In this short excerpt from the conclusion to his recently published book, Military Marxism: Africa’s Contribution to Revolutionary Theory, 1957-2023, Adam Mayer urges the importance of returning to and learning from Africa’s Military Marxists. According to Mayer, Marxist analysis that disregards the central role of armed violence to national liberation and social emancipation is ill advised, self-absorbed and detached from the lived realities of struggle and resistance on the continent, both historically and today.
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By Adam Mayer
In quick succession since 2014 when Compaoré fell in Burkina Faso, West African and Central African governments started falling too like dominos (Mali, Niger, Guinée, Gabon) to popular military governments. Those ousted France, declared military cooperation with Wagner and now even ended military cooperation with the United States. Burkina Faso then started buying weapons from North Korea, Angola signed a comprehensive treaty with China, Niger ousted US forces, and the West African countries Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso also established a Confederation, reminiscent of Nkrumah’s Union of African States.
Then in 2024, Wagner was replaced by the Russian state in West Africa, Central Africa (Bangui) and elsewhere. Sudan entered a civil war in 2023, with the Darfur conflict re-kindled. In Kenya, Communists won seats in elections in 2022, and in May 2024, Economic Freedom Fighters of South Africa (a Marxist force), are rumoured to be turning into political kingmakers (they obtained 10% in the elections in the end).
Even in neo-colonial Senegal, a young president with two first ladies, a radical on the topic of France, won elections in 2024. Rwanda restarted the armed conflict in Congo’s Kivu province. Museweni of Uganda defied the West in symbolic ways, prompting questions about his neoliberal credentials, as well as his succession.[i] Nigeria in 2023 very nearly enacted an imperialist invasion of revolutionary Niger: only its Northern senators (with ethnic and religious ties to the Sahel) prevented this eventuality.
In mid-2024, both armed Marxism and “democratic socialism” of the parliamentary variety, are on the ascendant. Africa’s democratic socialists have representatives in the West. Its Military Marxism on the other hand is ridiculed still, as a movement without theory, as the work of near-illiterates, or worse still, as the work of external forces acting on their own. No “Russian meddling” would have produced these results without genuine popular sentiment in Africa.
In actual fact, as much as the democratic socialists build on traditions of social democracy in Africa (strong and varied), so do Military Marxists. Democratic socialism has conferences, learned journals, America, Britain, the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung to strengthen it. My tome is proof that armed class conflict, as practiced in Africa, also has its strong tradition, its genuine Marxist theory, its intellectual provenance. Its leaders are not desert fighters and jungle fighters only: they are carriers of a grand tradition. They are also radical African counter-mercenaries in the tradition of African national liberation, as well as the fights of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.
First I wanted to give this chapter the title ‘The Joys of Vulgar Marxism’, before I realized that it was my 1990s instincts for self-distancing, post-modernism and irony that had been at work, and that all that was rather useless. ‘The Marxism that is Ready to Take Power’ expresses what I want to say much better. This is especially important because socialism, and even a sprinkling of Leninism, are tolerated by multilateral imperialism as long as they do not address issues of power in Africa.
Even the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation will not be chased out until it demands real change in the distribution of power. In the English language (the imperialist language par excellence) there are probably 10,000 pages on the Russian Revolution that took just a number of days, for every single page that discusses the young Soviet state’s four year long Civil War (!) – effectively taking out “conflict” of “class conflict”, obfuscating the very core of Communist agitation and Marxist praxis worldwide.
The Anglophone West has a reified, self-obsessed, entirely parochial understanding of what Marxism is: unions, continental philosophy, and Adorno occupy an imaginary mental landscape where power is perpetually in the hands of the class enemy, cops belong to the bosses, and the class conflict manifests in marches and demonstrations, while the state happily conducts neo-imperialist wars on five different fronts.
I would like to remind my Western European, British and American comrades that revolutions have actually been won in world history, that socialism had triumphed from the Paris Commune to early 21st century Nepal, that state socialism has stored up a world of experience for Marxists.
How did the land of the Soviets fight off direct imperialist agression and the Russian landlords? By Trotsky organizing the Red Army. How did Mao Zedong assume leadership of the CCP as well as ensure Marxist victory in the protracted civil war that took decades? By winning a tug-of-war around military strategy during the Long March against unimaginative other Marxists who opposed his guerilla strategy. How did Stalin do his part in winning World War Two? How did Vietnam become independent? How do we imagine that Kant’s perpetual peace with its perpetual parliaments would ever bring socialism anywhere?
Marxist analysis that disregards armed violence because of ideological pacifism is at best ill advised, at worst an exercise in self-absorption and “academic Marxism”. Real organic intellectuals had once behaved very much unlike this. One of the earliest and greatest theorists of Leninism, Georg Lukács, would serve on the front in 1919 (Hungarian Soviet Republic, of which he was a commissar), he would make rude jokes about the Egyptian Army in 1967,[ii] and he possessed extreme personal courage despite his frail frame. Partisans in the Second World War, insurgents in Southern Africa, Congolese radicals, simple Chinese peasants, and many others have given the Left myriads of examples of heroism.
Beyond toxic masculinity there lies sometimes heroic socialist masculinity as well – as a feminist woman journalist has recently reminded us. It is perhaps not by chance that Ruth First, Stephanie Urdang, Ifeoma Okoye, and many other African Marxist-feminists, had had more sympathy with armed militants (women and men) than had Marxist men. It is time to correct this classist, urbanist, armchairist bias.
Africa, according to a classic mainstream piece of literature on African armies, is the continent where armies are, if at all possible, even more important than anywhere else.
“African military forces have always served political ends. They were used by colonial authorities to subdue indigenous resistance to foreign domination and to serve European needs abroad during World War I and World War II. In the early stages of independence, there were numerous instances of the armed forces being used for domestic purposes in tax riots, electoral contests, ethnic upheavals, and the enforcement of controversial policies. As the unpopularity of several post-independence regimes rose, the principle of civilian control of the military—a colonial norm never deeply ingrained— eroded further. More than half of the states in sub-Saharan Africa have experienced successful coups d’état since the first intervention in Sudan in 1958, and some with depressing regularity.”[iii]
In addition, the army has been used in a number of civilian capacities—to conduct a census, clear congested ports, enforce wage and price controls, fight armed robbery, control religious upheavals, and operate domestic intelligence operations. Universities have been run under military decree in Nigeria; small businesses, such as bakeries, are operated by the military in Sudan. The idea of using the military for civic action programs, such as digging wells and building schools in the countryside, has surfaced in several countries (albeit with less than widespread success). So pervasive is the military that “it is impossible to separate political considerations from any evaluation of the African army.”[iv] Why would social emancipation be the only exception?
Military Marxism: Africa’s Contribution to Revolutionary Theory, 1957–2023 is available to order here.
Adam Mayer teaches African Studies at Széchenyi István University, Hungary and also International Studies at the American University of Iraq Baghdad. He also supervises PhD dissertations at UNED in Madrid, Spain, as well as at the University of Obuda in Hungary. A fellow Marxist, he studies the history of African Marxist thought as well as the continent’s socialist movements. His monographs are Naija Marxisms: Revolutionary Thought in Nigeria (Pluto Press, 2016) and Military Marxism: Africa’s Contribution to Revolutionary Theory, 1957–2023 (Lexington Books, 2025).
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[i] My analysis here is my own, but the phenomenon was noticed early by especially three analysts: Amy Niang: “Coups, insurgency, and imperialism in Africa,” roape.net, at: https://roape.net/2022/03/08/coups-insurgency-and-imperialism-in-africa/ , 8th March 2022, Toyin Falola: “Are These the Dying Days of La Françafrique?,” 27th September, 2023, The Elephant, at: https://www.theelephant.info/opinion/2023/09/27/are-these-the-dying-days-of-la-francafrique/ , and Ndongo Samba Sylla’s lectures in Bayreuth, Germany. I have also benefitted from interviews with Rudolf Sárdi (Burkina Faso) who had to leave the region due to UN links but kept his optimism.
[ii] Heller Ágnes, Kőbányai János: Bicikliző majom, Múlt és Jövő, Budapest, 2004
[iii] Bruce E. Arlinghaus, Pauline H Baker (eds): African Armies, Evolution and Capabilities, Routledge, London, New York, 1986 and 2018, p. 198
[iv] Ibid, p. 199
