Bolo’bolo

Bolo’bolo is a collectively run anarchist publisher. We host the Anarchist Winter School and the annual Cape Town Anarchist Bookfair. We also occasionally screen documentaries via our Unblinking Eye film club.

Our publishing project grew out of the bolo’bolo infoshop and vegan coffee house, which we ran collectively for two years in Lower Main Rd, Observatory, distributing materials related to anarchism and other forms of radical politics, grassroots environmentalism, animal rights, veganism, LGBTQIA issues, counterculture, cutting-edge philosophy, black consciousness and more.

The bolo’bolo collective is committed to eliminating the animal suffering and environmental degradation caused directly by the meat, egg, dairy and fishing industries.

Anarchists are opposed to all relations of hierarchy, domination, oppression and exploitation. We regard both capitalism and the state as instances of such relations, along with patriarchy, racism, heterosexism, ableism, speciesism, our relation to the rest of the natural world and any other instance where one group wields arbitrary power over another group instead of holding power together.

The Bolo’bolo collective offers the Anarchist Winter School – an eight week introduction to anarchism, anarchy and anarchists.

Bolo’bolo collective’s course is provisionally structured to last eight weeks and will cover a large amount of ground, from the history and basic ideas of anarchism to the multiple ways in which people have thought about and applied it in their own times and places. We’ll also look at what anarchism is not, comparing it to various other political philosophies like Marxism and liberalism, and attempt to collectively develop an anarchist understanding of the present time, asking each other why the world is so messed up and what anarchists can do about it. Beyond this, we’ll explore the proto-anarchies many anthropologists have written about, using this as a basis for reflecting on the various other ways we could live our lives.

The course will be focused on practical outcomes and we’re hoping that various groups and initiatives will emerge from it. To keep things exciting, we’ll also be sharing video interviews with a wide range of anarchists from around the world so that you can hear multiple opinions on the subjects we’re exploring.

Here is a copy of their first book in their guide series, Anarchy 101