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The current absence of any emancipatory vision for Africa lies at the heart of our political problems of racial capitalist and colonial oppression. Any attempt to rethink political emancipation on the African continent must be able to locate a universal conception of freedom within singular cultural experiences where people live. Irrespective of the specific manner in which such struggles for freedom were thought within different historical contexts, emancipatory politics always exhibited such a dialectic when it was based within popular traditions. Yet only some militant intellectual leaders understood the importance of this dialectic in thought.The present volume outlines and discusses two particularly important views concerning the role and importance of popular culture in emancipatory politics in Africa. Each is the product of distinct forms of colonial capitalist exploitation: the former saw the light of day within a colonial context while the latter is directly confronted by the neocolonial state. All emancipatory politics are developed in confrontation with state power, and all begin with a process of discussion and debate whereby a collective subject begins to be formed. The formation of such a collective political subject has been fundamentally informed by popular cultures on the African continent.The two authors whose essays are included here understood this and posit popular culture at the centre of their politics. The first, Amilcar Cabral, addresses the central role of popular culture in the independence struggle of Guinea Bissau in the 1970s; the second, Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba, addresses the centrality of African popular culture in an emancipatory politics for the current Democratic Republic of Congo. Despite the distance in time that separates them, both Cabral and Wamba-dia-Wamba develop a dialectics at the core of their politics which activates the universals of culture in the present. It is this that makes their views of central importance to emancipatory thought today.

Post-/Decolonial critique exposes and deconstructs global inequality in its epistemic and material dimensions. However, this knowledge tends to hide in universities and in abstract, inaccessible theoretical texts. This collective comic project deals with postcolonial critique of global inequality in everyday life in the spaces, discourses and practices of so-called 'global development'. Our project illuminates everyday life's postcoloniality as well as the decolonising potential of everyday struggles. It does so by focusing on (settler)colonial history, but also on recent interventions, for instance, by development experts. With the medium of comics, we want to tell such critical perspectives in a visualised form and by using everyday stories as examples, thus overcoming textual boundaries. Our project develops a combination of individual, interconnected narratives of non-fiction comics, along which we present thematic fields and perspectives of postcolonial critique of global inequality. The combination of the formats of comic and non-fictional research-based insights makes it possible to convey reality while at the same time using the literary freedom of a graphic novel to convey postcolonial critique in a more lively and humorous way than a purely factual comic could. Our project thus puts complex theoretical concepts into story form, making them tangible. The comic stories are developed by academics and activists engaged in postcolonial critiques of global inequality. For each story, different artists/illustrators connected to the geographical and political context of the story works with the academics/activists to transform the story into a comic strip.