Africa thirsting for ideas

Tokunbo Oke reviews Revolutionary Movements in Africa a book that looks at the radical left, political movements, and revolutionary struggle across Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. Oke praises a volume that examines the history of revolutionary change in Africa and unpicks the ideas and projects that have attempted to transform the continent.

By Tokunbo Oke

This book, Revolutionary Movements in Africa, has been published at a very auspicious time in the political life and political economy of Africa.

At a time when the poly-crisis of economic decline, environmental degradation and the potential spread of dangerous pathogens afflicts the political economy of Africa, not to talk of the intensification of inter-imperialist rivalry, we see the rise of an inchoate form of resistance of African youth, working people and the oppressed. Each of these groups are stumbling in the dark for an ideological framework through which to understand their material reality in order to transform it.

As Alex Callinicos, taking his cue from the late Walter Benjamin, has explained in his latest book, revolutionary change no longer can be equated with being the “locomotive of history” but resembles more like the “handbrake of history”, a heartfelt cry from the masses of working people globally, to stop the world from staggering from one crisis to another on the road to planetary extinction. To prevent barbarism from becoming the new norm, revolutionary change becomes a necessity for survival.

Africa is at the intersection of crises and the desperate need for real change. An increasingly youthful population watch as the prospects to live decent lives are destroyed by capitalism. Pillage of resources by imperialist powers, which has brought about a rivalry between old and new powers, aided and abetted by kleptocratic domestic ruling classes, is the backdrop to the increasing resistance of the African people, against oppression and for peace and progress.

However, without a thorough understanding of the struggles of the past, their successes, and failures, charting a clear course for future struggles is notoriously difficult. As George Santayana once proclaimed those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. This is where the book, Revolutionary Movements in Africa, can become an essential tool for activists in the battle of reclaiming memory against forgetting, demonstrating that any social progress that the African people have enjoyed has been brought about through struggle with working people in the forefront of such struggles.

The book, a compilation of papers presented at a conference held in Dakar, Senegal. ‘Revolutionary Lefts in sub-Saharan Africa (1960s-1970s): a political and social history to be written’ (Université Cheikh Anta Diop 30 October – 1 November 2019) presents rich lessons for the African left. This is despite the difficulties experienced by researchers in locating the raw material to reconstruct the history of the revolutionary left in Africa. Many relevant documents have unfortunately been left to the “gnawing criticism of the mice”, a phrase neatly lifted from Karl Marx’s explanation of what had happened to the manuscript of The German Ideology.

The book puts to bed a malicious myth in circulation that Marxism and the desire for a socialist system of society was a preoccupation of university students and lecturers that had no links with larger society. The book graphically brings to life how students formed links with revolutionary intellectuals and working people to present formidable opposition to parasitical colonial and post-colonial governments.

The chapters are an uneven mix, but the volume brought out both exhilaration and sadness in me. The chapters on Mali and Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) are painful reading, to say the least, at the complete waste of revolutionary potential and the way this was siphoned off into sterile debate between the various communist tendencies, one of which was a tendency centred around the ideas of Enver Hoxha, the brutal Stalinist dictator of Albania.

The opportunism of these tendencies was also breath-taking and alarming. One tendency came to the conclusion that there could be no socialist revolution without first building a national bourgeoisie. With access to the state apparatus, the members of the same tendency plundered it and transformed themselves into such a bourgeois class!

Tatiana Smirnova’s chapter on the Niger and the student movement is a masterclass in committed historical reconstruction and brings back a lot of memories and comparisons, especially with the student struggle in Nigeria that I was a part of and the measures taken to keep comrades and cadre committed.

Adam Mayer and Baba Aye present a well-written and thoughtful piece on the development of trade unions, feminism, and the revolutionary left in Nigeria between 1963 and 1978. The dangers of opportunism on the left, especially in the figure of the late Tunji Otegbeye, are well noted. However, a discordant note is struck with the plug for Omoyele Sowore and the African Action Congress (AAC), considering the fact that despite the clarity of Sowore’s programme during the last election and his heroism, he has little or no relationship with the organised working class in Nigeria.

I found the use of culture by the Senegalese left described in the chapter by Issa Ndiaye completely fascinating. The Senegalese comrades were translating socialist material into Wolof long before Kenyan author Ngugi Wa Thiong’o took the momentous decision to write in Gikuyu rather than any of the colonial languages. What makes this even more fascinating is that the Senegalese radical left undertook this at a time when the President,  Leopold Seder Senghor, was a noted poet dedicated to the reclamation of African pride through Negritude, though by independence, Senghor’s Negritude had turned into its opposite: a facade geared towards the obscuring of neo-colonial capitalist relations of production and dependence on France.

Other noteworthy chapters are the role of the left in the fall of the father of independence in Madagascar by Irène Rabenoro, the development of Marxism in Uganda by Adrian Browne, especially assisted by the links of revolutionaries like D. Wadada Nabudere with the Communist Party of Great Britain; the splendid work of the left in Congo Brazzaville described powerfully by Héloïse Kiriakou and Matt Swagler in bringing about the removal of the defrocked Catholic priest Fulbert Youlou and replacing him with the more progressive Alphonse Masamba-Debat. I was half-hoping that this chapter would continue to deal with the capture of power by Captain Marian Ngouabi, one of the first military vanguardist regimes in Africa, and the fate of working-class mobilisations.

The growth of the Movement for Justice in Africa (MOJA) in Liberia that challenged the domination of the Americo-Liberian settler class is also a notable chapter by George Klay Kieh, Jr. Marxist in theory but populist in execution, MOJA spread the illusion that the problem with Liberia was leadership and not the system of dependent capitalism. The coup of the lower ranks, led by Master Sergeant Doe in 1979, put a temporary end to their campaigning. The leading lights of MOJA made a dreadful mistake in accepting positions in the military regime, a mistake committed in Ghana, Benin and Burkina Faso by the revolutionary left seeking short cuts to power.

In my opinion, it is Patrick Noberg’s chapter on Tanzania, Heike Becker’s on the workers struggle in Namibia and South Africa, and Harris Dousemetzis’ on the lone revolutionary militant Dimitri Tsafendas that really gripped my attention, and replete with lessons for today, with the concluding chapter representing a form of hidden history of the left.

Patrick Norberg deals with the rise of a Marxist opposition, the University Students African Revolutionary Front (USARF), to Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaa socialist project in Tanzania. The students based at the University of Dar-Es-Salaam, one of whom was Issa Shivji who will be well-known to avid readers of the Review of African Political Economy, presented a serious, well outlined Marxist alternative to the philosophical idealist project of Ujamaa. Nyerere actually summoned them to State House to debate with him and on occasions incorporated some of their ideas into government policy. The USARF, whilst clear about the moral integrity of the Mwalimu (teacher, in Swahili – as Nyerere was known), believed that Ujamaa was not the transformative framework that could bring liberation to the working masses of Tanzania. They demystified completely Nyerere’s idealistic project, a belief that the so-called communocracy of pre-colonial Africa could serve as the basis for building socialism.

Ujamaa, a top down bureaucratic “socialist” project that still allowed for the existence of capitalist relations of production, could only result in Tanzania’s greater dependence on the global capitalist system. The students were right! Of course,  this form of ideological dual power could only last for a short while., so without the material forces available to the students to make their ideas hegemonic, Nyerere eventually banned them, but they gave him a good run for his money!

Heike Becker’s chapter records the resurgence in working class struggles in Durban, South Africa in 1973. It was these struggles and not the campaign of urban guerrilla warfare led by the ANC armed wing, Umkhonto We Sizwe, that eventually led to the collapse of the racial-capitalist project known as apartheid. Becker underscores the fact that the global student-worker movement of 1968 found an echo in South Africa and animated both white and black students and workers. Apartheid was not the homogenous project we were led to believe. Fascinating to read in Becker’s impressive chapter was the intersection of non-sectarian Marxist ideas and the black consciousness movement. Contrary to popular opinion, there was not a Chinese wall separating the two.

The final chapter, authored by Harris Dousemetzis, on Dmitri Tsafendas, is a summary of his ground-breaking book, The Man Who Killed Apartheid. This is the story of Dmitri Tsafendis, who succeeded in assassinating the architect of apartheid, Henrik Verwoerd in 1966. Tsafendas was motivated by communist ideas even if individual terrorism is not a method of struggle that Marxists would heartily recommend. The apartheid authorities, to hide the embarrassment that a communist had killed the head of state, spread the story that Tsafendas was mad and incarcerated him.

I recommend Revolutionary Movements in Africa highly, published by Pluto Press, a small radical publishing outfit in London, l hope that they will be able to reach local publishing agreements with African publishers to make this book available to all. Barring that, Samizdat copies should be made by those who can do it to make it available to a wider majority of comrades and activists in Africa thirsting for ideas.

The essential lesson that we need to take away from the book is the need to struggle to make the genuine ideas of Marxism hegemonic. This is the idea that only the self-organisation of working people with a programme of revolutionary change can bring about the change that the masses of working people desperately need to see and experience in Africa. Africa may have a small working class but time and time again they have demonstrated that they are prepared to fight to the bitter end for victory. When the working class moves into action, the oppressed, poor peasants and disadvantaged follow in its wake.

My only criticism of the book is the absence of the struggles of working women in Africa. Women, especially working and peasant women, who hold up half the sky in Africa, remain a ghostly presence in the book. I would also have loved to see a presentation on Ethiopia in the 1970’s where the beginnings of the real socialist revolution, led by students and the self-organising working people, was beginning to take place. Hijacked by the military centred in the Dergue, a form of red terror was launched against genuine Marxist elements by the military.

The editors promise us another volume, so watch this space. They deserve our thanks and appreciation for presenting us with such an embarrassment of riches. May they live long and prosper!

Revolutionary Movements in Africa is edited by Pascal Bianchini, Ndongo Sylla and Leo Zeilig, published by Pluto Press and available here. An online launch of the book will be taking place on 27 January on Zoom at 16.30 Nigerian time, please log-in here on the day. 

Tokunbo Oke is based in London, England. He a member of various progressive African and multiracial organisations that are fighting for real change globally. As he approaches retirement, Tokunbo hopes to intervene more vigorously in the pressing issues of the day that are of immediate concern to working and oppressed people.