Border, Breed nor Birth

In 1960s science fiction, almost no one talked about colonialism directly. Mack Reynolds did. Homer Crawford has a plan that sounds like madness: become El Hassan, a Bedouin leader, and forge North Africa into a unified power free from the grasp of a dozen competing empires. Now he's on the run in the Sahara, six followers beside him, the entire world's military might hunting him down. The Reunited Nations, the American bloc, the Soviet Complex, Common Europe, the British Commonwealth, the French Community, the Arab Union all want him dead or captured. His crime is wanting something that the powers that be will never allow: a continent that belongs to itself. Reynolds wrote this in 1962 as a direct, unapologetic examination of race, empire, and the violence done to keep the global south underfoot. It's a political thriller dressed in sf clothing, and it remains startlingly frank.