Helmi Sharawy (1935–2023)

Helmi Sharawy: not only a comrade in struggle and research, but much more than that.We were among the first Egyptians to realise that our national struggle was an indivisible part of the struggle for the independence of all the peoples and nations of Africa.We were agreed that Egypt and Africa were one unit, had been so since millennia, and should remain so.We supported together, from the first day, the 1955 Bandung Conference and 1957 Afro-Asian Conference from which the Afro-Asian Peoples' Solidarity Organisation was born.Since then, Sharawy has participated in the continuous struggles of all the African peoples, supported national liberation movements in the Portuguese colonies, Zimbabwe, and Namibia, and stood against the apartheid regime in South Africa.Samir Amin , Marxist theorist and Director of Third World Forum in Dakar, Chair of the World Forum for AlternativesOn 20 March 2023, Egypt lost its foremost 'Africanist' and renowned leftist activist, Helmi Sharawy, who had become a legend in Arab and African intellectual and oppositional circles.The transformation of Cairo into a leading Third World capital at the height of the decolonisation wave, and the fortunes of numerous Arab and African movements for liberation thereafter, are all reflected in his extraordinary life story.Sharawy was instrumental in forging Egypt's connections with independence struggles in Algeria, Angola, Cameroon, Congo, Eritrea, Kenya, South Africa, Mozambique, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda, Zanzibar and Zimbabwe.This journey began in his twenties, when Sharawy became responsible for supporting the African liberation movements hosted in Egypt during the 1950s and 1960s, as part of Gamal Abdel Nasser's policies of Third World solidarity and nonalignment.From the 1970s until the Egyptian revolutionary uprising of 2011, Sharawy was a tireless activist for political change, leading campaigns in solidarity with the Palestinians, and against the neoliberalism and corruption of successive authoritarian regimes.He founded the Arab and African Research Centre in Cairo in 1987, which he directed until 2010.He also became an Executive Committee member of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA).A Marxist of Arab nationalist sensibilities, and an Egyptian of pan-African convictions, Sharawy's life spanned encounters and friendships with future leaders from Sudan to South Africa, and took a critical yet unabashedly partisan view of African and Arab cultures and societies.Sharawy spent his childhood in the village of Abu Kullus in Munifiyya in the 1930s, and his teens in the big city after his family's migration to Cairo in 1947.His interest in the political events of the day began early, as did his keenness to write about them: he began writing and editing his first political publication, Al-Shu'la or 'The Flame', with his neighbourhood friends in 1950.His youthful writings reflect his early zeal for the national liberation cause.He and his fellow writers discussed the rise of Egypt's guerrilla resistance against the British, the parliamentary elections between status quo and anticolonial forces, and Egypt's participation in

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