CHICAGO — The 67th annual meeting of the African Studies Association here brought together over 1,600 academics, authors and others Dec. 12-14. Many participants came from Africa.
Over 350 panel discussions covered politics, economic underdevelopment and other topics. An exhibition hall was set up with booths and displays from 32 publishers, bookstores and other vendors, including Pathfinder Press.
The attractive Pathfinder booth was visited by scores of participants. One, an associate professor of history from Syracuse, New York, had visited Pathfinder’s booth at the association’s conference two years ago and said she now uses Pathfinder’s Thomas Sankara Speaks in her classes. She had come by to thank us for our books, as did many other professors.
Titles by Sankara were top sellers, as in past years. A participant from Mali told booth volunteers there is more interest in Sankara today than in the past. “We need a new Sankara today,” he said.
Many of the 116 books sold at the booth reflected participants’ interest in broad political questions. In addition to Sankara titles, best sellers included Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power and Are They Rich Because They’re Smart? Class, Privilege, and Learning under Capitalism, both by Socialist Workers Party National Secretary Jack Barnes; The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation; and Women in Cuba: The Making of a Revolution Within the Revolution.
Some participants bought a stack of books, like a student from Kenya who purchased History of the Russian Revolution by Leon Trotsky, Capitalism’s World Disorder by Barnes, The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward and three others.
“I knew you are raising up our honorable leaders like Nelson Mandela. But then I saw that you don’t just put their pretty faces on the books to sell them,” said Miranda Rivers, a Ph.D. student at Howard University, after looking at the spectrum of titles on the table. “You have books by Lenin and other revolutionaries.”
She came back with a friend on the last day and they bought several books, including In Defense of Marxism by Trotsky and Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power. They each got a subscription to the Militant.
The booth ran out of several titles, prompting one participant from South Africa who came by on the last day of the conference to exclaim, “I wish I had come here earlier!” She ended up buying New International no. 5 featuring “The Coming Revolution in South Africa” about Nelson Mandela and the revolutionary democratic struggle to overthrow apartheid rule, along with How Far We Slaves Have Come by Mandela and Fidel Castro, and Sankara’s Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle. As the curator of a new museum being built at the home of Mandela’s birth, she said she wants to order more Pathfinder titles to have available there.
Seven different titles in French were sold, as well as one each in Chinese and Arabic. One librarian looked up various titles to see if her library had them, and was surprised to see that they didn’t have many. She took a photo of five books, promising to order them.
Pathfinder books came up in several panel discussions. At one on the Congo, Pathfinder volunteer Lisa Rottach spoke briefly about the political legacy of Patrice Lumumba and Sankara for workers worldwide, and to the internationalism of the Cuban Revolution and how it sent over 250 medical volunteers to join in fighting the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Africa. She encouraged people to come by the Pathfinder booth to get Revolution in the Congo and Red Zone: Cuba and the Battle Against Ebola in West Africa.
Next year’s conference will take place Nov. 20-22 in Atlanta.