Every now and then we put together an issue and the whole editorial team says, “Ah, now this is one satisfying issue” – a short hand way of saying that the essays are deep, urgent, far reaching and also, a sheer pleasure to read. This is one such issue.

The essays are much longer than our usual ones – but we promise they will be worth every minute you spend on them.

At the top of the list is Mahmood Mamdani's incisive analysis of the struggle for land reform in Zimbabwe.

You will find Amiri Baraka arguing that the left outlook on Obama is wrong-headed and that the left risks being left (pun intended) behind by the people. Amiri Baraka thunders at the left and says “the task of the revolutionary is to lead the people by taking what they already know and giving it back to them with the focus of the present the past and the future.” Along the same lines, you will find, Michael Novick arguing that revolutionary resistance cannot be organized against Obama, or alongside him necessarily, but ahead of him.

In contrast, you will find Patrick Bond deriding Obama on his cabinet picks that seem to be taking him further away from the promise of change, bring on board hawks and the neoliberals.

But just as soon you are done with the Baraka and Novick pieces, Doreen Lwanga will ask you: What of the relationship between Africans and African Americans in the US? No one has really looked at the implications of an Obama presidency in the light of this important relationship, subversive but also fraught with contradiction.

AFRICOM is now official and Daniel Volman provides an invaluable comprehensive background piece. And Jacques Depelchin does the same for the food crisis while contextualizing the crisis in the old days of the invisible hand and in the equally invisible equality promised by globalization.

Silence Chihuri looks at the cholera epidemic, the massive economic meltdown and why home affairs remain the gate keepers of Zimbabwe.

While Neville Alexander and colleagues critique the crisis of education in South Africa.

Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, in the Pan-African Post Card is piercing - as always - cutting through the bubble wrap, this time using Uganda to ask whether we need liberation from the liberators.

And as usual, we have letters, the African blogosphere, and a round up on China in Africa.

But this also reflects the ever growing number of high quality articles being submitted to Pambazuka News, itself a reflection of the growth of critical voices on the African continent.

Can you tell just how excited we are by this issue? Now, be sure to let us know what you thought of it by sending comments to or commenting online at http://www.pambazuka.org/