Available January 20, 2024
 
Ere Roosevelt Came is a short novel by early pan-Africanist Dusé Mohamed Ali. Originally serialized in Ali's Nigerian newspaper 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 the 'invisible empire' - 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 imagination.
 
Written by an 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in West Africa, and set in the USA, Ere Roosevelt Came is a Pan-African novel par excellence and a fascinating historical document that conveys the complexities of Black internationalism in the interwar years.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, a biography of the author, and appendices featuring selected other writings to provide further insight into Ali's vision of a pan-African world.