psychological, economic and political)? The author draws upon his primary methodology of direct field experiences in Moscow during the Khrushchev era, as well as follow-up interviews in Tanzania, Paris, and elsewhere. His research on African students in the USSR during the Khrushchev era is unique for several reasons, including his field-research methodologies (participant observation and interviews) and focus on transnational actors. The chapter’s findings challenge previous scholarship related to African students’ personal, social experiences in the USSR, and Moscow’s significant formal-education programmes related to African needs and priorities as defined by prominent anti-colonial African elites.

Focusing on the histories of the New Era Fellowship (founded in South Africa in 1937), the Current Affairs Group (founded in Southern Rhodesia in 1938) and the Left Book Club in Jamaica (founded in Jamaica in 1938), this chapter maps a triangular network of circulation of socialist ideas created between the Caribbean, Africa and Europe. In particular, it looks at the transnational activities of London’s Left Book Club (LBC) between 1935 and 1947, when it founded more than fifteen groups around the globe, which distributed the material produced by the LBC. In addition to functioning as centres for the diffusion of Marxist, anti-imperialist and anti-colonial ideas, largely forming local nationalisms, those circles acted as centres of congregation and education. The Current Affairs Group, for example, was founded under influence of Victor Gollancz to support the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. Along with the South African Communist newspaper the Guardian, the Current Affairs Group was responsible for disseminating socialist ideas among the black segregated population. The chapter argues that transnational networks sewn by the LBC, which connected those groups, favoured the creation of a global circuit which helped non-European intellectuals to act as carriers of anti-colonial, anti-imperial, anti-racist and nationalist ideas.

The Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University in Moscow played a role in shaping both individuals and governments in post-colonial Africa. Founded in 1960, its stated objective was to provide higher education for the developing world. Its opening followed important global shifts – particularly the collapse of European empires – but coexisted with others, especially Cold War activities. For many Africans, it was one of the only avenues for post-secondary education available. Nelson Mandela commented, ‘Hundreds of young South Africans found here the education they were denied in their own homeland.’ Observers in the West soon began to refer to PLPFU as a site of Communist indoctrination and a training ground for terrorists; its symbolic connection with Lumumba was invoked (in racialised language) as evidence of this. For instance, Time magazine asserted, ‘Four years after his death, a lot of people talk as though Patrice Emery Lumumba were still the Congo’, and accused the university of producing ‘terrorists’ and ‘agitators’ who are ‘invoking Lumumba’s name’ with its ‘rhythm of jungle drums’. The chapter explores PLPFU’s operation as a nexus of interaction among the various African countries whose students travelled there, the USSR as host and ‘instructor’, and the global vision of the US and its allies.

Between 1919 and 1921, Claude McKay, best known as a distinguished black poet and novelist, spent fourteen months in London, a crucial and transformative moment in his life and work. Yet this is the least studied and understood period of McKay’s life and oeuvre. Drawing upon newly discovered archival sources, the chapter documents and analyses the extraordinary impact McKay’s British sojourn had on his radicalisation. He met and befriended disgruntled black and colonial veterans of the First World War, and spent most of his spare time at the International Socialist Club in the East End of London, a key venue for radicals of various stripes and nationalities. He became an important member of Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers’ Socialist Federation, the first British group to embrace and join the Communist International. He was at times the de facto editor of its newspaper, the Workers’ Dreadnought, for which he penned some of his most remarkable articles (including his very first) and radical poems. The moment that McKay arrived in Britain, and the radical milieu in which he lived and worked, turned out to be profoundly influential in the decolonisation of his mind and his full embrace of revolutionary socialism in general and Bolshevism in particular.

The chapter explores the policy and guidelines for the translation and publishing of African-American literature in Soviet Russia from 1917 up to the beginning of the Russian–German war in 1941, as well as of the basis for establishing and maintaining contacts with African-American writers. It examines the drastic difference between the revolutionary period of 1917–19, the 1920s (New Economic Policy) and the Stalinist 1930s. The key issues that allow us to see the logic of the change are: the choice of the authors and their works for translation and publishing, the bias of literary criticism, the dynamics of black writers’ literary reputation in the USSR, the activity of Soviet translators and publishers, periodicals specialising in African-American literature, Soviet and international literary institutions (like the International Union of Revolutionary Writers), writers’ associations and organisations of the 1920s, the Union of Soviet Writers. Special attention is paid to black visitors, including major figures like Claude McKay and Langston Hughes, and black residents of the USSR, their essays, articles, travel books about Soviet Russia, and the reception of these works in the Soviet Union, as well as to the correspondence between black writers and Soviet institutions, critics, editors and translators.