Photo credit, Ben Joseph
Leo Zeilig is a writer and researcher. He has written extensively on African politics and history, including books on working-class struggle and the development of revolutionary movements and biographies on some of Africa’s most important political thinkers and activists. In different ways, each book examines the growth of decolonization, the failures of independence and the development of radical politics on the continent. In all of his writing Leo presents the continent as being at the centre of globalization.
Leo is an editor of the Review of African Political Economy—the radical African-studies journal founded by activists and scholars in 1974—and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at the University of London where he set-up and coordinates the Ruth First Papers Project.
Leo’s critically acclaimed novel Eddie the Kid was published by Zero Books in 2013. Eddie the Kid is about the life of an activist in London during the anti-war movement in the early 2000s. It was praised in The Guardian: ‘This passionate, sad and well-told book offers a compelling portrait of a flawed young radical.’ Eddie the Kid won the 2014 Creative Work prize at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. Leo is writing his third novel
Leo is an editor of the Review of African Political Economy and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at the University of London. He has written in a number of academic domains, including sociology, political science, political economy, geography and history. Here are a few of the academic articles, chapters and reports he has written in recent years.
Books
This article was published in the Morning Star on 22 June, 2017. ON JUNE 8 cleaners, who had been on strike at the London School of Economics (LSE) for seven weeks, in a dispute that has spanned 10 months, won. They won each of their demands. The cleaners were members of the United Voices of […]
A version of this blogpost was originally published by RS21 Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century – news, analysis, comment and campaigning from socialist activists based in the Britain By eight in the morning on Tuesday last week it had already been raining for a few hours. I had turned up early for the strike and […]
Heike Becker reviews An Ounce of Practice for The Conversation a novel that ‘tells a gripping tale of an intellectual leftie from London, a group of southern African activists in Zimbabwe and England, and the emotional battles of living and acting in the struggles of the 21st century… An Ounce of Practice succeeds as an imaginative engagement […]
Arguably the résistance populaire across Burkina Faso in September 2015 against the coup led by members of the old regime was as significant as the uprising that toppled Blaise Compaoré in October 2014. In a recent Briefing in the Review of African Political Economy I attempt to unpick the significance and extent of the popular resistance. […]
