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Ere Roosevelt Came
Ere Roosevelt Came is a short novel by early pan-Africanist Duse Mohamed Ali. Originally serialized in Ali's Nigerian magazine The Comet in 1934, it grapples with the rise of global fascism and white supremacy, and the growing geopolitical influence of the USA in the interwar period.
This is a fantastical, intricately woven, and speculative story about how Black American airmen, organizing in secret, fight an international assemblage of white supremacists and Russian foreign agents bent on instigating a new world war. The narrative reveals how Black liberation struggles, Bolshevism, and the rise of so-called 'colored' Japanese empires were bound together in the Pan-African literary imaginary.
Written by a Sudanese-Egyptian, serialized in West Africa, and set in the USA, Ere Roosevelt Came is a Pan-African novel par excellence , and a fascinating historical document that conveys the complexities of Black internationalism in the interwar years.
The novel is presented with two original, contextualizing essays and appendices featuring selected other writings to provide further insight into Ali's vision of a Pan-African future.
This is a fantastical, intricately woven, and speculative story about how Black American airmen, organizing in secret, fight an international assemblage of white supremacists and Russian foreign agents bent on instigating a new world war. The narrative reveals how Black liberation struggles, Bolshevism, and the rise of so-called 'colored' Japanese empires were bound together in the Pan-African literary imaginary.
Written by a Sudanese-Egyptian, serialized in West Africa, and set in the USA, Ere Roosevelt Came is a Pan-African novel par excellence , and a fascinating historical document that conveys the complexities of Black internationalism in the interwar years.
The novel is presented with two original, contextualizing essays and appendices featuring selected other writings to provide further insight into Ali's vision of a Pan-African future.
- GenresFiction
256 pages, Paperback
Published January 20, 2024
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
July 9, 2025
This was an interesting find. The author was Sudanese-Egyptian, it was serialized in a Nigerian magazine, and it's set in the U.S. It has a thriller/spy story interspersed with Victorian-style romance & purple prose ("The perfume-laden breezes that floated through the open window blew the boy's flaxen curls about in tangled negligence. At the foot of the dainty bed the mother stood gazing with tear-dimmed eyes upon her only child."), interspersed with pages of Marxist analysis of American race relations in the 1930s. Some parts had great suspense, and none of it was boring. I loved it!
Displaying 1 of 1 review