
Writer, Activist and Researcher
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. Leo is an editor of the Review of African Political Economy—the radical African-studies journal founded by activists and scholars in 1974— and an Honorary Research Associate at the Society, Work and Development Institute (SWOP) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Leo’s critically acclaimed novel Eddie the Kid was published by Zero Books in 2013. 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. In 2017 Leo’s second novel, An Ounce of Practice, was published by Hoperoad. Praised in The Conversation as ‘a brilliant work of literary imagination that takes the reader to new realities in an engaging, moving read, hilariously humorous at times.’ Leo is writing his third novel.
Books

News
African Revolutions and Decolonization
I was interviewed about by the brilliant Guerrilla History podcast series on national liberation and revolution in Africa.
Reading from An Ounce of Practice
Posted in December 2020 on the YouTube channel of HopeRoad, the publisher of An Ounce of Practice, I read a short extract from my 2017 [...]
Rodney’s Hamburg Lectures
In December 2020 I spoke to the UCL Institute of the Americas on Walter Rodney's astonishing lectures in Hamburg in 1978. Between April and June [...]
The World Turned Upside Down: Rodney’s 1972 masterpiece
Writing on roape.net in November 2020, I look at the making of Walter Rodney's classic text. In 1972 Walter Rodney published his masterpiece How Europe Underdeveloped [...]
A Life of Praxis with Walter Rodney: interview with Jesse Benjamin
In June 2020, on the anniversary of the assassination of Walter Rodney, roape.net published an interview I conducted with the scholar-activist, Jesse Benjamin. In the [...]
Pulverized: Capitalism, Africa and Covid-19
On roape.net, with Hannah Cross, we wrote at the end of March 2020 about the outbreak of Covid-19 and alternatives to capitalism in the Global [...]