Germany’s Namibia Genocide Apology: the limits of decolonizing the past

January 30, 2024

We republish a widely read article in commemoration of the 120th anniversary of the Ovaherero and Nama genocide in Namibia (1904-1908) by the German empire. Heike Becker discussed the 2021 agreement between the German and Namibian governments for special: reconciliation and reconstruction” projects benefiting the affected Ovaherero and Nama communities. Becker brilliantly delved into the issues of the agreement, highlighting the popular protests in Windhoek. The German-imposed agreement was criticized for excluding genocide victims and the Namibian people. Today, Namibian victims continue to struggle for adequate recognition and reparations, as Germany’s 1.1 billion pledge over 30 years pales in comparison to the 80 billion given to Israel, facing its own accusations of genocide against the Palestinians.

2021 Introduction: Heike Becker writes about the recent agreement between the German and Namibian governments for special “reconciliation and reconstruction” projects to benefit the Ovaherero and Nama communities that were directly affected by colonial genocide. Becker asks what are the possible international ramifications of the Namibian-German agreement? Will the deal possibly turn the tide more broadly for reparation claims from ex-colonies of the empires of European colonialism?

By Heike Becker

“Words cannot be found to relate what happened; it was too terrible.” This is how Jan Kubas, an eyewitness of the events that followed the battle of Ohamakari in what was then called German South West Africa, now Namibia, in 1904, articulated his struggle to express his memories of the German pursuit of the Ovaherero into the parched Omaheke desert. Kubas was a member of the racially-mixed Griqua people who lived at Grootfontein near the area where following the extermination order by German general Lothar von Trotha, thousands were driven into the barren Omaheke.

In 1904 and 1905 the Ovaherero and Nama people of central and southern Namibia rose up against colonial rule and dispossession. The revolt was brutally crushed. By 1908, 80% of the Ovaherero and 50% of the Nama had succumbed to starvation and thirst, overwork and exposure to harsh climates. Thousands perished in the desert; many more died in the German concentration camps in places such as Windhoek, Swakopmund, and Shark Island.

A century after Jan Kubas struggled to articulate the horrors he witnessed in 1904, the German government has, at long last, officially acknowledged the colonial genocide. An agreement between the German and Namibian governments was recently concluded. According to the agreement, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier will soon travel to Windhoek and offer a formal apology for the first genocide of the 20^th century; the deal also stipulates additional German development aid for Namibia. These funds, to the amount of 1.3 Billion Euro, will be paid over the next thirty years. They will be earmarked for special “reconciliation and reconstruction” projects to benefit the Ovaherero and Nama communities that were directly affected by the genocide.

There are many open questions, however: What are possible international ramifications of the Namibian-German agreement? Will the deal possibly turn the tide more broadly for reparation claims from ex-colonies of the empires of European colonialism?

Penetrating questions need to be asked also about the extent to which Germany is committed to “working through” its violent colonial past. Has it, following decades of avoidance, truly committed to addressing its painful colonial past? Can the restitution of looted cultural objects and human remains from the postcolonial metropole’s museums and academic collections be considered a serious and sufficient effort at decolonization? What are the limitations of recent challenges to the historical staging of former colonial empires in the public space, such as monuments, and the renaming of streets, which were named after colonial despots?

And in national as well as transnational perspectives: What could be the next steps in going beyond dealing with the colonial past in purely symbolic terms? What kind of new solidarities are being forged in moves towards decolonization, racial justice and re-distribution?

Reactions

When the announcement that after almost six years of bi-lateral negotiations an agreement had been initialled by the Namibian envoy, Zedekia Ngavirue, and his German counterpart, Ruprecht Polenz, the German government and mainstream media celebrated this as a political and moral triumph: “Germany recognises Genocide” broadcast the main news bulletin of the state television ARD on 28 May 2021. The deal was quickly dubbed the “reconciliation agreement” in German discourse. The leader of the German delegation, Polenz remarked confidently that with the promise of special aid Germany would ensure that the acknowledgment and apology did not remain lip service.

The Namibian government’s announcement was much more subdued. President Hage Geingob’s spokesperson cautiously expressed that the agreement was a “first step in the right direction”. However, associations of the affected communities, the Ovaherero and Nama, whose ancestors had been victims of the genocide, were a whole lot more critical. They criticized the agreement on substantial as well as procedural grounds: For one, the German government had succeeded to enforce its stated principle not to pay reparations for the crimes committed during German colonial rule. And, as they had done for years, descendants of the victims protested that they had not been properly involved in the process. Ovaherero traditional leader Vekuii Rukoro, who sadly succumbed on the 18 June to the terrible Covid surge currently haunting Namibia, called the agreement “an insult“; a statement, which made front page headline news on the The Namibian newspaper.

Members of the victim associations took to the streets of Windhoek. Even those representatives of the affected communities, who had in the past been more amenable to the negotiation process, expressed their concerns in growing numbers. They particularly questioned the amount of the payment package, which was far lower than what had been expected by the Namibian government, who had rejected, in 2020, the earlier German offer of 10 million Euro compensation. While the amount offered now is an improvement on last year’s, it still falls short of Namibian expectations, as even Namibian Vice-President Nangolo Mbumba admitted although he officially accepted the German offer on behalf of his government.

For Namibians, and the descendants of the genocide victims in particular, it is not all about the amount of money though. Activist and politician Esther Muinjangue, the former Chairperson of the Ovaherero Genocide Foundation, now an opposition MP, and also Namibia’s Deputy Minister of Health and Social Services, cut to the chase when she unequivocally stated that “development aid can never replace reparations”.

The Namibian government’s official response on 4 June 2021 clearly attempted some damage control and referred to the agreed “reconstruction and reconciliation” payments as a “reparations package”. This is in distinct contradiction to the official language of the agreement that these payments were decidedly not reparations but an additional set of development aid. Three weeks after the announcement of the agreement, and what the German government had obviously hoped would bring closure to a painful past, there’s only one phrase to describe the situation: it’s a total mess.

Reparations

When former German Foreign Minister Joseph ‘Joschka’ Fischer visited Windhoek in October 2003 he went on record to say that there would be no apology that might give grounds for reparations for the genocide, which was committed by German colonial troops in Namibia. Fischer’s rather undiplomatic words are indicative of the intense and heated, historical and present relations that are at stake.

There is an underlying conjecture of the German-Namibian negotiations: what are the potential international ramifications of accepting legal, political and moral responsibility of reparations for colonial violence and genocide. Colonial Germany may have committed genocide, according to the UN definition, “with intent to destroy, …, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” only in Namibia; but it certainly carried out atrocities and mass killings also in other colonial territories. Esther Muinjangue nailed it when she said: “We know that the German Government is guilty equally when it comes to the people of Tanzania or when it comes to the people of Cameroon. So, they want to safeguard themselves.” The German government fears more claims from ex-colonies; it also fears claims from European countries such as Greece, which have never received compensation for World War Two war crimes.

Then there are the shared postcolonial anxieties among the former colonial empires. Would Germany’s acceptance of its colonial past open the floodgates to a surge of claims by formerly colonized nations, in Africa as elsewhere, against their erstwhile colonizers? Muinjangue thinks this a likelihood: “all countries that were present at the Berlin Conference of 1884 and divided up the African continent are guilty: France, Britain, Belgium, and many others. They all have blood on their hands – and they all fear that one day they will have to pay reparations for their crimes.” The fears of former empires, such as Britain, France and Belgium, have been the proverbial elephant in the room.

Not without us…

If any agreement between a former colonizing power and the formerly colonized should stand a chance of bringing about justice and reconciliation, the descendants of those affected must be closely listened to. This means that they should be appropriately included in the negotiations. This has been the vocal persistent demand of genocide victim groups for an inclusive process under the slogan “not without us” ever since the negotiations between Namibia and Germany began in 2015. In January 2017 representatives of Ovaherero and Nama traditional authorities filed a lawsuit in New York, which although ultimately unsuccessful, sent a strong message to Germany and the Namibian government that negotiations “without us” remained unacceptable for those whose ancestors were killed in the genocide.

A common grievance, often expressed in Namibia, questions Germany’s pronounced difference of responding to different victims of genocide. Ever since 1990, descendants of those who suffered under the colonial genocide have often asked me, why did Germany pay generous and easily negotiated reparations to Israel after the reparations programme, which was created when Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of West Germany and Israel signed the Luxembourg Agreement in 1952, but has been so recalcitrant regarding Namibians? Why did the German government readily include the Jewish Claims Conference as representatives of Jewish non-governmental organisations but insisted on government-to-government only talks with Namibia? Is it “because we are Africans”, with these words Namibians regularly express suspected racism.

Restitutions: Symbolic reparations, not quite…

Symbolic commemorations of Germany’s African genocide have taken place over the past few years. If not without controversy, human remains of genocide victims were repatriated from Germany to Namibia in 2011, 2014 and 2018. These had been shipped to academic and medical institutions in Germany, and had remained there until recently.

In 2019 some significant items of cultural memory, which had been stolen during colonial conquest, were returned to Namibia from the Linden Museum in Stuttgart. These included the slain Nama leader Hendrik Witbooi’s Bible and his riding whip.

Other former German colonies have also begun to claim restitution. In 2018 Tanzania’s ambassador to Berlin requested the repatriation of human remains, which are being stored in German museums and academic institutions. In Berlin alone the remains of 250 individuals were identified, and more are suspected to be in Bremen, Leipzig, Dresden, Freiburg, and Göttingen. Provenance research on the human remains from former German East Africa also include about 900 remains of colonized people from Rwanda, which together with today’s Tanzania and Burundi formed colonial German East Africa. Also, in 2018, the President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation promised funding for future provenance research in transnational collaborations on collections of human remains with the perspective of repatriation to Cameroon, Togo and Papua New Guinea.

Yet, the debacle of the Namibian-German “reconciliation” agreement points out that the attempts at addressing the German colonial past, including, but not restricted to the shared-divided history of Germany and Namibia, have thus far been at best half-hearted.

Bronzes, a boat & street names

At the same moment that the “reconciliation agreement” was presented in Germany with some fanfare, controversy erupted once again around the Humboldt-Forum. Berlin’s ambitious new museum is housed in the royal Prussian palace in central Berlin; the reconstructed Baroque structure that was built over the past decade at a cost of over 680 Million Euro. In this space in the historical centre of imperial Germany, controversially, ethnographic collections will be exhibited. The Humboldt-Forum has been at the centre of highly critical responses from anti-colonial and black community civil society organisations, cultural workers, as well as historians and anthropologists. Its claim to decolonization has been highly contradictory.

Just before news broke about the Namibian-German agreement, high-profile German politicians loudly congratulated each other for their decision to return some of the hundreds of Benin bronzes kept in German museum collections to Nigeria. Until recently Benin bronzes were meant to occupy pride of place in the new museum in central Berlin, where Germany wants to demonstrates its cosmopolitanism; now German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas celebrated the “turning point in our way of dealing with [our] colonial history”. Quite ironically, just a week later the next prominent scandal of colonial loot hit the news. A new book by the historian Götz Aly revealed the dark history of an artistically stunning vessel looted from former German-New Guinea in 1903.

Berlin’s leading museum officials displayed an astonishing level of ignorance. Even more astounding was the suggestion to continue exhibiting the beautifully decorated 16 metres long boat, that was built by residents of Luf Island in the Western part of the Hermit Group, and who fell victim to German colonial atrocities in the new museum by declaring it “a memorial to the horrors of the German colonial past”. This arrogance is indeed astounding since there is still no memorial in Berlin to honour the victims of German colonialism and genocide in the central Berlin space, near the Reichstag, where Germany honours the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and belatedly, now also the victims of the Porajmos (genocide of the Roma and Sinti), and the Nazis’ persecution of homosexuals.

A tongue-in-cheek suggestion came from a leading historian of German colonialism and genocide. In a column in die tageszeitung Jürgen Zimmerer, Professor of Global History at Hamburg University, asked why not turn the reconstructed Prussian Palace itself into a fitting memorial. His proposition: fill-up its centre courtyard with sand from the Omaheke desert, or break up the castle’s fake Baroque façade with barbed wire in remembrance of the concentration camps in colonial Namibia.

Then there is street renaming, the most noticeable form of postcolonial activism in the German public space. A well-known dispute over street names comes from Berlin’s Afrikanisches Viertel (‘African Quarter’), where from 2004 civil society activist groups have been calling for the renaming of streets, which are currently named after German colonial despots. The members of the long-standing activist group Berlin Postkolonial and other initiatives, now active in cities and towns across Germany, have employed decolonial guided walking tours as a main tool of intervention. Recently, one of Berlin’s oldest campaigns gained success when the former Wissmannstrasse in the borough of Neukölln was renamed Lucy-Lameck-Strasse. The infamous German colonial officer and administrator was thus supplanted with the Tanzanian liberation fighter and politician, who after her country’s independence campaigned for gender justice.

Entangled memory: from violent pasts to new solidarities

The question remains, how much real change can come from the symbolic engagement with the colonial past. A future-oriented trajectory will point out that, beyond symbolic action, Germany’s culture of remembrance has to face challenges for the country to understand its own history within European colonialism.

Public debates in Germany have frequently posited colonialism and Holocaust memory against each other; it is alleged that an expansion of “working through the past” to include the colonial era, would ‘relativize’ the Holocaust. In contrast to this supposed competition of memory, Michael Rothberg’s concept of Multidirectional Memory has recently garnered some interesting, though at times controversial attention in public debate. Rothberg’s intervention, translated into German only twelve years after the original publication of the book in 2009, has become a catalyst for productive dialogues. In a nutshell, Rothberg suggests that memory works productively through negotiation and cross-referencing with the result of more, not less memory.

**Berlin-based Ovaherero activist Israel Kaunatjike**

An interesting case to explore new ways of thinking about colonial memory, social change and solidarities relates to the historical legacies of racial science and eugenics, which were developed by the anthropologist Eugen Fischer on the basis of research in Namibia in 1908. Fischer’s research was mainly used in the European colonial empires. From 1927 it was further developed under his leadership at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics (KWI-A) in Berlin-Dahlem. From 1933 it became the basis of the Nazi race laws that targeted Jews and other racially and socially ‘undesirables’. Today the colonial roots of racism and inequality, as well as the systematization of racial studies and eugenics in Nazi Germany, continue to raise questions about the politics of remembrance and decolonization.

During excavations on the grounds of the Free University, which now occupies the site of the former KWI-A, hastily buried human remains were discovered. In 2015 and 2016 the University commissioned archaeological expertise on these finds. The KWI-A entertained close connections to the Auschwitz camp. Thus the initial suspicion was that the excavated bones may have belonged to people murdered during the Nazi era. However, when the archaeological report was presented during a well-attended online meeting in February 2021, it turned out that the situation was more complex. Some of the remains seem to have originated indeed in crimes against humanity that were perpetrated during the Nazi terror. Others, however, are more likely to originate in anthropological collections from the colonial era. It appeared impossible to ascertain the regional origins of the remains of the about 250 individuals. This gave rise to new solidarities that originated in entangled forms of remembering the atrocities of the colonial and Nazi eras. Representatives of Jewish, Black, and Sinti and Roma communities now work together to ensure that these human remains are treated with dignity.

Such new forms of solidarity are already practiced in civil society and transnationally in the global anti-racist movement. When the global Black Lives Matter movement formed a year ago, young activists got involved in Germany as well as in Namibia. In Windhoek, the movement was directed primarily against the statue of the German colonial officer and alleged city founder Curt von François. Not only the Nama and Ovaherero communities, but also young Namibians from all sections of the population are confronting colonial legacies. Over the past year the young Namibian activists who campaigned against the offensive monument and who support the claims of the descendants of the genocide survivors, have clinched a number of social justice issues as part of their decolonizing activism, and have been calling for an end to sexism, patriarchy, and racism.

In Germany too, civil society activists have played a big role and the “reconciliation agreement” is owed, more than anything else, to their post-colonial remembrance work. Campaigning started around 2004, i.e., the time of the centenary of the genocide. In October 2016, for instance, an international civil society congress, “Restorative Justice after Genocide”, brought together over 50 Herero and Nama delegates and German solidarity activists in Berlin. The participants staged public protests and Ovaherero and Nama delegates held a press conference in the German Bundestag. And now that the, unsatisfactory, agreement is on the table, activists in Germany are again campaigning vibrantly in solidarity with the affected Namibian communities and have taken to the streets of Berlin. The current Namibia solidarity alliance brings together civil society outlets of long-standing, and young groups, who have come together during the past year’s surge of radical anti-racist activism.

The agreement that has been concluded falls short of expectations in many ways. However, it can be an impetus for the former colonial rulers and the formerly colonized to finally begin a meaningful conversation about the difficult divided history. The question arises as to whether the civil society decolonization movements in both Germany and Namibia can influence the future politics of remembrance in both their countries in a way that makes a solidarity-based post-colonial policy of reconciliation and justice possible.

Heike Becker focuses on the politics of memory, popular culture, digital media and social movements of resistance in southern Africa (South Africa and Namibia). She also works on decolonize memory activism and anti-racist politics in Germany and the UK. Heike is a regular contributor to roape.net.

Featured Photograph: Chained Herero and Nama prisoners during the genocide (Wiki Commons)

Photographs: The photographs were taken during a rally that was organised in Berlin on 28 May 2021 – it was held during the afternoon of the day when the agreement was officially announced by the German government. The space where the rally was held is on the grounds of where the infamous Berlin-Kongo conference was held in 1884/85 (all photographs were taken by Heike Becker).

Apartheid, Israel, and a chosen people

ROAPE

January 24, 2024

The connection between Israel and apartheid South Africa has been repeated and disputed since October last year, but this is not new argues Graham Harrison. The comparison of Israel to apartheid was debated in the 1970s over a denunciation of Israel’s removals, settlements, walls and border-posts crisscrossing the occupied territories. Harrison teases out some of the similarities, and important differences, in the relationship between two states, and two chosen people.

By Graham Harrison

‘In Israel, economic goals arise naturally from the general goal of the survival of the state.’ Israeli General Director of the Ministry of Finance, 1985.

‘Israel and South Africa have a common lot. Both are engaged in a struggle for existence.’ South African newspaper Die Burger, 1968.

The association of Israel with apartheid South Africa has become prominent and contested since October last year, but it is not new. The likening of Israel to apartheid emerged in the 1970s through a condemnation of the Israeli state’s geopolitics expulsion, settlement, and later walls and checkpoints in the occupied territories.

The day-to-day lives of Palestinians in these walled and fenced zones is one of coercive control of movement and routine humiliation and frustration: the geopolitics of the ‘separation barrier, Israel’s apartheid wall’. This is China Mieville’s phrase, evoking especially the ‘high apartheid’ of Hendrick Verwoerd. After the incremental ratcheting up of racist legislation, Verwoerd sought to systematise and consolidate a totalising legislative project of racial dominance: Bantustans scattered on the peripheries of cities, mines, and commercial farms; the coerced expatriation of black South Africans; the massive and routine deployment of the police and army to arrest, shoot, and expel black Africans; the complete segregation of public services and amenities; the banning of black African political organisations; the mass criminalisation of black South Africans in cities without a pass and a baas (white employer).

The analogy is clear enough: between two highly-securitised states endeavouring to create facts on the ground through a military-administrative project that seems both absurd and abysmal in equal measure. Projects to create ethno-racialised denizens, pushed into quasi-states (recall that the Bantustans were given their own flags and governments under the rubric that they would progress towards nationhood), and subjected to heavy restrictions on their movements.

But, beyond this ethnic and de-nationalising cantonment, considerable debate exists concerning the degree of conceptual stretch that the apartheid analogy allows. Much of this questioning is important, interesting and adds nuance. For example, Israel has never had a ‘labour reserve’ economy in the way South Africa did (although a version of this did exist in the 1950s up to 1967). Nor is Gaza a version of a Bantustan, although it has hardly enjoyed anything like juridical statehood. And—although there is plenty of evidence of general social prejudice and some hard constitutional differentiations lurking behind its procedural democracy—there are Arab Israelis who have full formal citizenship rights in Israel, which no black, ‘coloured’, or Asian South Africans did until the mid 1980s (and even then in a highly restricted and qualified way, and not for black South Africans).

All of which is to say that analogies are not similes. There is little point in saying country A is like country B; but there are possible insights from exploring how there is something in a facet of country A’s politics that help us understand country B’s politics. Analogous thinking seeks out the ‘independent variable’, the phenomenon that connects facets of one political economy to another. As such, analogous thinking is partly about exploring degrees of similarity but also revealing generic features, features that might have salience in both cases and beyond.

The visceral politics of a chosen people

It was apartheid South Africa that gave the newly-formed Israel its first premier-level diplomatic visit. In 1953, Magnus Malan visited Israel. At first blush, this seems remarkable. South African politics had betrayed a long-standing antisemitism. But, the official narrative that the visit expressed was that the Israeli and South African governments had something primordially important in common: they were both states forged through righteous struggle in pursuit of a home for a chosen people. This idea was at the heart of the apartheid project as it was realised after 1948 with the victory of the National Party. It relied on the construction of a discourse in which the Afrikaaner had endured the oppressions of other peoples (black and English), had the will of God on their side, and had come to achieve sovereignty through their own tenacity.

There is something of the Ulster experience here; something in Taiwan’s post-1948 exile government; perhaps also Rwanda’s post-genocide ‘return’ government that took power after marching from Uganda. In each case, statehood was closely connected to the wielding of power by an ‘immigrant’ elite that faced a territory with which it was only partially familiar. The chosen/authentic/destined elite sees in the sovereignty it has won an existentialism value: without the state, we are nothing; removed from power, we will be erased. Apartheid South Africa, Israel, and to some degree the others briefly mentioned have all displayed considerable and tenacious authoritarianism as a result of this analogous historical experience.

Capitalism, modernity, and the siege state

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, both Israel and South Africa posted strong statistics in terms of economic growth, industrialisation and sectoral change, and productivity. Each also forged tight mutualities between states, corporately-organised labour, and capital. The state developed institutions to ‘lock in’ a political dispensation of support for capital that was realised through strategic subsidies and investment in infrastructure. Both made strong investments in their military-industrial complexes. Both achieved all of this through an ethno-national bonding that derived from its immigrant/siege sociology. Each developed a perception that capitalist transformation was not primarily a ‘good thing’ in itself but rather a difficult, violent, but necessary project to secure sovereignty in what was perceived as (to use the apartheid phrase) total onslaught. This gave each country a ‘crony capitalist’ or corporatist character Israel had its Histradut and South Africa its Broederbond), but one disciplined by the imperatives of ‘national security’. And both projects excluded, repressed, and (in South Africa’s case) exploited those who were racialised out of the benefits that modernisation had to offer.

No less importantly, both Israel and South Africa forged their authoritarian capitalist transformations through agrarian change that was, in essence, characterised by two interlinked processes: dispossession and heavy state support. Incumbent indigenous landowners, tenants, and peasants were removed from the land (through force of arms if necessary), and settler farmers would receive subsidies, infrastructural investment, and the more or less visible backing of the states instruments of coercion. Both countries invested heavily in irrigation, state marketing boards, and support for the introduction of new production technologies. Rural space, remade through settlement, consolidated through capitalist transformation.

Apartheid and the disenchantment of the West

The successful modernising drive in these two countries reveals in stark form a deep and pervasive equivocation in Western power and the flattering visions produces of its own dominance. This derives from the manifestation in each case of something attractive and something repellent. The modern cities, investment zones, tourism, and infrastructure seduce whilst the expulsions, violence, and racism undermine the liberal creed of human rights that broadly holds a global Western identity together. This agonism is nicely encapsulated in Stephen Gelb’s terms for the political economy of apartheid: racial Fordism. Something that resonates with the American experience of modernity—the suburb, the male industrial worker and family, the consumer society. And, a dissonance in its constitutionalised racial order. A similar agonism is explored in Amy Kaplan’s Our American Israel: its image of modernity presented in its military and its cities, juxtaposed with the historic fact that all of this is predicated on the expulsion of at least 700,000 Arab Palestinians and an ongoing war of attrition against Arabs in the occupied territories.

Both apartheid South African and Israel sought to operationalise the internal tensions of liberalism as a Western global ideology by presenting a modern image of their governance, obscuring their systemic human rights abuses and, when the latter became visible and contentious, articulating them through a frame of reference that might be called civilisational.

Both countries excused their violence by contextualising it in relation to a barbaric hinterland. The apartheid catch-all term for this was swart gevaar—black peril. Apartheid was presented as an ‘outpost’ of Western modernity in a ‘tribal’ and turbulent region. Israel presented itself in the same way: a Western outpost in a volatile Arab middle-east. Each tested Western (and especially American) global liberal visions. They asked of the West: realistically, what is the priority in your values? In Israel’s case up to the present, and in South Africa’s case up to the mid 1980s when things started to change, the priority was the geopolitical combination of strategic allies and capitalist modernisation over the brutalised bodies of black Africans and Palestinians. In the words of American Chester Crocker’s (Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs) book title, South Africa existed in a ‘rough neighbourhood’. This trope produces a folksy metaphor that expresses very well a kind of global liberalism that will allocate human rights to a second order priority when the rights of capital and visions of security are threatened.

Israel parallax: the state that missed the post-Cold War liberal transition

Given a little distance from the polemics about the use of the term ‘apartheid Israel’, we can see that the political analogies are quite salient, even if they do not produce some kind of strict comparative correspondence. They both reveal something about the particular historical experience of both countries: the metaphysics of a chosen people wielding state power over territories with estranged indigenous populations over which they seek dominance. The drive to capitalist modernity that the combination of insecurity and economic transformation forges. They also betray an agonism in American global liberalism: its ‘organised hypocrisy’ concerning the declared unconditional and universal value of human rights and the commonplace downgrading of this value to an ancillary status after the rights of capital and state security.

In the present-day, in this analogy, Israel seems strangely prehistoric. South Africa is no longer an apartheid state and it managed its transition very well, all things considered. Both Northern Ireland and Taiwan, for that matter, have also de-escalated from the peculiar intensity of minority-siege-modernity politics. There is much to criticise in all of these cases but, in a more fundamental sense, the nature of political change is remarkable.

In the present-day, South Africa is not Israel’s analogue. South Africa has moved on. Its most likely analogue is perhaps Rwanda. Both still act within the bandwidth set by the origins of their establishing sovereignty: the militarism, military incursions beyond their frontiers, Romantic-religious discourses of destiny (in Rwanda an often Pentecostal Protestantism that was nurtured in exile and contrasted strongly with the ‘genocide adjacent’ Catholic church), the desire to modernise as a means to secure statehood, and the political differentiations between one ethno-national group and others. On and off, Benjamin Netanyahu has served as Prime Minister since 1996; Paul Kagame has served as Vice President and then President of Rwanda since 1994.

If we allow some stretched analogical speculation, we might argue that Israel is, in a sense, a country out of step with political time. It eschewed the peacemaking endeavours of the post-Cold War moment of liberal optimism, intensified its military-tech securitisation, moved into an increasingly conservative politics of nationhood and failed in even the most rudimentary way to identify a way out through the prevailing models of liberal transitology that characterised the 1990s. Our American Israel is now rivalled by Israelism, a documentary in which one can see the guilt and horror of those Americans who saw in Israel a spiritually-resonant manifestation of liberal modernity, went to live, work, and fight there, only to find routine rights violations and a deep prejudice amongst the IDF. For all of its modern accoutrements, Israel resembles a state in chronic condition: unable to move beyond the vexed conditions of its origins as a nation.

Graham Harrison teaches political economy at the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University and is on the editorial board of ROAPE. His recent book Developmentalism: The Normative and Transformative within Capitalism is published by Oxford University Press.

Featured Photograph: The Hawara checkpoint in the occupied West Bank, Palestine (12 June 2006).

Learning from Lenin today

ROAPE

January 21, 2024

One hundred years since Lenin’s death, Nigerian socialist Abiodun Olamosu describes of the revolutionary on his own political development. As the preeminent organiser of the Russian revolution, Lenin helped to determine the course of Olamosu’s life in Nigeria. Olamosu explores the development of Lenin’s work and legacy. He regards Stalin’s rise to power, and the Soviet Union, as an abomination to the body of ideas of Marxism and socialist internationalism.

By Abiodun Olamosu

Not long after I joined the socialist movement as a student at the Polytechnic of Ibadan in 1980, I was introduced to Marxist literature at the Progressive and Socialist Bookshop which was the sole depot of many left-wing publishers from UK, USSR and China that included Zed Books. By the time I entered university as a mature student, I had already worked as a full-time revolutionary assisting Ola Oni, a foremost Marxist revolutionary and scholar at the University of Ibadan where he lectured. He also owned the bookshop.

My generation were inspired by the history of Russia, the only country that achieved a successful socialist revolution in October 1917. We believed in the cause, and we thought we could replicate the revolution in Nigeria.

The Russian revolution of 1917 became clear to us through access to cheap books by the foremost socialist revolutionaries including Marx, Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin, Gorky, and other volumes by Russian writers published by Progress Publishers in Moscow. This was unlike any publisher from the West who charged a fortune for their books.

As a worker I was able to purchase the forty-five volumes of Lenin’s collected works, three volumes of Das Capital by Marx – his major works on political economy – and other works by Engels.

Lenin was a household name amongst comrades across the country, so there was no book that had his signature as the author that did not sell. I usually reserved a copy of any newly published volume of Lenin’s work in advance. His collected works served a useful purpose as reference on theoretical matters but also as a guide in practical struggles. Notable of his books and which I recall sold in their thousands, included his classics, Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism and State and Revolution. The close rival at the time remained The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.

Across our offices, in our rooms, in the corridors and decorating meetings were posters of Lenin, Mandela and Marx published by the bookshop which were in higher demand than others including Amílcar Cabral, Walter Rodney, Che Guevara, and Kwame Nkrumah.

Lenin remains one of the most brilliant contributors to Marxism as a distinguished original thinker in the area of imperialism, philosophy, the national question, trade union(ism), religion, state and revolution, education and the student movement. In truth, he has no equal in revolutionary politics, which as students we realised was the very reason he was able to win the revolution in Russia. His personal life was intertwined with his political activities.

My readings of the many biographies on Lenin at the university library in the 1980s further exposed me to the aspects of his life and revolutionary activities. Possibly for this reason I became determined to emulate Lenin by becoming a fulltime revolutionary, no other work interested me, and I was determined to advance the cause of the class struggle for socialism and revolution in Nigeria.

We looked to Lenin as an organiser of the revolution, and the revolutionary party. He was an inspiration to us in Nigeria, and we saw our conditions – though dramatically different – as sharing some elements with early Russian industrialisation, and the development of class consciousness.

What are the lessons from Lenin’s life?

While the bourgeois scholars and the press in the West could deceive a generation over their misrepresentation of Karl Marx a ‘reformist’ and simple scholar, they struggled to malign Lenin in the same way. After all, he had been a fulltime revolutionary who had combined theory with practice, but most importantly because he was able to lead a revolution in his own lifetime.

Lenin moved into revolutionary politics because of the murder of his older brother, Aleksandr Ilyich Ulyanov. His brother was executed along with other leading members of the Narodniks (a left-wing terrorist group) whose strategy of struggle hinged on the assassination of the Tsar and other senior figure of the government who personified the system of oppression and exploitation.

Lenin was expelled from his legal studies at the university and embraced Marxism in the 1890s, making a clear departure from of politics of the Narodniks who had dominated revolutionary politics in Russia. The Narodniks had as their main concentration the peasantry, and even when they turned to the working class, it was never to help organise the class to fight for their liberation but to sympathise with the cause to liberate the peasantry.

These were lessons we understood well in Nigeria.

Lenin started his revolutionary activities as a Marxist with four other pioneering members that included Julius Martov and Krzhizhanovsky. They started by forming study groups with workers from the industrial areas especially in the growing cities of Tsarist Russia. They were able to produce leaflets and newspapers that helped the agitation, propaganda, and education of the rank-and-file working class. What separated their method from that of educated elites of the Narodniks and Decembrists was that the working class had the revolutionary duty to liberate themselves.

Marxist revolutionaries built within the ranks of the working class itself. Lenin’s wife was one of those. With these methods, the labour movement was organised and grew in strength while the number of strikes increased with thousands, and tens of thousands of workers involved in the late 1890s and early 1900s.

The first broad socialist group – the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party – grew in strength to challenge the system. The party later broken into two, one faction led by Lenin and the other by Martov. These two groups were known as Bolsheviks (majority) and Mensheviks (minority) respectively. At first the break was because of disagreements on organisational perspectives and how to constitute a revolutionary party. But as time went by the opportunism of the Mensheviks revealed itself, and differences widened on a range of issues.

Lenin saw the Bolsheviks supporting a political party with fulltime revolutionaries constituting the core of the leadership of the party. As a young militant and revolutionary, I saw October 1917 occurring because of the revolutionary processes in Russia and across the world over decades, but importantly emerging from the work and involvement of the Bolsheviks. In addition, Lenin understood that the Russian revolution could only emerge from the revolutionary struggles of February1917 and the great ‘dress rehearsal’ in 1905 from which revolutionaries and the working class of October had learnt many great lessons.

Nevertheless, we saw the role of Lenin in leading the revolution as underscoring the position an individual can make in a social movement. This informed Leon Trotsky’s blunt statement: there would not have been October 1917 without Lenin. Trotsky was highlighting the enormous role that Lenin played in the revolutionary struggles of his era.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks not only achieved a revolution in Russia but underlined the potentialities of the working class in making a revolution in the weakest, peripheral areas of the capitalist world. Revolutionary possibilities in Nigeria – and much of Africa, and the Third World – was interpreted in this light. Though our Russian comrades were also aware that socialism could only truly be won internationally by spreading of the revolution to the developed capitalist countries. Revolutionary ‘permanence’, and internationalism, was a resolutely Leninist idea, rather than one original to Trotsky.

So the revolutionary state of Russia could at best be regarded as a socialist government-in-transition. Unfortunately, two important events broke this ‘transition’. This included the European invasion organised with the military forces of the White Guards to attack Russia with the objective of crushing the revolution in the years immediately following 1917. Though they failed in their efforts and the new Soviet state won the war, it came at a huge price for the revolution in the sacrifices made by the working people. The isolation of the revolution, and its failure to spread to other countries was also a factor in the rise of the bureaucracy with Stalin as its preeminent leader.

Joseph Stalin railroaded himself to power and led the great betrayal of the revolutionary process in Russia and the world. By the late 1930s, Stalin was the only former Bolshevik who had served with Lenin during the Russian revolution, having orchestrated the murder of almost every other leading Bolshevik. He led a government that became dictatorial and reduced the internationalist socialist tendency to ‘socialism in one country’. State capitalism was rationalised as socialism and as a model for other countries who were influenced by Soviet communism.

What an abomination to the body of ideas of Marxism and socialist internationalism! But as a young militant discovering this history, it was an important and hard lesson.

By the time Stalin consolidated himself in power he personified the brutal and autocratic state, and the degeneration to the revolution. Stalin and Stalinism was exported from the Soviet Union as communism until 1989.

Yet the rise of the bureaucracy in Russia was predicted by Lenin before his death and his polemics against the bureaucracy are among his most powerful final works. Before he died, he quickly tried to develop policies which could undermine the growth of the Soviet bureaucracy. He proposed the end to a standing army to be replaced with a militia of working people; no public official should earn more than the average worker, and above all the nationalised economy should be managed and put under the control of working people. Nationalisation without workers control was state capitalism.

These were the lessons we took from Lenin as students and revolutionaries in the 1980s in Nigeria. and they remain vital to us today.

Abiodun Olamosu is a leading Marxist activist in Nigeria and the Senior Researcher and Coordinator of the Centre for Social Policy and Labour Research. He is the National Secretary of Socialist Labour. Read a detailed interview with him on roape.net here.

Featured Photograph: Stamp of the Congo (Brazzaville) 1970, produced for the 100th anniversary of Lenin’s birthday.

ROAPE welcomes new submissions

ROAPE

January 18, 2024

ROAPE is now fully open access, each journal article, review, briefing and debate published for 50 years is available for everyone to read, download and share. As well as moving to a new open access platform, ROAPE is welcoming new submissions to our peer-reviewed journal. Our radical and high quality publication remains the same, as does our remit, but publishing in ROAPE will now mean that once published your article will be immediately free to read and share across the world. In this blogpost, we explain how to submit your article on our new platform.

Instructions for contributors

Before submitting your research and paper, please make sure to study closely our submission requirements and remit:

ROAPE has, since 1974, provided radical analysis of trends and issues in Africa. It has paid particular attention to the political economy of inequality, exploitation and oppression, whether driven by global forces or local ones (such as class, race, community and gender), and to materialist interpretations of change in Africa. It has sustained a critical analysis of the nature of power and the state in Africa.

Aside from this substantive remit, we are looking for submissions which present new empirical material, rethink existing literature in a stimulating fashion, or coherently argue a fresh understanding of existing issues. We seek papers which are clearly organised, concisely expressed and free from unnecessary jargon, sexist or other discriminatory language. We may occasionally consider material in languages other than English.

Check for further details the requirements for our full papers, briefings, debates and reviews.

How to submit your manuscript

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Submit your manuscript as a PDF document via → Submit a manuscript button on the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) landing page:

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If approved for peer review, the PDF file will be uploaded as manuscript under submission to the journal and pending for reviewers.
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Africa thirsting for ideas

ROAPE

January 16, 2024

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.

Exposing the murderers – the UAE involvement in the war in Sudan

ROAPE

January 10, 2024

In this long-read, Husam Osman Mahjoub examines the growing and profound influence of the UAE and Saudi Arabia in the region over the years, and Sudan in particular. He argues that war in Sudan drives the final nail into the coffin for the democratic aspirations of the peoples of the Arab and African region. Husam Mahjoub explains that understanding the positions and actions of these countries is crucial for appreciating and, more importantly, working towards stopping the war that erupted on 15 April last year between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

By Husam Osman Mahjoub

Following the fall of dictator Omar Al-Bashir in April 2019, Sudanese main political forces cautiously used terms like “axis” and “sponsors” to allude to the interventions of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) in Sudanese affairs. These two words allow the political forces to be perceived as siding with the Sudanese people’s rejection of the two countries’ counter revolutionary efforts, while also avoiding arousing the ire of the two countries out of opportunism, fear, or political realism.

Contrary to their measured approach to the UAE and KSA, these Sudanese political forces address the negative roles of other regional countries without similar reservations. This distinction arises from the established history and geography, in the case of Egypt and Ethiopia, or the clear support for Islamic political movements, including backers of Sudan’s former regime, as seen in Qatar, Türkiye, and Iran.

However, the growing influence of the UAE and KSA in the region over the years, and Sudan in particular, challenges the objectivity of any analysis of Sudanese political affairs that neglects their profound role.

Understanding the positions and actions of these countries is crucial for comprehending and, more importantly, working towards stopping the war that erupted on April 15 between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The UAE’s pivotal role as the primary supporter of the RSF becomes particularly relevant, as the militia heavily relies on direct UAE support to sustain its devastating war.

There is consensus that the strategy of the UAE and KSA in the region (loosely speaking, the Middle East and North Africa) is driven by economic hegemony, political expansion, and countering threats from Islamic political movements and Iran. But a closer look indicates that their fear of democratic regimes in the region precedes other considerations.

Despite shared objectives, differences arise in the UAE and KSA’s responses to this perceived risk. The shifts in their respective positions towards Sudan since the December (2018) Revolution underscore the nuanced variations in priorities, goals, and means between the two countries.

The Arab Spring – One Risk, Multiple Responses

The eruption of the “Arab Spring” in Tunisia then Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, and Syria in 2011 stirred unease among the Arabian Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Their state-sponsored media initially struggled to navigate the chaos, torn between the conservative policies of these countries and the predominantly sympathetic sentiments of the Arab street. Notably, Qatar’s Al-Jazeera Network openly embraced the uprisings, aligning with the broader political Islam movement.

For KSA and the UAE, the Arab Spring posed an existential threat to their ultra-conservative monarchies, built on clan and tribal foundations, suppression of freedoms, inequality, discrimination, and military reliance on the United States.

After Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak stepped down, the flames of the Arab Spring spread close to the UAE and KSA in Bahrain in the demonstrations of February 2011. The Bahraini authorities met them with force, resulting in the killing of several peaceful demonstrators on February 17. Saudi and Emirati military and police forces intervened crossing the King Fahd Causeway, which connects the island of Bahrain to the eastern coast of KSA, to suppress the protests, and restore “order” and the Sunni King’s control over the rebellious masses with a Shiite majority.

Simultaneously, limited protests emerged in Oman between January and March 2011, prompting a cabinet reshuffle by the Sultan. The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, including KSA and the UAE, pledged financial aid to Bahrain and Oman to address economic grievances fueling the unrests.

Despite interventions in Bahrain and Oman, dissent persisted in the UAE and KSA. The UAE cracked down on 132 Emiratis (many of whom were Islamists) who petitioned to reform the elections of the Federal National Council. In Saudi Arabia, particularly in the mostly Shiite Eastern Region, protests erupted, met with a harsh government response that resulted in numerous deaths and arrests throughout 2011.

The handling of protests in Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Syria, and Tunisia varied due to diverse geostrategic and political considerations. Crucially, changes in leadership within the Houses of Saud and Nahyan, marked by generational shifts and internal competition, played a decisive role. The ascent of Mohammed bin Zayed (MBZ) and Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) to power significantly influenced regional and global dynamics.

MBZ and MBS – Game of Thrones

Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al-Nahyan, UAE’s founder, passed away in November 2004. His eldest son, Sheikh Khalifa, succeeded him, but with a noted disinterest in direct governance. This allowed Zayed’s third son, Sheikh Mohammed (MBZ), to rise as the de facto ruler, gaining global acceptance as Khalifa’s health declined.

In subsequent years, MBZ worked diligently to strengthen his position, sidelining potential rivals, particularly his brothers. In 2016 he replaced the head of the security apparatus, his brother Hazza, with their brother Tahnoun. MBZ then appointed his son Khalid as Tahnoun’s deputy in 2017. Khaled became crown prince in 2023, effectively shifting Abu Dhabi’s succession line from Sheikh Zayed’s sons to MBZ’s descendants.

In Saudi Arabia, two consecutive crown princes passed away leading the way to Prince Salman bin Abdulaziz becoming crown prince of King Abdullah in 2012.

Nothing distinguished Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), Salman’s sixth among twelve sons, from the hundreds of brothers and cousins of the third generation of the Saudi ruling family.

King Salman ascended the throne after King Abdullah passed away in January 2015, his son, MBS, succeeded him as minister of defense, and the first ever Deputy Crown Prince Muqrin assumed the Crown Prince briefly before he was relieved “at his request” in April 2015.

The second generation and most of the third generation of Al-Saud princes were officially bypassed when Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, a strongman close to the United States (having overseen anti-terrorism efforts), was appointed crown prince. MBS was appointed Deputy Crown Prince.

The deepening relationship between MBZ and MBS (widely understood as a mentoring relationship) became evident during Operation Decisive Storm, the Saudi-led Arab coalition’s intervention in Yemen in March 2015 launched by MBS against the Houthis. This military venture marked a significant milestone for the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and set the stage for their later involvement in the current war.

MBS, seeking to consolidate power, assumed crucial portfolios within Saudi Arabia, strategically involving some of his brothers and those close to him. Historically, some of these portfolios, such as the oil sector, were judiciously left to Saudi technocrats outside the hands and conflicts of the royal family.

Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE diversified their weapons sources, strengthening ties with global allies such as France, Russia, China, and South Korea, beyond the traditional partnerships with the United States and Britain.

The alignment between MBZ and MBS in regional and international affairs reached new heights, leading to a major crisis with the blockade of Qatar in June 2017 by KSA, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt. This crisis had far-reaching implications, impacting the region’s geopolitics and global economic interests, and confusing America, strategically allied with all these countries.

There were speculations about military plans to invade Qatar (like Bahrain earlier), involving a significant role for the RSF. Taha Osman El-Hussein, a former chief of staff of President Al-Bashir who later became an advisor for the Saudi government, was suggested to have facilitated the RSF participation.

Simultaneously, Mohammed bin Nayef was finally “removed” from his position, and MBS was appointed crown prince in June 2017. MBZ played a pivotal role in these changes by what Mohammed bin Nayef described as, “An Emirati plot … to help aggravate the differences within the royal court,” and promoting MBS to the administration of then-US President Barack Obama. His efforts were crucial in convincing President Donald Trump of MBS’s potential as an agent of change in the region early in Trump’s presidency.

The Falling Star – the Egyptian Spring

The strategic significance of Egypt, both in terms of its size and political and cultural influence, compelled the UAE and KSA to closely monitor the transformative events at the helm of power in the country. The prospect of the most populous Arab nation empowered with the belief in their ability to shape the country’s destiny through democratic means posed a considerable threat to the authoritarian status quo, something the UAE and KSA were determined to contain.

Fearing the potential disintegration, chaos, or emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood (despite their accession to power through democratic elections), along with the threat of strengthening the currents of political Islam in the region and in the two countries particularly, the UAE and KSA collaborated to thwart the democratic experiment in Egypt in cooperation with Egypt’s “deep state” institutions.

They directly supported the Egyptian army leadership and the nomination of Ahmed Shafiq for the presidency. They supported Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi and the opposition “Rebellion” movement against President Mohamed Morsi until Sisi seized power. They provided political and media cover for the Rabaa Al-Adawiya Square massacre, which Sisi committed against masses of people, the majority of whom were Muslim Brotherhood supporters. These events inaugurated an era of repression and terror that has continued since 2013.

In exchange for Saudi and Emirati financial support, Egypt made significant concessions, ceding the strategic Tiran and Sanafir islands to Saudi Arabia and opening its markets to Emirati and Saudi investments and hot money (funds that are moved between economies to make short-term gains).

However, the aftermath of these arrangements paints a bleak picture. Egypt, a decade after the coup, resembles a repressive kleptocracy, where power is concentrated among a select few, including the president, his family and military leaders. Millions live under widespread repression and violations of freedoms and human rights, with more than 60,000 political prisoners.

The economy is in crisis, reliant on IMF loans with harsh conditions, and the aid flow from the UAE and KSA has dwindled. Between 2015 and 2022, Egyptian external debt skyrocketed to over $160 billion, while internal debt worsened.

As the UAE and KSA applied economic pressure to influence Sisi’s economic policies and to grab the assets of the Egyptian state, the country faced challenges to its historical regional role. The UAE’s support for Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the Sudanese RSF Militia, coupled with Egypt’s concerns over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam and militia presence, have strained Egypt’s national security.

Hot Sahrawi Summer – the Libyan Spring

Muammar Gaddafi’s relations with the UAE and KSA were historically tense. Libya has been of comparatively lesser importance than Egypt in terms of geographical proximity, small population, and political and cultural influence. However, Libya’s oil wealth and Gaddafi’s sway in Africa could not be overlooked by these Gulf nations.

In February 2011, when anti-Gaddafi demonstrations erupted demanding an end to the rule of the dictator who had governed Libya since 1969, the authorities confronted them with extreme violence that resulted in the killing of many civilians. NATO countries seized the opportunity to intervene militarily in March 2011, ensuring the country entered a period of chaos from which it has not emerged.

Some of the results of the campaign were disastrous for the coalition, especially the killing of the American ambassador in Benghazi in September 2012. But external interventions escalated, and some countries began supporting various militias and groups with weapons, funding, political support, or active engagement in combat within Libyan territory, as in the case with the UAE and Egypt.

Currently, control in Libya is divided between Khalifa Haftar’s militia, and the UN-recognized government, alongside numerous militias and foreign actors. Haftar received substantial support from the UAE and Russia (and to a lesser extent Egypt, the KSA, Jordan, and France). On the other side, the government with its Islamist background found backing from Qatar and Turkey. Various foreign militias, including Russian Wagner, Sudanese RSF, and militias affiliated with the Sudanese armed movements from the Darfur region play complex roles in the conflict.

The UAE, with its mastery in political, financial, military, and logistical support, has been a central player in aiding Haftar’s militia (along with the Wagner and RSF militias) since the start of the second Libyan civil war in 2014. Violating arms embargoes, the UAE supplied Haftar with weapons from Russia and China, a strategy mirrored in its support for the RSF in Sudan before and after the April 15 2023 war, with the participation of Haftar and Wagner militias.

Today as Libya grapples with ongoing instability, the hope for peace seems distant. The UAE hopes to have taught the Libyan people and the peoples of the region a lesson about the consequences of dreaming of a radical transformation, a lesson most Sudanese wrestle with now.

Where the Jasmine Blossomed – the Tunisian Spring

Tunisia holds immense symbolic significance in the Arab Spring, being the first, fastest, most peaceful, and most successful in achieving a democratic transformation. Despite its geographical distance from the Gulf states, Tunisia shares stronger cultural ties with them than Libya, though less than Egypt. Recognizing Tunisia’s strategic importance for Western Europe and America and the maturity of its civil society and political life, the UAE and KSA adopted a more cautious approach compared to their interventions in Egypt, Yemen, Libya, and Bahrain.

Former President Moncef Marzouki and other Tunisian politicians have alleged that the UAE and KSA aimed to liquidate the Arab Spring, with Emirati money flowing provocatively during Marzouki’s rule. Reports suggest UAE involvement in Kais Saied’s “coup” against the democratic process in July 2021, effectively ending the wave of democratic transformations called the Arab Spring and installing a civilian dictator, in what appears to be a continuation of the pattern of Tunisia’s presidents before the Arab Spring, Bourguiba and Zine El Abidine.

The Rapid Support Forces in Sudan and the UAE

The Janjaweed militia is rooted in the Sudanese state’s history of arming supportive tribes against rebels in the peripheries. Musa Hilal emerged in 2003 as Janjaweed’s highest commander when his forces fought the rebel movements in Darfur.

Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti) overthrew Musa Hilal and became the leader of Janjaweed’s new mutation, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which was established in 2013 under the supervision of the Sudanese Security and Intelligence Service.

The militia and the army committed atrocities and serious human rights violations that led to International Criminal Court referrals for senior regime officials, including President Al-Bashir.

The conditions resulting from the civil war in Darfur led to Musa Hilal’s, and later Hemedit’s, control over the Jebel Amer region, where gold mining has produced commercial quantities through traditional methods since around 2010.

The top import destination for the gold produced in the areas under the militia’s control was, and still is the UAE. The UAE remained a center for money and gold transfers to and from Sudan for the benefit of the Sudanese government, its security services, and armed movements. This role is notable considering the economic blockade imposed on Sudan since the 1990s, which paralyzed the Sudanese banking system’s dealings with international banks and markets.

It is the same role the UAE, and Dubai in particular, is known for playing with countries under economic sanctions or political turmoil (like Iran, Syria, and Russia). Dubai provides a haven for these funds to enter, be laundered, and transferred.

Dubai’s markets, especially luxury real estate and upscale malls, provide protection and spending venues for many leading figures in those countries, even those that do not enjoy (officially) friendly relations with the UAE.

The UAE has allowed RSF front companies to provide weapons, supplies, and financing services to the militia, and to carry out smuggling, gold exporting, and money laundering operations with Russian and African companies linked to the Wagner militia and African governments.

Tradive General Trading (registered in the name of Al-Goney, Hemedti’s brother) is one such RSF company registered in the UAE. It was sanctioned by the US and the UK after the outbreak of the war, along with Al-Junaid (owned by Abdul Rahim Dagalo, another brother of Hemedti, and his deputy) among other companies. The UAE’s awareness of the RSF’s extensive operations prompted its engagement with Hemedti.

The UAE fostered connections between the RSF and its allies, the Haftar and Wagner militias. The UAE coordinated the RSF fighters’ participation in the fighting in Libya with Haftar. Black Shield, a UAE-affiliated security company, recruited young Sudanese to work with Haftar’s militia in Libya.

Beyond financial contributions, the UAE played a transformative role, modernizing the RSF and reinventing Hemedti’s as a well-groomed, resourceful, populist leader. The UAE provided training, consulting, public relations, and media services through various companies, contributing to the militia’s evolution into a sophisticated organization.

The Rapid Support Forces and the Yemen War

The RSF’s pivotal involvement in the Yemen War marked a significant juncture in its trajectory and Sudan’s contemporary history. The collaboration between Mohammed bin Zayed (MBZ) and Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) prompted Omar Al-Bashir’s government to sever ties with Iran and join the Saudi-led Arab coalition in Yemen strategically aligning itself with the Gulf states in an opportunistic manner given the hostile relationship between them and the regime for a quarter of a century.

Originally, the Sudanese forces comprised members of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the RSF. Gradually, an increasing number of fighters originated from the RSF, fostering independent ties with the UAE and KSA, distinct from the Sudanese army and state.

The UAE has assimilated the RSF into its military system, increasingly reliant on mercenaries through contracts with notorious companies and figures such as Erik Prince, the American founder of Blackwater, which was involved in the killing of civilians and other violations in Iraq. Prince participated since 2010 in developing an elite force responsible for the UAE Presidential Guard, and for conducting military operations in Syria and Yemen. This force included mercenaries from apartheid-era South Africa, Colombia, Morocco, and other countries.

Expanding this system during the Yemen war, the UAE established bases in Eritrea (Assab) and Somaliland (Berbera), offering its domestic and international facilities to RSF personnel. Estimates suggest the RSF deployed around 40,000 troops to Yemen, funded by substantial payments from the UAE and KSA. These funds not only enhanced the RSF’s power and influence, but also attracted tens of thousands of Sudanese youths, including the very young, to join its ranks.

Hemedti’s wealth and influence received another boost as he engaged in the Khartoum Process, a European-African initiative combating “illegal” immigration. This involvement contributed to his tacit international acceptance, further solidifying his stature amid complex geopolitical dynamics.

Bashir’s Last Tango

Al-Bashir’s skill in clinging to power and playing on the contradictions of regional and international politics reached its final stages when he shifted alliances by abandoning Iranian ties and aligning with the Arab coalition in Yemen.

He lost many strategic advantages due to the deterioration of his regime’s state of affairs. Popular opposition escalated with the emergence of younger generations of opponents who planted the seed of the December Revolution in its grassroots forms, especially within the resistance committees and professional groups. These groups were inspired by the Arab Spring revolutions and took advantage of the spread of social media. Internal conflicts at the heart of the ruling National Congress Party and the Islamic Movement, along with the transformation of the regime into a kleptocratic dictatorship further away from the comprehensive Islamic ideology exacerbated his situation. The dire economic conditions after the 2011 independence of South Sudan and the drying up of oil revenues added to the pressures on Bashir.

Seizing the opportunity, the UAE and KSA displayed pragmatic diplomacy, overlooking the regime’s Muslim Brotherhood identity. Between 2015 and 2018, substantial aid, loans, and investments from the UAE and Saudi Arabia aimed to bolster Bashir’s regime, addressing economic woes and reducing public anger.

By late 2018, Sudan’s economic collapse and Bashir’s diminishing ability to navigate crises eroded confidence domestically and internationally. December saw the eruption of widespread demonstrations, marking the beginning of the end for Bashir’s prolonged grip on power.

The Sudanese Spring – December Revolution

Sudan preceded the wave of the Arab Spring with two popular uprisings that overthrew two military regimes in October 1964 and April 1985. Popular resistance against Bashir peaked in 2013, met with brutal suppression by RSF soldiers. This marked the RSF’s role as Bashir’s lethal protector in Khartoum along with its continued atrocities in Darfur.

The UAE and KSA have always maintained ties with the traditional Sudanese political forces and “rebel” armed movements. It made sense for the two countries to confront the threat of the December Revolution with a mix of containment and assimilation tactics.

With the escalation of popular demonstrations, hundreds of thousands of protestors headed to the vicinity of the Armed Forces Headquarters on April 6, 2019. Once there, they staged a sit-in, demanding protection from the army. Fearing regime collapse, security services orchestrated Bashir’s ousting.

Al-Burhan and Hemedti assumed the leadership of a Transitional Military Council (TMC). They then began negotiations with the Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC), representing the civilian forces, seeking a power-sharing arrangement, diverging from the public’s demand for full civilian rule.

The FFC’s strategic mistake lay in underestimating the TMC’s strength, failing to account for international and local relations that favored the military. This miscalculation hindered the FFC, backed by popular support, from fully securing power and challenging the military. Hemedti emerged as a key figure within the TMC, fostering robust ties with the UAE and KSA. Concurrently, Egypt, UAE, and KSA swiftly cultivated strong relations with Al-Burhan and other TMC members during negotiations. In the following months the Emiratis and Saudis actively engaged in the Sudanese political scene, pledging $3 billion in aid to the TMC.

Regional capitals witnessed endless meetings of Sudanese political forces with regional and international powers. Activists noticed the marks of interference from several intelligence services in meeting locations inside and outside Sudan, along with reports of bribes from the UAE, KSA, and Qatar.

At that time, relations between the UAE and KSA had begun to experience a silent tension caused by disagreements over the war in Yemen. Riyadh began to worry about Abu Dhabi’s support for the southern separatists, and the withdrawal of Emirati forces from Yemen.

This tension surfaced as discrepancies in their Sudanese approach. Several FFC leaders revealed that the Saudi ambassador to Sudan privately criticized the role of the UAE, expressing concerns about the UAE’s influence, its limited understanding of Sudanese realities, and Sudanese politicians favoring Abu Dhabi.

To bolster Hemedti’s position, the UAE facilitated a lobbying contract with the Canadian agency Dickens and Madson, led by former Israeli intelligence figure Ari Ben Menashe. This arrangement, initiated in May 2019, aimed to globally promote the military junta, securing weapons, financing, and positive media coverage for the TMC.

Further complicating the landscape, networks affiliated with the UAE, Egypt, and Russia engaged in disinformation campaigns. These networks disseminated false information and coordinated misleading content on social media platforms, favoring the military while opposing civilian forces and democratic transformation. Some of these networks had ties to Emirati and Egyptian security services, exacerbating the information warfare within Sudan.

The Khartoum sit-in massacre

Amidst prolonged negotiations and FFC’s political missteps, the military, and the UAE, KSA and Egypt sensed an opportunity to regain control and tip the balance of power in their favor. The military’s continued crackdown on peaceful demonstrators and reluctance to negotiate showcased their growing confidence. Following a successful two-day political strike, the military dispersed the HQ sit-in with a massacre reminiscent of Egypt’s Rabaa Al-Adawiya massacre.

The three countries sought to provide political and media cover for the massacre, as had happened in Rabaa, aiming to quash the December Revolution, and introducing a Sudanese Sisi; Burhan, as the Egyptians (and possibly the Saudis) desired, or Hemedti, as the Emiratis wanted.

However, the Sudanese people’s valiant resistance to the massacre in the following weeks, their ability to continue resisting, and the mobilization of millions of people on June 30 forced the UAE and KSA to bow to the storm. It was also clear that Egypt was dissatisfied with Burhan’s weakness, and perhaps his failure to kill the required number of people to put down the revolution.

The ambassadors of the UAE, KSA, UK, and US gathered a select few of the FFC leaders with Hemedti at the mansion of a prominent businessman, days before the June 30 march of millions. Their pressure led to a return to negotiations, despite the resounding success of the marches. A partnership between the civilians and the military, establishing a transitional government with a civilian presidency (Abdullah Hamdok), and a joint sovereignty council with rotating presidency was reached. Burhan would lead the first half of the transitional period, with a civilian taking over in the second half.

The UAE and the transitional period

Persisting in their efforts to liquidate the revolution, the UAE, KSA, and Egypt implemented strategies to weaken the mass movement while bolstering the military and pressuring civilian elements. Financial aid pledges from the UAE and KSA were abruptly halted, and the UAE escalated arming the RSF. In November 2019, Ari Ben Menashe inked a contract with DP World, Dubai’s ports company, to expedite DP World’s acquisition of the South Port Container Terminal at Port Sudan.

The UAE played a pivotal role in normalizing Sudan’s relations with Israel, culminating in the signing of the “Abraham Accords.” Sudan joined a US-sponsored alliance promising economic aid and loans, removal from the list of countries sponsoring terrorism, and facilitating reengagement with international financial institutions. This accord deepened Israel’s military and intelligence ties with the SAF and RSF, sidelining the civilian government.

As UAE-Egypt relations cooled, their Sudan-Ethiopia contradictions surfaced. Egypt strengthened military ties with the SAF (conducting joint military drills, deploying Egyptian fighter jets to the Merowe Air Base, and bringing the official Sudanese discourse on the Renaissance Dam closer to the Egyptian position). The UAE supported the Ethiopian Prime Minister in his war against the Tigray.

When needless military clashes occurred in Al-Fashqa on the Sudanese-Ethiopian border, the RSF notably abstained from involvement alongside the SAF. The UAE proposed a mediation that was met with popular Sudanese rejection.

The UAE’s influence through connections with wealthy Sudanese businessmen became evident, leveraging their economic interests within the UAE to shape Sudanese politics and economics. This adept maneuvering showcased the UAE’s ability to use economic relationships to exert influence in Sudan.

The coup and the war

The civilian-military partnership, ostensibly designed to share power, inadvertently granted Burhan and Hemedti more authority than outlined in its charters. With unwavering support from the UAE and KSA, they gained international legitimacy while deflecting blame onto the FFC, government, and Prime Minister for unfulfilled revolutionary promises.

The pretext of tensions between civilians and the military around transferring the Sovereignty Council presidency to civilians didn’t convincingly justify the October 25, 2021 coup. Instead, it seemed a move to eliminate symbolic civilian presence and solidify military rule.

Sudanese resilience, notably led by the resistance committees from the first moments of the coup, thwarted coup plans, rendering international support inappropriate.

Amidst chants for the military to return to the barracks, the dissolution of the Janjaweed and the famous “no negotiation, no partnership, no legitimacy”, global players, including the UN, US, and UK, sought to revive the civilian-military partnership. Simultaneously, negotiations between the military, Hamdok, and some FFC leaders and traditional political elites took place, culminating in an agreement promptly rejected by protestors.

Hamdok resigned and relocated to Abu Dhabi, hosted by the Emirati presidency, and heavily involved in international scenarios. The KSA and the US facilitated negotiations between the military and the FFC leading to the “Framework Agreement” in December 2022. The subsequent “final” political process, slated for April 2023, was disrupted by the sounds of bombings on the morning of April 15.

In the months leading up to the war, UAE-affiliated networks intensified efforts to fortify RSF’s presence on social media, laying the groundwork for the militia’s disinformation and misinformation campaigns.

At the onset of the war, a Dubai-based expert team managed RSF’s media and propaganda, portraying the militia favorably to European decision-makers. The UAE facilitated weapon shipments for the RSF through connections with Libya, Chad, Central Africa, Uganda, and the Haftar and Wagner militias.

MBZ met with the leaders of Chad and Ethiopia, garnering support for the RSF, disguising armament and supplies as humanitarian aid. The New York Times exposed in September the UAE’s covert operation to supply weapons and drones, treat RSF injured fighters and airlift the most serious cases to an Abu Dhabi military hospital.

Sudan has become an additional item on the list of tension in relations between MBS and MBZ, which includes disputes over Yemen, oil markets, and MBS’s ambitious plans for the Saudi economy, which threaten UAE’s dominant position.

The KSA, in collaboration with the US, initiated the Jeddah platform for ceasefire negotiations between the SAF and RSF, seemingly the most viable diplomatic effort to end the conflict. KSA’s shift away from the RSF indicates a prioritization of halting the war and preserving Sudan’s unity and stability.

Egypt staunchly supports the SAF and opposes the RSF militia. Sudan’s potential collapse is viewed by Egypt as a significant threat to national security, prompting proactive diplomatic measures, trying to neutralize the positions of the UAE and RSF regional allies.

The Pariah state?

The RSF is a fiefdom operating within the entire Sudanese state more than a traditional militia, or a paramilitary group. It is run like the domain of feudal lords (the Dagalo family) and is formed as a conglomerate of military, political, economic, and media operations. The war that the RSF is waging, with the support of the UAE and others, is not a conventional war, but rather a war to dismantle the Sudanese state and subjugate the Sudanese people.

The UAE’s involvement extends beyond economic hegemonic ambitions; it was able to obtain what it wanted from Sudan’s resources with the collaboration of its Sudanese allies, friends, or clients. Shipments of Sudanese gold to the UAE have not stopped over the past years despite volatile circumstances. The UAE signed an agreement with the de facto coup government and an important Sudanese businessman to develop the new port of Abu Amama on the Red Sea, with investments amounting to $6 billion. The UAE made it clear to the local population and political forces that opposed the UAE’s efforts to take over the port of Port Sudan that it was the ultimate, political arbiter.

Just as most of the army leadership belongs organizationally to, or is allied with, the National Congress Party and the Islamic Movement, this war is not simply a war against Islamists. The leadership of the RSF is filled with cadres from the Bashir regime and its notorious security services. In addition, the UAE has previously cooperated with Bashir, his government, and ruling party.

In one of its most important aspects, this war serves the UAE’s interests in preserving its ruling regime. Any successful democratic or revolutionary experiment in its sphere of influence is perceived as a threat, justifying extreme measures, even if it means destroying a country harboring such sentiments.

It is a war that drives the final nail into the coffin of the Arab Spring, with its symbolism for the democratic aspirations of the peoples of the Arab and African region.

Despite MBS and KSA’s direct responsibility for the killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent Yemenis, the killing of one man, the US-resident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and the dismemberment of his body on the orders of MBS in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul prompted President Biden to famously pledge to make KSA a “pariah state” during his election campaign. A promise he quickly reneged on.

However, Biden and the international community at large have been hesitant to confront the UAE, despite its shared responsibility with KSA for the immense human suffering in Yemen, and despite its greater responsibility for the killing of tens of thousands of innocents in Libya and Sudan.

The diplomatic, political, and economic prowess of MBZ seems to shield the country from being labeled a major player in the RSF war in Sudan. This extends to Sudanese parties, including the Sudanese Armed Forces, whose interests have not aligned historically (nor necessarily now) with those of the Sudanese people.

However, history shows that confronting foreign parties crucial to a conflict is essential to create opportunities for resolution. Popular pressures forced many Western governments to end support for the apartheid regime in South Africa and the Indonesian occupation of East Timor.

The UAE is very sensitive to negative media coverage. On July 4, a mere four days after a flight tracker publicized the sudden surge in Emirati flights to Amdjarass in Eastern Chad, the UAE announced it had opened a hospital there.

Four days after the publication of the above-mentioned New York Times report, UAE’s media reported that the Chadian President visited the Amdjarass hospital praising UAE’s humanitarian efforts. A day later, the Emirati Defense Ministry announced launching joint military exercises with Chad in Chad.

To create any serious opportunity to stop the war, it is imperative to hold the UAE accountable for its decisive role. This involves a concerted effort to expose its extensive involvement, generate global public opinion against its actions, and compel governments and organizations allied with it to address the Emirati “elephant in the room.”

Husam Mahjoub, co–founder of Sudan Bukra, an independent non-profit Sudanese TV channel watched by millions of Sudanese people. Knowledgeable about the politics of the Arabian Gulf region having lived there 31 years, he believes that stopping the war that broke out in Sudan on 15 April requires creating popular opposition to persuade governments to push the UAE to stop supporting the RSF militia.

Featured Photograph: A protest in London outside Downing Street against the war in Yemen (7 March 2018).

CLR James and George Padmore: Hidden Disputes in The Black Radical Tradition

ROAPE

January 4, 2024

On CLR James’ 123rd birthday, Matthew Quest examines the collaboration between James and George Padmore since their partnership within the International African Service Bureau in the 1930s. Despite their joint activism in Pan-African affairs, political rifts emerged on democracy, socialism, and revolutionary strategy. Quest looks at James’ portrayal of Padmore to highlight the political tensions underlying their friendship. James’ and Padmore’s different perspectives on anti-imperialism reveals hidden disputes in the Black radical tradition.

By Matthew Quest

In 1930s London, during the era of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, CLR James (1901–1989) and George Padmore (1903–1959) worked together as activists in the International African Service Bureau. As a youth, they became chums and bathed in Trinidad’s Arima River together. Their fathers, both were teachers and friends. In 1957 a plan was hatched in Britain for Padmore to become chief of staff of Pan African affairs in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana, and James to become the editor of The Nation, the organ of Eric Williams’s People’s National Movement (PNM), but also the secretary of the effort to federate the West Indies from 1958–1962. When Padmore passed away CLR began to write him into history.

We must never forget that CLR James, in Party Politics in the West Indies (1962), was really the first to codify the framework of the Black radical tradition. He called it a tradition of anti-colonial national talent. But he underscored you don’t understand the tradition or archive unless you grasp the antagonisms and debates within it. Many of the “expert” scholars on Pan Africanism and Communism still cannot discern these hidden disputes and spread a cobwebbed collection of phantoms adjusted to their own professional development and accumulation of social capital.

Keep in mind James’s and Padmore’s friendship of many years assisted each other in surviving in the political wilderness until later in life the world came to terms with a startling fact. They theorized and led a great social movement that many doubted until, in a certain sense, what Richard Wright first termed “Black Power” began to arrive on its own authority as part of the Age of Third World National Liberation struggles (1947–1993).

Padmore: Radical Coordinator of Global Solidarity

George Padmore (1903–1959) was the Moscow coordinator of international solidarity efforts with Black workers (1928–1933) for the Communist International, and editor of The Negro Worker, before working with CLR in the International African Service Bureau in London before World War II. James’s “Notes on the Life of George Padmore,” an unpublished manuscript, is the basis for many published essays and public lectures. Padmore, among the canon of heroic representative men which James began to manufacture, holds his place in historiography largely as a result of James’s singular effort to place narratives of his life as central to a Black radical tradition.

James often tried, with his Padmore narratives, to teach his audience lessons about problems of thin conceptions of democracy, socialism, and national liberation, though his audiences frequently failed to understand all the facets of James’s Padmore stories. Though this shouldn’t be taken as a small matter, when James is misunderstood, he is generally assumed to be simply imparting lessons about Black autonomy in political organization.

Silences on James’s and Padmore’s Political Friction and Quarrels

Though James and Padmore became independent Marxists of a different variety, James constantly repeated a message of unity to younger Pan-African audiences. Despite the fact that he was initially a Trotskyist, and Padmore had begun his political career as an adherent to Stalin’s Russia, they never “quarrelled” or had “friction” between them in their dedication to African solidarity against empire. This silence in James’s public career is proven false by historical research.

In the original manuscript, these silences are slightly less muted: “Though there were difficult moments we never had any serious disagreements.” James and Padmore argued about the value of direct democracy and workers’ self-management for evaluating and building socialism, the very possibility of social revolution in modern industrial nations, and the terms for shaping national liberation struggles.

James’s Padmore, A Selfless Cadre: Political Agitator and Organizer

James presented Padmore as the embodiment of the selfless and disciplined cadre organizer of Pan-African solidarity, linking struggles in Mombasa, Lagos, Dakar, Fyzabad, and Port-au-Prince. Padmore pursued underground work in the Sudan, and Congo, and, in 1930, organized a global conference of Black workers in Hamburg, Germany, where he would later be held as a political prisoner.

George Padmore wrote letters to editors of newspapers, lobbied government officials, provided hospitality and mentoring for anti-colonial activists, published books, and gave public lectures based on original material from his sojourns and extensive library. He educated Africans in the dynamics of modern party politics, trade unionism, and the art of crafting demands and programs for action.

James repeatedly shared this basic outline of Padmore’s life and work, while omitting details of Padmore’s actual politics, emphasizing his belief that Padmore provided critical ideological continuity for global Pan-African and labor revolt. In pioneering this narrative of George Padmore’s life, James believed he was placing a crucial pillar in the framework of the Black radical tradition. With this cornerstone, James wished his audiences to understand that one need not become a statesman to be considered a successful revolutionary, but merely a disciplined organizer with skills in political education, agitation, and propaganda. Further, the terms of Black autonomy, socialism, and resistance to empire were more complicated than they first appeared.

Successful Revolutionaries Need Not Be Statesmen Above Society

It is clear James Padmore was an implacable foe of white supremacy and empire and an independent Marxist, but it was rarely apparent what this meant for Padmore’s actual practice of political teaching and advising. We know that James did not believe Padmore to be an exceptional orator; we also know that he felt that Padmore’s published works were often distinguished by dry economic details instead of epic ruptures in party politics or struggles of social classes. For Padmore, poor wages and the condition of Black working people revealed that the institutions of white supremacy and the empire of capital were synonymous on a global scale — this was essentially Trinidad’s Eric Williams’s and Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah’s view.

Padmore propagandized against oppressive acts and institutions: the stealing of colonized peoples’ land, subordination of Africans through Pass Laws and other racial and anti-labour legislation in Africa, lynching, segregation, and mass unemployment in the USA. In 1959, James reflected, “Everybody says these things nowadays”; they are even “commonly heard, and play a role,” in elections in the United States and in Britain. In the early 1930s, James argued, “George was giving them currency.”

Black Toilers and Progressive Guardians

Padmore in 1937 with a cigarette in his mouth ( Wiki Commons)

Padmore, however, beyond challenges to racism and empire, rarely offered vistas of self-emancipating labor in his writings — not even for people of color. Padmore’s Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers (1931), despite the title’s emphasis on resistance, can only partially be seen as an exception to this rule. For Padmore, socialism and democracy meant a type of economic radicalism, where social equality and material welfare were asserted through a constitutional republic. Labor mobilized to achieve these “rights” and then was loyal and subordinate to a post-colonial guardian state. This dependence on progressive guardianship was consistent with Padmore’s reading of Leninism.

James’s Padmore, whether in Moscow or London, was single-minded in pursuit of his work. He made friends easily with people of many ideologies but allowed no sectarian allegiances of the party to stand in the way of coordinating African solidarity. Padmore, much more than James himself embodied the “Black Marxist,” the radical of African descent who experimented with the inventory of European political traditions to arrive at his own authority for crafting vistas for Black freedom.

Global Minded: Not Merely an Africa Specialist

James’s Padmore was presented as global-minded, not merely “an Africa specialist” who concerned himself only with “colonial or African affairs.” This presentation is partially true. Padmore was concerned, as James indicated, with the plight of British workers, China, Latin America, and the Middle East as well. However, unlike James, who proposed to lead and theorize “a world revolution” and make contributions in many spheres, Padmore wrote and organized overwhelmingly on matters of race and colonialism, and sought to maintain a Black International or a Pan-African Federation, of which he would be the chairperson. In contrast, James had a greater audacity. As a perpetual founder of small multi-racial revolutionary organizations, James was an aspiring leader on historical and political questions on many continents crucial to the destiny of imperial and peripheral nations.

Comrades in Anti-Colonial Coalition with Different Radical Politics

Padmore’s and James’s attitudes toward political organizations for anti-colonial work appeared compatible. In fact, James gave credit to Padmore for teaching him about how the small radical political organization should and could function. However, their approaches to the multi-faceted dynamics of world politics were very different. This is obscured if we don’t comprehend the difference between an anti-colonial coalition and a revolutionary organization.

Padmore was received by many of James’s readers as someone who would not allow the chauvinism of the white Left and the intrigue of their party politics to undermine his organizing efforts for Black freedom. This certainly proves if not false, an ambivalence, as Padmore’s London Pan Africanism is carefully reconstructed. The more conservative British Left, whether the British Labour Party or British Communist Party, had a trajectory consistent with half the British ruling class.

In the search for power above society, with Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana, Jomo Kenyatta’s Kenya, and Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia, Padmore’s uncompromising rhetoric often existed side by side with lobbying the left bloc of capital and parliament in Britain. This is captured in Peter Abrahams’s novel A Wreath for Udomo (1956) but also in Leslie James’s scholarship on Padmore that salutes him for his “pragmatic” anti-colonialism.

CLR’s critique of Padmore’s How Britain Rules Africa (1936) is that Padmore implied it was possible for half the imperial ruling class to be moral and help their trustees to independence. This was consistent with their disagreement on relying on the League of Nations, however late, to restore Selassie to power. Later Padmore’s Pan-Africanism or Communism? (1955) implied something similar. Namely, white lobbyists of the British Empire, such as the later Sylvia Pankhurst, were somehow part of the Pan-African movement. In fact, it was the Popular Front style of anti-imperialism around Haile Selassie, that undermined the global movement for Black toilers in militias and nurse corps to come to fight the Italians in Ethiopia, a similar social motion to the global effort in the Spanish Civil War. Finally, Padmore was not only concerned with the self-mobilization of Black toilers but also with making agreements with imperialist powers to respect and prop up the self-determination of Black-led nation-states. His take on self-determination foreshadowed that it did not mean a profound autonomy, but recognition by the empire of capital. This disturbed CLR in the 1930s.

Uncompromising with the White Left? Or in Coalition with part of the British Empire?

Some wondered why CLR James appeared to allow debates within the overwhelmingly white Trotskyist movement to preoccupy him — though many forget James was a global leader and co-founder of that movement. Further, James was the leader of his own multi-racial collectives where American revolutionary socialists, many of European descent, looked up to him as their teacher for insight on European, African, and Caribbean developments equally.

CLR did not intend Black autonomy to be the sole emphasis in his Padmore stories. He also tried to explain why the problems of Stalinism were relevant both to colonial independence and a socialist future. Padmore, formerly aligned with Moscow, became an independent Marxist as a result of Russia’s shift to the Popular Front strategy (which many people of color all over the world, not merely whites, accepted). By redefining the United States, Britain, and France as allies, and “democratic imperialists” on the eve of World War II, Stalinism revealed that for them, socialism and internationalism primarily meant defending their own nation (first Russia), and really their own regime, above promoting independent workers’ power at home or abroad.

Moscow asked Padmore to refocus anti-colonial work on Italy, Japan, and Germany, although Italy had only one colony in Africa, Ethiopia, and the others had none. Padmore refused, in defense of Black autonomy, and was purged from the Communist International. He found it an “unspeakable betrayal.” James used this example to explain a further political lesson, which he felt could be gleaned from Padmore’s life. In contrast to Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967), which suggested that Jews and West Indians controlled African American politics through the Communist Party in the United States, James explained that in China, Latin America, the Middle East, Europe, and Africa, the top-down approach and political philosophy affiliated with Moscow was the same.

For James, though he recognized the Communist Party was permeated with racism despite genuine struggles to root it out, Russia’s affiliates in the United States, certainly by the measures of their time, were not behaving in particularly “a white chauvinist” fashion. Instead, Russia, the standard bearer of socialism for many, collaborated with the empire of capital. For James, this revealed another dilemma. The working class did not directly govern in the Soviet Union, and Popular Front-style politics in the United States didn’t seek to promote workers’ self-management either.

“Notes on the Life” contains two other George Padmore stories rarely told in public by James. In one, Padmore has tea with a Russian friend in his Kremlin apartment in Moscow in 1933, the same year as the great famine in the Ukraine. His friend stopped Padmore from cleaning the table of “small crumbs” of bread which he was about to throw away. Her family hadn’t seen white bread for months. Padmore began to “sneak” food to his friend to take to her family. He would occasionally courageously speak to ordinary Russians in the repressive environment, inquiring whether they knew of the privileged life of the Party hierarchy. This narrative, while plausible, suggests James’s own particular gloss.

Soviet Union: National Liberation Struggle or Workers Democracy?

Padmore had the privileges of the Kremlin bureaucracy and could purchase fine foods from the Torgsin, the Kremlin-subsidized shop, at the cheapest prices. Many told him they were aware and disturbed by the inequalities as represented by the Kremlin hierarchy, but feared German and Japanese imperialism more. James used this example to illustrate the fact that the Stalinists, who claimed to serve working people, lived like an aristocracy in the midst of severe poverty. Yet even in James’ rendering of this Padmore story, one can see through Padmore’s eyes, that Russians under Stalinism saw themselves in the midst of a national liberation struggle not a fight for workers’ self-management. More crucial to James was the cavalier negation of direct democracy, the erasure of the soviets (workers and popular councils) in Russia.

In another of James’s stories, Padmore, while working one day in the Kremlin, before the purges and show trials of the late 1930s, was asked by Dimitry Manuilsky, a functionary of the Communist International, if he would like to stand for election with Stalin to the Moscow Soviet. Equivalent roughly to a city municipality, the Soviet was once a popular council, a directly democratic form of freedom, which had, by this point, long been suppressed by the Bolshevik State. Padmore, as described by James, was careful to not get caught up in “political intrigue.” He “knows nothing about the Moscow Soviet, does not speak Russian, and has enough work to do.” Manuilsky insisted he should run for this position, that it was not necessary to campaign, and that somehow Padmore was sure to attain this office. Should he win, Padmore would have no tasks to perform.

Padmore Alert but Not Preoccupied with Russia’s Contradictions

Sometime later, Padmore was informed that he had been elected to be a representative of the Moscow Ballbearing Factory (where he was surely not a worker) to the Moscow Soviet with Stalin and Lazar Kaganovich. James wrote that Padmore “does not care, attends no meetings,” and continued in his work for Black workers and anti-colonial revolt. Undoubtedly, on more than one level, Padmore was uninterested.

George Bernard Shaw later led a British delegation to the Soviet Union and Manuilsky introduced Padmore as an elected member of the Moscow Soviet. Padmore was held up before this British audience as an example of the anti-racism of the Russian regime. The British delegation was astounded. For James, their pleasure reveals a thin conception of socialism. People of color or immigrants, Manuilsky boasted, could never be elected to the British parliament or American Congress. The British social democratic-minded delegation and the USSR’s Stalinist bureaucracy believed socialism meant affirmative action. This dilemma foreshadowed the global Popular Front politics of the future.

Bolshevism Could Not Be Discredited: It Was a Forerunner of Black Power

Socialism or national liberation came to be synonymous for many, not with workers’ sovereignty or defeat of capitalist nation-states or ruling elites, but with equal opportunity to enter the ranks of hierarchy. James recognized that Padmore was always careful to see that Bolshevism not be discredited in the world. For James, this recognition largely meant the need to defend the legacy of Lenin. For Padmore, the legacy of Bolshevism was the idea, even after he was purged from Moscow, that the Soviet Union was a progressive nation-state. In 1946, Padmore began to conclude that the defense of the Soviet Union was crucial to defending the viability of national liberation struggles as a whole.

In 1946, Padmore and his wife Dorothy co-authored How Russia Transformed Its Colonial Empire. They argued that whatever criticism could be made of Stalinist Russia from the point of view of the limits of “socialism in one country” or “world revolution,” Russia had still, in their minds, facilitated the self-determination of oppressed nationalities. This was, of course, false. James’s earlier volume World Revolution (1937) was not cited in this work, but the Padmores’ criticism was an allusion to his ideas which they disagreed. The Padmores recognized that the workers’ councils no longer had any meaningful sovereignty within Russia. But they blamed this on the failure of the revolutions abroad not suppression of the soviets by the state in Russia. They went on to emphasize, however, that any person in Russia, regardless of nationality or property qualifications, could be elected to office. James would have been disturbed by such an argument.

Russia: An Affirmative Action Regime Betrayed Self-Determination

If someone from Poland, Czechoslovakia, or Hungary were elected to representative office in Stalinist Russia, or within their own national borders colonized by the Red Army, this would not have meant for James that their countries were autonomous from the Soviet Union. Further, James argued in this same period, in The Invading Socialist Society (1947), there was no dual or progressive character of government bureaucracy. We must remember that both James and Padmore were silent about what Lenin’s and Trotsky’s concession of the Ukraine to Germany meant for the self-determination of oppressed nations.

In 1953, James and Padmore had a dispute triggered by the former’s study of Herman Melville, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways (1952). James presented the multi-racial, multi-national motley crew of the whaling vessel as the site of global solidarity seeking unity and self-government at the point of industrial production against the tyranny of capitalist management. For James, this perspective was synonymous with the potential of the United States. Padmore was neither enthusiastic nor concerned with the potential of American workers as represented in James’s literary criticism.

The Herman Melville or Anti-Communism Controversy

However, the last chapter of the book, devoted to a recounting of James’s detention on Ellis Island as an independent radical immigrant who overstayed his visa, somewhat inexplicably touched off this dispute with Padmore. As James explains in the book, in the prison on Ellis Island, he encountered a genuinely friendly Communist Party member, who offered solidarity to all his fellow prisoners and even to James himself. The Communist likely knew that James had a Trotskyist background. However, James’s counterpart — and this is James’s emphasis — simply did not understand the perils of affiliation with Moscow. James wrote this in a book he circulated to many members of the U.S. government as part of his campaign to legally appeal his immigration status during the McCarthy era. His argument would have been the same, if he merely articulated it in public forums. For he was already under surveillance and knew it. Rachel Peterson and Donald Pease, in their own ways, recognize that James’s circle represented a grassroots anti-communism that took workers’ self-organization and self-emancipation seriously. This is something that the historiography of American communism, that presents the Moscow oriented in a free speech fight, does not.

Increasingly, the politics of solidarity in American and world politics had little to do with working for the direct self-government of toilers. Rather, the Popular Front pursued an enhanced welfare state in Europe and the United States and peace with the Russian one-party state. James, instead, wished to see both types of regimes toppled, though he tactically, like Moscow-affiliated Communists in this era, argued for his own peculiar brand of popular democratic politics in the United States.

Richard Wright to George Padmore: Unethical Critiques of CLR James

In a letter of 22 June 1953, CLR James responded to Padmore’s irritation, firmly insisting that, despite accusations, he had not changed. James emphasized that, unlike Padmore, he had never seen anything progressive in the Moscow regime and never would. On the lower frequencies, the 1950s correspondence between Richard and Ellen Wright and George and Dorothy Padmore revealed disputes the Padmores had with James over the years that are corroborated by muted aspects of “Notes on the Life.”

Padmore came to believe that James had been working for “a paper revolution,” that his political faction was irrelevant, and that James had been an abstract “ivory tower” elitist in his talk of the potential of Detroit’s industrial workers, whether black or white. James was “a dreamer” in his plans for an American Revolution. Dorothy Padmore believed James was partially seen as an “interloper,” “poseur,” and “carpet bagger” at Ghana’s independence celebrations for doing little to propagate African anti-colonial revolt during his first American years, while still feeling he was “instrumental” in bringing Ghana’s independence about, and seeing in Ghana “the permanent revolution.”

This perspective is remarkable, as James referred Kwame Nkrumah to the Padmores and actually did have an impact as Nkrumah’s mentor. On some level, the Padmores detested Facing Reality (1958), which James shared with them in draft form at Ghana’s independence celebrations. They saw no direct democracy or instinctive proletarian revolution in the Hungarian Revolt of 1956, nor in the shop stewards’ movement in Britain.

Radical Traditions: A Mask for Those Opposed to a New Society?

CLR James and Leon Damas in 1972 at the African People’s Congress in San Diego (wiki Commons)

CLR James was recalled by many radical Black Nationalists and Marxists of the next generation (not all) as at a certain point having stale formulations about the United States, Hungary, and Classical Athens. But upon closer look the common identification with George Padmore’s and Richard Wright’s earlier perspective started from a premise that it was “radical” to believe there would be no American Revolution, no significant European revolutions, and even no popular self-directed vision of an African or Caribbean revolution. This is astonishing. Is the point of maintaining “radical traditions” to sustain pragmatic and sociological interpretations of the world where nobody has a philosophy of becoming that seeks to bring the new society closer?

The Padmores sensed that James had wasted much of his political career theorizing about social revolutions in the United States and Europe. They could not understand why he was writing a book on American civilization and on the prospects for social revolution there. They also felt James spent too much time theorizing about the exact nature of the Soviet Union.

Who Needs an American, European, African, or Caribbean Revolution?

Why had CLR not written more books like The Black Jacobins (1938) in the service of colonized nations? James was aware of this criticism and found it absurd. By 1959, James had written more on anti-colonial revolt (separate from his writings on revolution in other sectors of the world) than the entire London Pan-African circle. In discipline and productivity, he regarded only George Padmore as his peer. Yet the Padmores, in their correspondence with Richard Wright, found James’ references to “world revolution” and “permanent revolution” as ridiculous. They believed they were working more concretely for “Black revolution.”

George Padmore confided in Richard Wright that CLR’s mentoring of Kwame Nkrumah in the United States was more influential than most realize, and from his point of view, very disruptive. The young Nkrumah, it appeared to Padmore, was too internationalist and not nationalist enough. Padmore attributed Nkrumah’s lack of primary preoccupation with the future of Ghana’s state to the influence of James’s “Trotskyism.”

CLR James and Kwame Nkrumah’s Radical Internationalism

Close scholars of James understand he did not view the main currents of Leon Trotsky’s followers as internationalist enough. They wanted to see nation-states as the embodiment of socialism, even where the working class did not govern. Frankly, the Trotskyists and Padmore’s Pan-African vision saw the socialist state and political economy in very similar terms.

James and Padmore, who had previously exchanged marked-up political literature across the Atlantic, were growing apart, even as they celebrated independence in Nkrumah’s Ghana. While James viewed the Hungarian Revolution as the culmination of the instinctive struggle against state power, Padmore was increasingly captivated by the wisdom of Mao Zedong. Mao viewed the Hungarian revolt as a contradiction that had to be resolved on behalf of the supremacy of the one-party state.

Interestingly, Padmore’s criticism of James did not reveal an excessive idealism on James’s part. It was more stratospheric during World War II for Moscow-oriented Communists to view Britain, where the sun never set on their empire, and the USA, distinguished by Jim Crow and Japanese internment, as “democratic,” and the Soviet Union as a workers’ republic (with no soviets) that had abolished property relations and liberated Eastern Europe.

Revolutionary socialists, one would think, should be genuinely concerned with the destiny of working people all over the world, not merely as an empty cultural banner. James did not believe it was internationalist to subordinate the destiny of one nation, or one working class, to another; this was a stance he never took, regardless of how this worker behaved or whether that government executed a deformed policy in one global sector or another. Yet Padmore, partially as a result of an increasing disbelief that white working people in Europe or the United States would be part of making a social revolution, anticipated a type of Third World Marxist perspective that equated toilers of color with progressive nation-states and ruling elites.

Concerns with white supremacy and empire increasingly collapsed the distinction between toilers and rulers above society in both imperial and colonized nations. Padmore, in this way, anticipated certain perspectives of Walter Rodney and Stokely Carmichael. Crucial for understanding Padmore’s postcolonial vision is recognition, regardless of the blind spots of white workers in imperial centers, of its lack of content for Black labor’s self-emancipation.

At their best, James’s politics appear to have continuity. Was he not engaging the frustration and anger of the masses, and the new leaders they installed, so as to clarify the purpose of national liberation and socialism as he attempted to facilitate the popular will toward self-government? At the same time, James had to position himself strategically in order to minimize the chances of his being perceived as an out-of-touch “old man” from another generation, even as Black Power activists and Third World regimes craved his mentoring.

Workers Self-Emancipation: “Obsolete” or “White Idea” Until Discovered by Black Power activists among African Americans and the Caribbean?

CLR, the elder, was not always able to rigorously explain, save for the most attentive, where he came from politically. James began to recognize the fact that, for youth who wanted him to tell stories about the Black radical tradition, chronicles which included George Padmore, the distinctions of ideological and party affiliation among the Red and Black were irrelevant — it was all “communism” because the white racists and capitalists said so, and because conservatives appeared to be threatened by such ideas. The next generation did not understand that many of the Old Left had also come to this conclusion, to the qualitative detriment of how one viewed white workers, imperial nations, and national liberation in colonized nations.

This conflict between workers’ self-management (increasingly seen as a “white” idea) in metropolitan centers and national liberation struggles tore apart the last manifestation of the Facing Reality group, James’s last small revolutionary organization in 1970 — this was expressed through internal uncertainty about where Mao Zedong and Stokely Carmichael were going. Ironically, at this moment the direct democratic tendency of the Caribbean New Left (in Trinidad, Antigua, Guyana, Grenada, and Jamaica — many who met each other in Canada) and certain dissident currents in Detroit’s League of Revolutionary Black Workers began to see the merits of direct democracy and workers’ self-management for Black post-civil rights and post-colonial revolt. These are evidence of other hidden disputes in the radical tradition stimulated by CLR James.

[A revised section of a longer and older scholarly essay. For archival evidence and citations see Matthew Quest. “The Not So Bring Protegees and the Comrades that Never Quarreled: CLR James’s Disputes on Labor’s Self-Emancipation on the Political Economy of Colonial Freedom.” Insurgent Notes. October 4, 2013.]

Matthew Quest is an editor of Clash! a collective of writers who advocate for Caribbean unity from below. He has taught African, African American and Caribbean History at universities in the United States. He is known as a scholar of the legacies of CLR James.

Feature Photograph: CLR James at work (wiki commons)

ROAPE’s 2023 Best Reads for African Radicals

ROAPE

December 21, 2023

Last year, for the first time on roape.net, members of ROAPE’s Editorial Group offered some of our favourite radical reads from 2022, new and old, fiction and non-fiction. Here again, in what we hope will beome an annual offering, Editorial Group members provide a list of books that have served to educate, shock, move, and inspire over the last 12 months, in our 2023 offering of ROAPE’s best reads for African radicals. Five of the ten books listed are available as free downloads.

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Revolutionary Hope vs. Free-Market Fantasies: Keeping the Southern African Liberation Struggle Alive

by John Saul

No doubt John Saul has left an indelible legacy at the intersection of left-thinking scholarship and activism. In the year that he passed on, I finally read his Revolutionary Hope vs. Free-Market Fantasies, one of a trilogy. This was two years from its publication, when I finally arrived at the section of the bookshelf where it had been lodged, driven by a hungry search for answers to the many questions I as a southern African was grappling with regarding our lost liberation struggle and prospects for redemption. By the time I read the last page, I had been challenged to ask more questions than those which drove me to the book in the first place. And this is why I’m recommending it. It reimposes with renewed candour the tough questions and arguments about how, in the 21^st century, class and capital still centrally define the enduring and evolving oppressions and challenges facing southern Africa, but whose relevance is both local and global.

Chanda Mfula

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Empire of Disorder

by Alain Joxe

Written more than 20 years ago now, Alain Joxe’s Empire of Disorder is one of my three best to read and think books this year. This is particularly so since the onset on 7 October 2023 of the Israeli war of extreme violence and terror against Gaza and the Palestinian people. Readers might find Joxe’s analysis of the ‘Palestinian Question’ and Israel’s ongoing wars and status as a US client state incredibly insightful and prescient [The book is available here as a free download].

Caroline Ifeka

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Revolutionary State-Making in Dar es Salaam

by George Roberts

Roberts puts Dar es Salaam in its rightful place in the political historiography of liberation in Southern Africa in particular and the Global South in general. At a time when xenophobia and parochial nationalism are on the rise, Roberts reminds readers of the strategic role of this ‘revolutionary city’ and its Nkrumah Street in forging Pan-Africanism and ‘Third World’ solidarity during the ‘global sixties’. The book is a gem to those interested in Cold War politics, state-building, capitalism, socialism, urbanism, globalization, and transnationalism [The book is available here as a free download].

Chambi Chachage

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Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region

edited by Hamza Hamouchene and Katie Sandwell

Just a few years after compiling and editing The Arab Uprisings: A Decade of Struggles (one of the recommended radical reads from last year), Hamza Hamouchene has done it again, this time partnering with co-editor Katie Sandwell to publish a timely collection of writing on green colonialism in the Arab region. Covering a wide range of countries from Morocco, Western Sahara, Algeria and Tunisia to Egypt, Sudan, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Palestine, as a collective work the book challenges Eurocentrism, draws attention to the imperialist agendas either holding back or underlying energy transitions, and foregrounds a class-based analysis that is all too often absent in accounts of and discussions around climate justice. Available as a free download here, the book can also be purchased for around £12/$15 by those who can afford it.

Ben Radley

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Red Africa: Reclaiming Revolutionary Black Politics

by Kevin Okoth

My radical read of the year is Kevin Okoth’s book Red Africa: Reclaiming Revolutionary Black Politics. I really appreciated his critique of Afro-pessimism and his attempt to show that Marxism and Black liberation are not always incompatible [See here for a longer review by Mikayla Tillery].

Chinedu Chukwudinma

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Dark Emu

by Bruce Pascoe

My daughter lives in Australia, so I spend a lot of time on the continent. I have noticed how one of the outrages of a country that seems to be regarded as a ‘promised land’ is its treatment of the Aboriginal population. Herded into rural settlements, suffering daily abuse and racism and imprisonment by the state, Aboriginal Australians are invisible in the so-called Australian dream.

The myth that Australian history only really began with the arrival of European adventurers and colonialists in 1788 is repeated annually on Australia Day – a jingoistic celebration of the arrival of the first settlers in 1788; renamed Invasion Day by activists. The real history of this settlement is the genocide of Aboriginals Australians across the continent in the 19th century. Yet, there was tremendous resistance from the start, and many settlers, including convicts were killed in an organised anti-colonial revolt. For every settler murdered, fifty Aboriginal Australians would be massacred – does that sound familiar?

One of the great lies of Australian settlement, and occupation, was that pre-colonial Australia was a desert wasteland, with uncultivated expanses of land peopled by hunters and gatherers. These falsehoods continue to be perpetuated in the popular and academic press.

In 2014 the Aboriginal author, Bruce Pascoe wrote Dark Emu, a remarkable book which I read on my recent Australian visit – reading is the only cure I know for jetlag. Pascoe’s thesis is simple, and his evidence extensive: the hunter-gather label is a colonial appellation denigrating a complex history of developed and settled agricultural societies, with large and diverse communities across the continent.

Using the reports and dairies of the early colonialists, Pascoe provides evidence of Aboriginal dams, levees, channels, and fish traps, and argues that pre-colonial Aboriginal people practiced advanced aquaculture. Yet, this extraordinary and complex world was systematically destroyed by European settlement, and much of the history consciously erased.

When I was researching Walter Rodney’s life a few years ago, I found in the archive in Atlanta correspondence between an Aboriginal activist group and Rodney in the mid-1970s. Inspired by his recently published book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, they expressed kinship with the obliteration of their own history by colonialism, and the need to resurrect it.

More than forty years later, Pascoe has now written a contribution to Australia’s history equal to Rodney’s classic. I urge our readers to pick up a copy!

Leo Zeilig

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Joan Wicken: A Lifelong Collaboration with Mwalimu Nyerere

by Aili Mari Tripp

A fascinating study of Joan Wicken, the personal assistant and speechwriter for President Julius K Nyerere from 1961 to 1985. Based on the author’s interviews with Ms Wicken, it combines her history and her experience and perceptions of Nyerere. Joan Wicken witnessed the “enormous” reception of Nyerere in one village after another in the early ‘60s, campaigning for independence and for TANU afterwards. Every evening they would discuss issues that arose that day and events for the following day. She would draft a speech on the basis of these discussions, he would go through them, add to them, and return to her for polishing up. Nyerere usually “kept to the script” with English speeches, whereas he adlibbed a lot with Kiswahili. There was often no written speech at mass meetings.

Nyerere spoke freely with Joan Wicken about issues more than people, knowing “it wouldn’t go anywhere else”, which is why she embargoed her notes for thirty years after her death. She could argue with him because of age and similar outlooks. In later years, Mwalimu worried “that the party was becoming slack and losing concern for the people and involvement with the people.” She thought Nyerere was a democrat prepared to go over the heads of the leaders to the people, as in the case of the Arusha Declaration of ujamaa na kujitegemea [socialism and self-reliance]; “The people loved it, but not the leaders”. The book is full of gems like that, but would be strengthened with more analysis.

Marjorie Mbilinyi

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Amílcar Cabral: The Life of a Reluctant Nationalist

by António Tomás

This new biography of Cabral traces many of the themes that shape his political mobilisation and the struggle for liberation from Portuguese colonialism in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. It draws on newly available archival material and among other things highlights his personal and family context for his political mobilisaiton. The book develops an analysis of how and why national sovereignty is so important and the role of military struggle and political organisation in achieving it. The book reflects on Cabral’s pragmatism in formulating strategies for liberation and unity between Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde as well as the politics of ethnicity that often frustrated him. Perhaps contentiously Tomás notes how in dealing with powerful (imperialist) external forces Cabral noted that the “best ideology to have was not to have one at all”.

Ray Bush

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The Hundred Years War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017

by Rashid I. Khalidi

and

Mental Health and Human Rights in Palestine: The Life of Gaza’s Pioneering Psychiatrist Dr Eyad Sarraj

by Wasseem El Sarraj

The ferociously brutal bombing of Gaza in October drove me to immerse myself in literature on Zionist colonialism in Palestine and the Palestinian people’s resistance. Most of what I did was rereading. Rashid Khalidi’s and Wasseem El Sarraj’s books were two that I read for the first time, and found invaluable. They are both similar in two ways.

First, as with many other books worth reading on the history of the Palestinian struggle, they both provide a rich history of the land. Tracing this back for centuries, they disprove the Zionist lies of “a land without people, for a people without a land.” They reveal Britain’s deceitful actions, spanning from the Balfour declaration to the Nakba, and the continuous backing of Jewish colonialism by imperialist powers. The books examine how Arab countries, like Jordan, have had conflicting stances on the Palestinian cause and how this impacts the people’s struggle. And prominently, they highlight this struggle’s “history from below” in all its strength, weakness, pains and tenacity.

Second, a distinctive element of these books is the personal ties the writers have with the stories they tell. Both authors come from influential families that opposed Zionist expansionism before the Nakba and have remained committed to the Palestinian liberation movement.

In The Hundred Years War on Palestine, Khalidi points out that Britain and such Zionist institutions as the Jewish Colonisation Association left no one in doubt that their aim was colonisation of Palestine. But “once colonialism took on a bad odour in the post-World War II era, the colonial origins and practice of Zionism and Israel were whitewashed and conveniently forgotten in Israel and the West”. And the Zionist movement was even presented as an anticolonial struggle of Israel for self-determination, in the period leading to the Nakba.

In Mental Health and Human Rights in Palestine, El Sarraj writes as “a young bi-racial (half Palestinian/half English) man”. The book is a completion of the task which his father Eyad Sarraj had set himself; writing Eyad’s memories. The older Sarraj could not finish this definitively because his life was intertwined with the life of the struggle for a liberated Gaza, and a free Palestine. The younger Sarraj did not exaggerate when he said the book is a biography of his father’s life, and “it is also a history of Palestine with a focus on Gaza.” His father fearlessly spoke truth to power, even challenging Palestinian leaders. This earned him imprisonment several times by the state of Israel as well as the Palestinian authority.

One aspect of the book which struck me in the light of current events is where it points out that aerial bombings became a feature of life in Gaza, decades back. Reading this, I could not but reflect at the folly of arguments that Israel needed Hamas’ 7 October attack to bomb the Gaza strip. Whilst the current merciless bombardment is unprecedented, it is in essence, the continuation of a long-standing trajectory of blood-soaked settle colonialist “disciplining” of the people whose land they had stolen.

Eyad spent the better part of his life fighting to “end the siege on Gaza.” And his words “I would rather die with dignity than live in fear” captures the spirit of the struggle for a free Palestine, from the river to the sea.

As Palestinians in Gaza face one of the most vicious bombardments in recent history, this spirit gives strength even in the face of trauma. For radicals in Africa and across the world in this traumatic era, this is a spirit that must continue to guide us. Books like Khalidi’s and Sarraj’s are tonic for this spirit.

Baba Aye

Time to reclaim black revolutionary politics

ROAPE

December 19, 2023

Mikayla Tillery reviews Kevin Okoth’s Red Africa: Reclaiming Revolutionary Black Politics. She delves into Okoth’s incisive critique of Afro-pessimism, Negritude, and the academic misinterpretations of Franz Fanon. Tillery discusses Okoth’s arguments against the idea that Marxism is Eurocentric by examining the historical suppression of Marxism in Kenya. She reveals how he highlights the contributions of black revolutionaries and reframes Marxism as a potent force for decolonisation and anti-imperialism.

By Mikayla Tillery

With a refreshing and incisive perspective, Okoth is not afraid to challenge contemporary Black scholarship in his poignant exploration of revolutionary Black political theory and action in his new book Red Africa: Reclaiming Revolutionary Black Politics. In a scathing yet insightful dissection, he exposes the limitations of discourse on issues including Black and Colonial Studies, afro-pessimism, Negritude, and Franz Fanon. His searing analysis leaves the reader aware that the future of revolutionary Black politics requires both Marxism and Black radicalism to reconcile what was lost with the incomplete project of decolonisation. Okoth impeccably straddles three audiences:

(1) Those who are well-versed in revolutionary Black political theory (Namely, Franz Fanon, Cedric Robinson, Walter Rodney, Frank B. Wilderson III, etc).

(2) Those unfamiliar with these foundational authors and texts.

(3) And those who have read seminal works and misinterpreted them, either maliciously or negligently.

Without compromise, he illuminates the failures and misrepresentations that have marred the intellectual landscape in modern Black political theory. Okoth’s call to action resonates strongly; he urges a resurrection of anti-imperialist solidarity, reminding readers of the imperative to salvage a contemporary path to liberation from the vestiges of Red Africa. Despite the forces that eroded these Marxist anticolonial movements – betrayal, suppression, or erasure – Red Africa is a rallying cry for revolutionary Black politics.

Black Studies and Afro-pessimism’s Betrayal of Radical Roots

In his polemic chapter on Black Studies and Afro-pessimism 2.0, Okoth condemns “the retreat of Black radicalism” in American universities. What once could have stood as beacons for Black revolutionary international solidarity, “failed to realise [their] radical potential.”

Okoth focuses on the betrayal of the Black Campus Movement, a movement that cultivated Black Studies at American universities as a space for radical student-activism and international solidarity only to be sold out to “institutionalisation and professionalisation.” He delineates the soul-crushing transition from Black Studies as a place of revolutionary thought and action, to a political playground for Black, middle-class, American men to reinforce parochial epistemologies, with nothing to show for their efforts when asked about solutions. With Okoth attributing this transformation to universities’ “precarious employment, low pay, pressure to publish, [etc]”, he outlines the conditions that often leave only the most neo-liberal Black scholars to survive.

In particular, Okoth highlights the proliferation of afro-pessimism – what Okoth calls AP 2.0 – by scholars like Frank B. Wilderson III and Jared Sexton as a symbol of the failure of the Black Studies project. Beginning (and ending) in American universities, AP 2.0 describes an ontology distinct from Marxism that posits two classes: Human and Black/Slave. This is also distinct from the prior conception of afro-pessimism (AP 1.0) which defined the term as the negative or pessimistic portrayal of Africa in Western media. In afro-pessimist 2.0 theory, the Black/Slave is uniquely dehumanized to the extent that solidarity is an impossibility. From the perspective of afro-pessimist 2.0 scholars, “Because anti-Blackness is qualitatively different from the regimes of violence that affect the Marxist proletariat, or the non-Black person of colour… we cannot speak of any experience of oppression without reference to the ontological disparities between Black/non-Black people.” As a result, the struggles of Black people are not only “qualitatively different from those of other oppressed peoples”, but also they leave no room for political action, interracial nuance, Marxist integration, or inquiry into colonial or imperial dynamics.

Revolution vs. Negritude

In a parallel critique, Okoth exposes the limitations of the monolithic portrayal of Blackness in the Negritude movement. Emerging in Paris in the 1930s from francophone African and Caribbean émigrés, Negritude was an ideological and political movement that essentialized Black identity, culture, and heritage with hopes to challenge colonial ideals of beauty.

Within Negritude’s “malpractice of diaspora” – defined as “the conflation of myriad experiences of racialisation under a monolithic Blackness” – Okoth takes issue with Negritude’s facade of universality. For Okoth, there is no universal “common Black heritage” when the philosophy neglects “particularities of race relations on the continent.” Negritude failed to do more than offer empty, non-transferable platitudes on Black exceptionalism. Okoth asks, “Is it at all surprising that, under Césaire’s leadership, Martinique chose to remain an overseas department of France?” That is, is Negritude so daft as to actively reinforce colonialism?

Okoth instructs that those wishing to transcend Negritude “should develop a practice of Black internationalism that is attentive to the multiple histories of diaspora, and that reaches for linkages despite such differences.” Okoth points to Amílcar Cabral, who navigated a post-Negritude approach by integrating Maoist tactics with his localized knowledge of Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique. In practice, Negritude is easily eclipsed by Marxism when political and intellectual leaders have the creativity to “[connect] the insights of Marxian method with the conditions of struggle on the ground.”

The Twisted Truths of Franz Fanon

Within contemporary Black scholarship, Okoth objects to the distortions of Fanon’s conclusions, the revisionist interpretations of his psychoanalytic role, and the academic reception of Fanon’s scholarship.

Okoth believes that afro-pessimists base their support of Fanon on a mistranslation. To believe that “The Fact of Blackness” represents an afro-pessimist Black ontology requires a fundamental misunderstanding of “L’expérience vécu du Noir” wherein afro-pessimists misrepresent lived experiences as being. Although the two are related, “The experience of racialisation creates the impression that Blackness is an inescapable and eternal condition; consequently, it transforms Blackness into a perceived reality.” This is a tradition of AP 2.0 which “distorts beyond recognition the various Black liberation movements that fought against racism, colonialism and imperialism throughout the global south.” Afro-pessimists would rather cling to an obtuse mistranslation than admit Fanon was a political, anti-imperialist Marxist, revolutionary in addition to his Black radicalism.

As Okoth moves from this critique, he asserts that some misrepresentations of Fanon “justify ‘post- or anti-revolutionary’ intellectual projects.” In response to Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Wilderson, who both distil Fanon as solely psychoanalytic by rejecting his other works, Okoth condemns that “anti-colonial thought has been distorted by the neoliberal university and emptied of its revolutionary content.” When scholars disregard Fanon’s connection to national liberation movements in favor of myopic Black radicalism, they betray “Fanon’s (self-)critique of the ‘native’ or colonised intellectual.” While Fanon was a psychiatrist, it’s a distortion of his legacy to treat his psychoanalytic work as anything but a call to “produce the spiritual and material conditions for the emergence of a new, decolonised subject.” His work as a psychiatrist was not to intellectualize the trauma of racism but to advocate for actionable revolutionary politics that integrate both Marxism and Black radicalism.

This comes to a head when discussing Fanon’s reception by “the ivory tower.” Okoth expresses frustration that the academy “lack[s] interest in the crucial everyday work of revolutionary struggle.” It is possible that Fanon’s positive academic reputation is because of his works’ misappropriation, or it could be because of his abstraction of revolutionary action. Either way, it stands to reason that the strategic and selective reading of Fanon is a short-sighted, yet normalised way to engage with Black radical politics in contemporary Black scholarship.

What is More Western: Marxism or Imperialism?

In Red Africa, the word betrayal is best reserved to describe failures in realising national liberation. Okoth details the suppression of Marxism in Kenya as a case of independence being thwarted by “the architects of revolution… gradually [becoming] its gravediggers.”

In revolutionary Kenya, it was clear that Jomo Kenyatta rhetorically situated Marxism as Eurocentric and anti-African in order “to sell imperialist positions to the public as ‘authentically African.'” It was a classic bait and switch; Kenyatta offered “African socialism”, a malignant misnomer, only to provide Western-endorsed privatization and primary commodity exportation. Kenya’s Minister of Justice at the time would argue that “Because no class problem existed in traditional African society… Marxism was irrelevant in Kenya.” As Marxists and leftists were systematically assassinated, Okoth instructs the reader to consider how “socialism, emptied of its revolutionary content, was used to silence a leftist opposition which sought to challenge the one-party state by evoking a different, more radical kind of Marxian socialism.” The reader is left to wonder if revolutionary leaders’ aversion to Marxism in Red Africa is betrayal in itself.

As a result, Okoth expresses scepticism for scholars that brand Marxism as a Eurocentric ideal, like Cedric Robinson in his theory of Black Marxism. Okoth refutes the claim that “Marxism… was an insufficiently radical self-examination of Western civilisation.” While he concedes that Marx was a Western, bourgeois scholar “supported by unfree labour”, Okoth cites several instances of Marx considering non-Western class dynamics, chattel slavery, and its abolition to disprove the assumption proffered by Robert Brenner, Robinson, and afro-pessimists that “enslaved labour is non-capitalist since capitalism is a system based on the exploitation of ‘free’ wage labour.” By rejecting this argument, Okoth concludes that “slavery was not a pre-capitalist form, but represented capitalism in its early stages as a mode of production”, thus rejecting a Black ontology argument against Marxism as a Western ideal.

While Okoth primarily agrees with Robinson’s takes on the historical contingency of Blackness and slavery, he argues that many of Robinson’s stances are not mutually exclusive with Marxism as a method. Instead, he argues, “we can avoid parochial ontological conceptions of Blackness while simultaneously emphasising the histories of interconnection between Black people across the world.” Going back to the Kenya example, Okoth conceives of a Red Africa that incorporates both Marxism and Black radicalism so long as Black radical thought leaves room for Marxists to realize national independence as decolonial and anti-imperialist.

Gender in Revolutionary Politics

In Okoth’s exploration of gender, his attempts to champion Andrée Blouin’s anti-colonial feminist contributions veer into gender essentialist perspectives. His focus on Blouin, an influential figure in 20th-century anti-colonial feminism, feels myopic in its analysis of women’s contributions to Red Africa. While acknowledging that Blouin’s struggle to impact post-independence politics should be attributed to misogyny, it is important not to conflate questions of what national politics could have looked like with more female participation and deterministic assumptions that women’s representation, and the gendered traits we ascribe to revolutionary women, are what keeps us from the success of the national liberation project.

In one instance, Okoth argues that “For Blouin, [Lumumba’s] inability to put the needs of the nation over those of his family, as she had often done, constitutes nothing short of the betrayal of national liberation.” While this may apply to Blouin, Okoth then immediately extends the conclusion to the larger feminist anti-colonial project: “Blouin gives the strong impression that the African revolution… would have been more radical if the women responsible for igniting it had found a place in post-independence governments, or if they had been more intimately involved in the formal process of decolonisation.” By ascribing characteristics to Blouin, such as her apparent prioritization of national liberation over motherhood and selflessness, then gendering these characteristics, Okoth perpetuates gender stereotypes, even if he portrays them as being positive. In line with prior critiques he has of Negritude, it is important that Okoth condemns strategic or positive gender essentialism.

Okoth’s interrogation of Black revolutionary politics in Red Africa instigates a crucial discourse within contemporary academia and intellectual spheres. His critique challenges the complacency shrouding modern Black intellectuals, urging for a re-evaluation of ideologies and frameworks that restrain the realization of liberation. As readers journey through Okoth’s elucidation of the failures within Black Studies, AP 2.0, Negritude and interpretations of Fanon, they are challenged to embrace a paradigm shift towards a more inclusive, nuanced, and action-oriented approach to Black internationalism, Marxism, and Black radicalism.

Okoth leaves the reader with a farewell remark: “It is up to us to build a communism for our times from the ruins of Red Africa.” He reminds us that, in spite of the forces that cannibalized Red Africa – asymmetric power assigned to the intellectual elite, monolithic portrayals of Blackness, and a misrepresentation of diasporic Black perspectives as universal – we have an obligation to reinvest into the anti-imperialist solidarity that gave us Red Africa.

Mikayla Tillery is an activist and an African and African-American Studies student from Stanford University. She founded Students for Black Maternal Health, an online coalition of Black students advocating for legislation that addresses the disproportionate rate of Black women dying from pregnancy.

Feature Photograph: Protest in South Africa 1980s (wiki commons)

Africa’s role in Palestinian liberation–an interview with Salim Vally

ROAPE

December 14, 2023

ROAPE interviews South African Human Rights activist and academic Salim Vally on Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and the relationship between Palestinian liberation and Africa. Vally argues that Israel’s military campaign is rooted in 75 years of Israeli settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing. He also discusses the shifting positions of African countries in the conflict, noting the complex role of Egypt, and delves into the comparison between the Israeli regime and South African Apartheid based on recent human rights reports. He ultimately calls for African support for Palestine against Israel’s military-industrial complex, which is backed by Western imperialism.

By Salim Vally

What are the roots of the current Israel war on Gaza, which led to the bombing and forced displacement of millions of Palestinians from North Gaza?

The mainstream narrative presents the latest Israeli bombing as a response to “unprovoked” attacks by the Palestinian resistance on 7 October. It, however, neglects the broader context. The latter includes British colonialism and the Nakba 75 years ago, where Zionist terror gangs eradicated 418 Palestinian towns and villages and ethnically cleansed 80 per cent of the indigenous Palestinian population–over 750,000 people. Today two-thirds of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million are refugees and their descendants, victims of the Nakba in 1947-1948, the 1967 displacements and ethnic cleansing in more contemporary times. The people of Gaza, 50 per cent of whom are children, have endured profound suffering, forced displacement, and a brutal 17-year-long inhumane medieval-like siege and blockade, including five major brutal regular Israeli carpet bombings, which the Israeli generals and politicians refer to as “mowing the lawn”. Human rights organisations have long characterised Gaza as the largest open-air prison, which morphed into a concentration camp and now an extermination camp.

To what extent does the rise of far-right in Israel have a part to play in the current crisis?

The present genocidal attack is the wet dream of the Israeli far-right. They have long argued for ‘finishing the Nakba’ and a ‘final-solution’. The presence of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister for internal security in Netanyahu’s government along with other far-right ideologues, including Avigdor Moaz overseeing school curriculum and Bezalel Smotrich the Finance Minister responsible for building settlements in the Occupied Territories, effectively jettisons the old tropes liberal Zionists employed to defend Israel — that it is the only democracy in the Middle East, that it seeks a peaceful settlement with the Palestinians in a two-state solution, that extremism and racism have no place in Israeli society and that Israel must impose draconian forms of control on the Palestinians to prevent terrorism.

Ben-Gvir is a disciple of the genocidal rabbi Meir Kahane and considers Baruch Goldstein “a hero.” On 25 Feburary 1994, Baruch Goldstein a US-born settler entered Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque wearing his IDF reserve uniform with a Galil rifle. He opened fire during Muslim morning prayers and killed 29 Palestinians. Ben-Gvir displayed a portrait of the mass murderer Baruch Goldstein in his living room. The profoundly racist Kahanist ideology Goldstein ascribed to has a deep influence on Israeli policy today. The ideology that led to the massacre isn’t just history. The same ideology is mainstream in present-day Israel and massacres are carried out no longer by individual gunmen but coordinated by the army and police with regularity.

Avigdor Maoz from the extremist Noam Party, opposes LGBTQ rights, is a misogynist and has been appointed to oversee the Israeli school curriculum. Other notorious members of the government include Zvika Fogel who chairs the Israeli Parliament’s National Security Committee – not too long ago Fogel called for a “final war” against Palestinians, to “subdue them once and for all”.

The old tropes Israel employed to justify itself were always more fiction than reality in any case. Israel long ago became an apartheid state. It directly controls through its illegal Jewish-only settlements, restricted military zones and army compounds, over 60 per cent of the West Bank and has de facto control over the rest. A high priority of the government is the further annexation of the Naqab (Negev) desert and the Galilee in Israel’s south and north, respectively, where many Palestinians reside. They have already made clear their desire to formally annex large sections of the West Bank, including “Area C” where up to 300,000 Palestinians live. Netanyahu intends to construct 10,000 new housing units in nine illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

The old tropes are being replaced by screed-filled diatribes that paint Palestinians and Arabs (Muslim and Christian) as contaminants and an existential threat to Israel. This hate speech is accompanied by a vicious internal campaign to silence Jewish “traitors,” especially those who are liberal or left-wing and secular.

In what ways might the Palestinian crisis express the failure of the Oslo peace process? Is fair to say that the two-state solution is a myth?

The extensive criticism of the Oslo Accords and the warnings by the likes of the Palestinian-American intellectual, Edward Said and the poet Mahmoud Darwish has come to fruition. The Oslo Accords which were meant to freeze the building of settlements in fact resulted in a massive proliferation of settlers numbering over five hundred thousand settlers in the occupied territories making a two-state denouement impossible apart from a parody of a sovereign state without contiguous territory and no real powers – less than the Bantustans that existed in South Africa.

Referring to the Oslo Accords, Prof Haidar Eid, A South African-Palestinian currently displaced to the south of Gaza (and whose house and university were bombed as well as many colleagues and students killed with their family members) wrote in June 2020:

They kept feeding this delusion for 27 years, refusing to admit the economic, political and even physical impossibility of establishing a truly sovereign Palestinian state amid an active colonisation project and lack of territorial contiguity…The painful question we must ask today is whether, since 1993, we have been forced to endure horrible massacres, a genocidal siege, the unstoppable seizure of our land, the building of an apartheid wall, the detention of children and entire families, demolition of homes, and many other abuses only because a comprador class saw “independence” at the end of a closed tunnel…Before he left us, Said published two pieces, Israel-Palestine: A Third Way and the only alternative, in which he offered a solution based on “equality or nothing”, one that can be materialised with the establishment of a secular democratic state in Palestine in which all citizens are treated equally regardless of their religion, sex, and colour. A comprehensive peace, he postulated, means that Israel, the colonising power should acknowledge the right of Palestinians to exist as a people, their right to self-determination and to equality, as the white colonisers did in South Africa.

Why do you think Hamas chose this moment in history to launch its biggest-ever attack on Israeli territory?

Many commentators in the West have wrongly ascribed the attacks to the Iranian influence on Hamas and the changing regional dynamics, including a likely normalisation process with Saudi Arabia following the ‘Abraham Accords’ with Morocco, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates and Sudan. More compelling is the view that sees the Hamas action, despite its ingenuity and audacity, as akin to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against a much more militarily superior adversary. The more likely factors that contributed to the attacks on 7 October include the 17-year-long strangulation of Gaza and the likelihood of a sixth bombardment of Gaza since 2007; the expansion of settlements; the Israeli state’s enabling of increasingly violent settler pogroms in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem; the frequent desecration of the Al Aqsa compound and the increasing arrests and maltreatment of Palestinian political prisoners, including children.

What has been the position of most African countries on the Israel-Palestine conflict? Can lessons be drawn from the African anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles of the second half of the 20th century for the Palestinian liberation struggle today?

The establishment of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in 1961 and the role played in its inception by Indonesia’s Sukarno, India’s Nehru, Egypt’s Nasser and Ghana’s Nkrumah helped connect anti-colonial struggles in Africa and Asia with the Palestinian struggle. Support from Cuba, the Soviet Union and its allies also brought together anti-imperialist struggles. This direct contact proved to be important for the PLO to establish connections and pursue support within the continent and to assist in countering Israel’s Africa strategy, at least in the UN and other multilateral fora (even if there were contradictions with the bilateral relations some African states had with Israel).

Historical ties forged through these common struggles for national liberation in Africa and Palestine have shifted considerably in recent years. Many states on the African continent are normalising relations with Israel, opening up diplomatic relations and economic partnerships, and ignoring the commitment enshrined in the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights to fight against apartheid, racism and Zionism.

In North Africa, there is still some government and much popular support for Palestine, as manifested in the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings and, recently, in the Algerian Hirak. But for young people in many sub-Saharan countries, whose identification with their own national liberation struggles has diminished, relations with the Palestinian Authority, PLO and the Palestinian people are not very resonant. Many younger Africans feel let down by erstwhile liberation movements that have failed them in government and appealing to a shared liberatory past is no longer an automatic identification.

There is increasing military cooperation between Israel and some African regimes whose arms purchases finance Israel’s genocidal practices against Palestinians and fuel repression and wars in Africa. Israeli sales of military hardware, and surveillance and security technologies such as Pegasus spyware to various African governments undermine democracy and the rights of the people on our continent. Israel attempts to greenwash its Apartheid crimes by selling water and agro-technology to African countries. In fact, these projects are unsustainable and destructive to local communities. Israel also hopes to mobilise African votes in UN bodies and is grooming partners to substantially shift the African multilateral position away from support for the Palestinians in multilateral fora and to develop reliable African bilateral partners. Styling itself as a “start-up nation”, Israel promotes an image of a country based on innovatory Small-Medium Enterprises that offer high-tech, low-cost solutions for sustainable agriculture, water technology and renewable energy. This puts a sustainable development façade to its export of security- and military-related technology. (Recently, however, a number of scandals related to the activities of Israeli cyber companies have begun to tarnish Israel’s image.)

At the same time, Christian Zionism, which seeks to provide a theological justification for Israel’s apartheid crimes, is being funded and promulgated through the proliferation of fundamentalist churches in Africa, often linked to conservative Christians in the West. It is proving a powerful way to mask Israeli racism towards Africans and create a pro-Israeli narrative within civil society.

A combination of these developments created the conditions to allow the African Union Commission chair, Moussa Faki Mahamet, to unilaterally accept credentials from the apartheid Israel ambassador in July 2021. Allowing apartheid Israel into the Union clearly and flagrantly contravenes the AU Constitutive Act, which commits the AU to “promote and protect human and peoples’ rights in accordance with the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR)”. Indeed, the African Charter itself makes a pointed commitment on behalf of Africans to “eliminate colonialism, neo-colonialism, apartheid, [and] Zionism”. It was clear in the AU debate that there was no agreement on accrediting Israel. Major countries from each African region and those that played a key role in the establishment of the AU – Nigeria from West Africa, South Africa from Southern Africa, Algeria from North Africa, and Tanzania from East Africa – all voiced their strong opposition. Their positions were supported by a number of other African foreign ministers. South Africa explicitly linked Israel with apartheid South Africa and, along with Namibia, spoke out against the crimes of Israeli apartheid.

As a result of these developments, solidarity organisations and activists in March 2022 launched a Pan African Palestine Solidarity Network (PAPSN) in Dakar Senegal. Participants came from Botswana, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Malawi, Mauritania, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Sudan Tanzania, Tunisia, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Nelson Mandela supported Palestine. (credit: Hafez Omar)

What is Egypt’s role in the current crisis, given that it shares a border with Gaza?

The 2011 uprisings that saw the overthrow of Mubarak exacerbated tensions with Israel, particularly during the Mohammed Morsi presidency, given the Muslim Brotherhood’s anti-Zionist rhetoric, their relations with Hamas and Morsi’s opening the Rafah crossing into Gaza. In April 2011, under the interim leadership of the Supreme Council for the Armed Forces, Egypt brokered a Fatah-Hamas reconciliation agreement. After General Abdelfattah El-Sisi ousted Morsi in a coup in 2013, relations between Egypt and Israel improved again. The uprisings and their aftermath showed, however, that while the Egyptian elite and the military regarded the peace accord with Israel to be beneficial, popular opinion was behind the Palestinian struggle. According to a 2019-2020 survey by the Arab Centre for Research and Policy Studies only 13% of Egyptians support diplomatic relations with Israel, while 85% oppose it. Under Sisi’s authoritarian rule, the harsh suppression of civil society and opposition parties made it impossible to openly organise Palestinian solidarity from within Egypt.

How accurate is the comparison between the Israeli regime with South African Apartheid?

Well to start with, both societies as settler colonial formations were formed by Europeans, overseen by British imperialism. They enacted their particular racist states in 1948 relying on white supremacy and its ‘civilising mission’ complemented by the messianic ‘God’s chosen people’ view and the gift of a ‘promised land’ based on the Bible — at the expense of indigenous people.

In addition to identifying with the struggle of Palestinians, South Africans also recognised Israel’s culpability in their own oppression. For instance, Israel was an important arms supplier to Apartheid South Africa despite the international arms embargo, and as late as 1980, 35% of Israel’s arms exports were destined for South Africa. Much has been written about the subsequent relationship between apartheid South Africa and Israel. It will suffice here to say that Israel was loyal to the Apartheid state and clung to the friendship when almost all other relationships had dissolved. During the 1970s this affiliation extended into the field of nuclear weaponry when Israeli experts helped South Africa to develop at least six nuclear warheads and in the 1980s, when the global Anti-Apartheid Movement had forced their states to impose sanctions on the Apartheid regime, Israel imported South African goods and re-exported them to the world as a form of inter-racist solidarity. Israeli companies subsidised by the South African regime despite the pittance they paid workers were established in a number of Bantustans.

Strong bonds were also forged between Palestinians, the PLO and South African liberation organisations. There are also clear similarities between the 65 odd pieces of discriminatory legislation in Israel that governs all aspects of everyday life, the fragmentation and theft of the land and the matrix of security laws with what existed in South African Apartheid. While the laws are similar, they are not the same and actually apartheid Israel is much more severe than what existed in South African. An important critical difference though is that apartheid South Africa depended on the super exploitation of the labour of indigenous Black people. In Israel the indigenous Palestinians are disposal and expendable.

Over the past few years, a number of organisations have concluded that systemic and widespread discriminatory Israeli policies and practices against the Palestinians amount to a violation of the international convention on the suppression and punishment of the crime of apartheid. Of course, Palestinians and South Africans have been saying this for decades. The Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese in her recent report on human rights in the occupied territories laments that “while the international community has not fully acted upon it” she makes the point that “the concept that Israeli occupation meets the legal threshold of apartheid is gaining traction”.

A brief mention of these reports: In January 2021, B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, released a report unambiguously titled A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This Is Apartheid. Three months later, Human Rights Watch, echoed this finding when it issued an exhaustive report, including extensive legal analysis, which concluded damningly that Israeli authorities are committing crimes against humanity, in the form of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people. A year later, in January 2022, Amnesty International, issued a report titled Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: A Cruel System of Domination and a Crime against Humanity. The latter report’s key components include territorial fragmentation; segregation and control; dispossession of land and property; the denial of basic economic and social rights and the suppression of Palestinian’s human development.

In addition, I’m aware of numerous theses and dissertations over the years that speak to these issues and many books about apartheid in South Africa and Israel such as Abdelwahab M. Elmessiri book as early as 1976, Israel and South Africa: The Progression of a Relationship to an edited collection to the edited book by Illan Pappe in (2015) Israel and South Africa: The Many Faces of Apartheid.

The most recent report, Francesca Albanese’s September 2022 report to the UN General Assembly requires some discussion. It significantly speaks to some limitations of the apartheid framework: It’s important to mention some details:

(a) First, with few exceptions, the scope of recent reports on Israeli apartheid is primarily “territorial” and excludes the experience of Palestinian refugees. She says the recognition of Israeli apartheid must address the experience of the Palestinian people in its entirety and in their unity as a people, including those who were displaced, denationalized and dispossessed in 1947 –1949 (many of whom live in the occupied Palestinian territory);

(b) Second, a focus on Israeli apartheid alone misses the inherent illegality of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem. The Israeli occupation is illegal because it has proven not to be temporary, is deliberately administered against the best interests of the occupied population. Its illegality also stems from its systematic violation of at least three peremptory norms of international law: the prohibition on the acquisition of territory through the use of force; the prohibition on imposing regimes of alien subjugation, domination and exploitation, including racial discrimination and apartheid; and the obligation of States to respect the right of peoples to self -determination.

(c) Third, the apartheid framework does not address the “root causes” which Albanese calls settler colonialism – a war crime under the Rome Statute.

About two months after the Special Rapporteur’s report, the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq in its report Israeli Apartheid: Tool of Zionist settler colonialism echoes Francesca Albanese and expands the current international discourse on apartheid, and importantly, examines apartheid as a structural element of furthering Zionist settler colonialism on both sides of the Green Line and against the Palestinian people as a whole. The report adds clear Palestinian voices and analysis to the wider international calls demanding an end to Israel’s apartheid regime. To quote: “Palestinian civil society demand decolonisation and dismantling of Israel’s settler colonialism and apartheid regime, the fulfilment of the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, systematically denied since the British mandate, and the right of refugees and exiles in the diaspora to return”.

Why should Africans support the struggle to free Palestine?

Jeff Halper’s book War Against the People, shows us how Israel through its high-tech weaponry, ‘securitisation’ and methods of pacification plays a key role in the global suppression of human rights. It makes the very important point that the occupation:

…represents a resource for Israel in two senses: economically, it provides a testing ground for the development of weapons, security systems, models of population control and tactics without which Israel would be unable to compete in the international arms and security markets, but no less important, being a major military power serving other militaries and security services the world over lends Israel an international status amongst the global hegemons it would not have otherwise.

A reading of imperialism shows that apartheid Israel is needed as a fundamentalist and militarised warrior state not only to quell the undefeated and unbowed Palestinians but also as a rapid response fount of reaction in concert with despotic Arab regimes to do the Empire’s bidding in the Middle East and beyond.

We have to recognise that the foundation of the Israeli economy was founded on the special political and military role which Zionism then and today fulfils for Western imperialism. While initially playing its role to ensure that the region is safe for oil companies it has also carved out today a niche market producing high-tech security essential for the day-to-day functioning of Imperialism. The weaponry and technology the Israeli military-industrial complex exports around the world are field tested on the bodies of Palestinian men, women and children. As Adam Hanieh argues, “It is not merely the depth of suffering or length of exile that makes the Palestinian struggle an imperative of international solidarity in the current period. It is also the central location of the struggle within the broader context of global resistance to imperialism and neoliberalism.”

Salim Vally is an South African Human Rights activist and Professor and Director of the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation (CERT) at the University of Johannesburg and the National Research Foundation’s South African Research Initiative’s Chair in Community, Adult and Workers Education (CAWE).

Featured photograph: Palestine protest with Egyptian flag (Wiki Commons)

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