20 years or so ago fellow co-editor Richard Swift and I had an idea for a book that would pre-empt the flood of historical material that was bound to emerge in celebration of the Millennium. This would be bold in scope and look back over all the ways in which the shape of the 20th century was defined by protest movements that stood up for such mad, subversive ideas as women voting and African people running their own countries. In the end the book was thought to be too riskily expensive for the New Internationalist to take on. But 15 years ago this month I did channel some of the ideas for it into a special issue called The Radical Twentieth Century. My own writing on the topic also did find its way into a book in the end – I spliced it together with my 1989 attempt to condense the whole history of the world into one magazine so as to create The No-Nonsense Guide to World History, which is now into its third edition.
The most memorable thing about the magazine was an exclusive interview with Julius Nyerere, Tanzania’s first independent leader and one of Africa’s greatest figures. He ranged over his anti-colonial life with typical spikiness and intelligence, and it proved to be the last interview he ever gave – he died a few months later, in October 1999.
