Kenya – a loyal lieutenant of imperialism

December 12, 2023

On the 60^th anniversary of Kenya’s independence, Gathanga Ndung’u writes that the country has spent decades as the loyal servant of imperialism. The country may have express highways, a busy international airport, a modern railway, and an emerging silicone savannah, but in reality, Kenya seeks only to endear itself to world leaders and potential investors through well-packaged imaginaries of the present and the future. Ndung’u lists some of Kenya’s extensive betrayals – not least support for Israel and the abandonment of Palestinians.

By Gathanga Ndung’u

As Kenya marks 60 years of independence on 12 December, pundits are set with their narrow developmental lenses to examine the country’s progress over the years. Her growth is being tethered on capitalist metrics of growth such as Gross Domestic Product, Gross National Income, on geopolitical influence in Eastern and Central Africa, the global stage at large, and Kenya’s value and role in global capitalism. Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, has continued to be marketed as a growing node for global capitalism, an entry port into the region, and a major fintech capital apart from being the safari capital of the world. With express highways, a busy international airport, a modern railway, green energy, and an emerging silicone savannah, Kenya has continued to endear herself to world leaders and potential investors through well-packaged imaginaries of the present and the future. However, this growth and development has been achieved at a cost that forms the focal point of this piece.

In this blogpost I look at how Kenya has betrayed her independence war heroes: the Land and Freedom Army (popularly known as Mau Mau), and even went ahead to proscribe their activities and labelled them as terrorists. Surprisingly, Kenya has not only betrayed internally but also externally. These betrayals, to a larger extent, have allowed Kenya to dine with imperialist forces and cement her place on the global stage. As she betrayed her people on home soil, she did the same to her peers on the continent and the Global South in what should not be viewed just as mere diplomatic bluffs as in the case of rescinding recognition of Western Saharawi but rather as systematic work for an imperialist agenda.

However, this should be understood from the perspective of the state, since the Kenyan masses have always rallied with the oppressed across the world, joining hands and showing solidarity whenever the need arose such as the ongoing marches and activities in solidarity with the people of Palestine and Sudan. As we examine six decades of independence, I chose to take stock of our mistakes and external betrayals made by the state in siding with imperialists and oppressors when others showed solidarity.

A darling of apartheid regimes: Israel and South Africa

Kenya has continued to be one of Israel’s greatest allies in Africa in what has been christened as a mutually beneficial relationship with historical ties in military and technical cooperation. The apartheid state of Israel has been sanitized in Kenya’s churches by individuals who do not understand how Israel came into being as a state. This scripted misinformation and disinformation has been carefully disseminated to the Kenyan masses through both the state and the church.

In return, Kenya has received technological aid in military, police, agriculture, healthcare, communications, and surveillance. One of the outstanding legacies of this cooperation are the specially trained RECCE Squad (Reconnaissance Squadron) part of the dreaded General Service Unit (GSU), with the RECCE Squad being used in the suppression of demonstrators while the GSU being hardened for urban warfare.

Israeli’s experience in suppressing and wiping out Palestinians has systematically been passed on to our forces and the same tactics have been used on peaceful demonstrators in Kenya. This has over time connected Kenya to a perpetual cycle of aid dependency while the US and Israel have turned the country into ‘their foster child’ in Africa in the global war on terror.

During the recent conflict between Hamas and Israel, Kenya’s hypocrisy was unmasked through President William Ruto’s blatant statement giving unequivocal support to Israe l while labelling Palestinians as terrorists even though the Land and Freedom Army faced similar treatment more than sixty years ago. Kenya has claimed to be in solidarity with oppressed people around the world while the country’s policies support global bullies and murderers. When other countries such as South Africa have recalled their ambassadors in Israel, Kenya continues to court imperialist forces with open arms while suppressing any solidarity marches so as not to provoke her benefactors and donors.

Kenya’s relationship with apartheid Israel is not an anomaly. At the height of South Africa’s liberation struggle, Kenya maintained a cordial relationship with the ruling apartheid regime. While other countries were boycotting international sporting fixtures with South Africa, and others such as Tanzania and Zambia were supporting the liberation struggle through the training of militants and offering technical support, the Kenyan government continued to engage with the regime as though it were a legitimate government. This happened despite the Organization of African Unity (OAU) having passed resolutions to its member states not to engage with the racist regime.

A statue of Dedan Kimathi Waciuri (31 October 1920 – 18 February 1957), born Kimathi wa Waciuri. He was the senior military and spiritual leader of the Land and Freedom Army – a movement that led to the eventual independence of The Republic of Kenya. He led the armed military struggle against the British colonial regime in Kenya in the 1950s until his execution in 1957.

Kenya seemed to be unashamedly supportive of racist South Africa despite having gone through a bloody liberation struggle and her wounds still being fresh. In June 1991, the then president of South Africa, Frederik Willem de Klerk visited Nairobi in an official capacity which was followed by a reciprocal visit by Kenyan President Daniel Moi the following year to Cape Town. His visit to South Africa was the first by a sitting African leader which legitimized an apartheid regime on African soil. This relationship with the apartheid regime shaped what came to be a frosty relationship between Kenya and South Africa’s first democratic government which viewed Kenya with suspicion.

Kenya’s Haiti Mission

In September 2023, Kenya declared its interest to lead the ‘peacekeeping’ mission in Haiti which has been plagued by gang violence after the assassination of the former president, Jovenel Moise, in his home in Port-au-Prince. In his address to the nation after the 2 October UN Security Council’s approval of the mission under resolution UNSCR 2699(2023), Ruto reiterated his Pan-African populist rhetoric of ‘cooperation’ and ‘solidarity’ among the black people everywhere.

The Kenyan president has been known to endear himself to fellow Africans as a pan-Africanist the same way he rode to power on a charade of populist, bottom-up economics and politics. This time, he has found an international platform to upscale his conmanship while at the same time to sit at the imperialist table. Through this mission, Kenya will be the face of imperialism backed up by the US, Britain and France which reply heavily on compliant states in the UN to support their missions.

This step raises many questions on whose interests is Kenya acting, since the Constitution of Kenya in 2010 has no provision for external deployment of police officers. A closer look at the previous deployment of the Kenyan Defense Forces (KDF) shows the involvement of US, Britain, and their allies in backing Kenya on international missions.

Kenya’s mission in Somalia came after the abduction of two Spanish staff members working with Médecins Sans Frontières at the Dadaab Refugee Camp in 2011. This intervention was heavily backed up by the US, and other Western powers while the recent mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo follows nearly the same century-old script of maintaining law and order in a country rendered ungovernable as a result of foreign generated civil wars and political strife.

Kenyan forces have now become the foot soldiers of imperialism around the world which parallels the two World Wars in the 20^th century when Africans were recruited (some forcefully) to fight and die in distant lands on behalf of the British government. The only difference is that this time, it is a comprador class in Kenya that is sacrificing our people on the altar of global capitalism as they seek acceptance, recognition and financial incentives that come with such missions.

Western powers understand the need to reconfigure their imperialist agenda to fit in the ever-changing geopolitical landscape. To avoid the criticism of interference by foreign powers, the US has chosen to use Kenya’s armed forces to meddle in the affairs of Haiti. This has allowed them to take a backstage seat, relax and watch the wretched of the earth annihilate and oppress each other using tactics and techniques which have been shared to them through military trainings and exchange programs.

This is the role that Kenya is successfully executing on the global stage.

Red Carpet for King Charles III

Ruto has mastered the art of speaking from both sides of his mouth which led to Julius Malema the leader of South Africa’s Economic Freedom Fighter (EFF) likening him to a chameleon who is impossible to understand. Malema who had visited the country to launch the Pan-African Institute at Lukenya University, reprimanded Ruto for siding with Israel and labelling Hamas as terrorist. He went on to criticize Ruto for the glamourous welcoming of King Charles III in the country which included according him a 21-gun salute by the country’s defense forces. Yet nothing was said on reparations for the many victims of British tyranny during colonial rule.

Charles chose Kenya for his first international visit after his coronation, coinciding with a year when Kenya was preparing to celebrate 60 years of independence. In a visit full of pomp and glamour, nothing substantive was achieved or addressed to benefit the common man.

Kenya has continued to provide a base for imperialist forces on the continent even those who have been directly involved in the oppression of Kenya’s people. Kenya continues to recognize the crown as the head of the Commonwealth at a time when many continue to reject the monarchy including young Britons, and other countries ditch the imperial institution.

Towards Kenya’s freedom

As we mark six decades of British and US imperialism, and neoliberalism in the country, we need to have a candid interrogation into the country’s foreign policies and how we relate to the rest of the continent, and the Global South at large. We also need to ask if we are a truly an independent country or just another oversee territory of the Crown.

Tragically Kenya has been an appendage of global capitalism with Britain and the US controlling their interests in the country. It is hard to undo these betrayals but there is still room for penitence. This penitence must start by addressing our internal betrayals to our freedom fighters who remain landless, and to the current betrayals of structural adjustment policies and the barrage of ruthless taxes supported by IMF which are slowly chocking the life out of Kenyans in the midst of a devastating economic crisis.

Only then can we deal with our past and current political and external betrayals. This should help us create meaningful solidarity with other oppressed countries and chart our way as a truly independent country.

Gathanga Ndung’u is a community organiser with Ruaraka Social Justice Centre which is under the Social Justice Centres’ Working Group. He is also part of Revolutionary Social League brigade that organizes political education in different political cells in the respective centres in Nairobi.

Featured Photographs: 10th anniversary of Kenya independence (16 January 2009).

ROAPE – a revolutionary new beginning

ROAPE

December 7, 2023

For 50 years, ROAPE has brought our readers pathbreaking analysis on radical African political economy in our quarterly review, and for more than ten years on our website. ROAPE’s founding editor, Peter Lawrence, explains that from January 2024, all of our readers will be able to access every part of ROAPE as well as its archive without a paywall. This will make ROAPE accessible to a much wider readership, especially in Africa. We need subscriptions and donations to make this revolutionary intiative work. Sign up now!

Subscribe and Donate now!

As we have recently announced on our website , at the end of this month we are leaving our publisher, the global corporate giant Taylor and Francis, and returning to our original status as an independent self-published journal. In a further exciting development, the journal will be openly accessible online without a paywall.

For 25 years from our first issue in 1974 the Editorial Working Group was responsible for the publication of the journal and in the very early years was also involved in the physical production process. The journal financed itself from relatively low subscription rates but with a large number of subscribers, especially from individuals as well as institutions and also in the early years, bookshop sales. Costs were kept low by the voluntary input of some of the editors in editorial and financial management. Gradually this became too much for the editorial group to manage and we set ourselves up as a cooperative, ROAPE Publications Ltd, with not very well-paid workers dealing with editing, production and sales.

Always short of money and close to folding, the journal was offered a home with Carfax, which subsequently via Routledge became part of the increasingly large Taylor and Francis stable of journals. This put us on a very stable financial footing with a good relationship with our publishing colleagues and proper payment to our production manager, and later website editor as well as honorary payments to our editors with roles in the production of the journal.

We were also able to run our Connections workshops across the continent with additional support from donors. This came at the cost of being part of a global corporate and a large increase in subscription prices. As a radical left journal, and still a cooperative, we were never happy with this arrangement even if our publishers never interfered in our editorial decisions.

In particular, we did not like that the past seven years of issues were behind a paywall, and effectively inaccessible to a large number of readers. Even some of our institutional subscribers did not have access to the whole 50 years old archive. Our discomfort increased with the advent of the duplicitiously termed ‘open access’ model driven by the Research Councils and other bodies whose grants include an element to compensate the publisher for the loss of income from being required to make articles based on funded research openly accessible. This ‘pay to publish’ model means that to make an article that has been accepted for publication openly accessible, authors have to pay the publisher whether from a research grant or from their own pocket. We did not want to be part of this new academic exclusivity.

So, from January 2024, you will now be able to access electronically all parts of ROAPE as well as its archive without a paywall. We are partnering in these exciting developments with ScienceOpen and through our website you will be able to access and to contribute to the journal. This will make it accessible to a much wider readership, especially in Africa.

We know that journals that have taken this step have increased their readership many times over. We are sure that we will do the same.

Like other periodicals that have taken this step, we will still need an income. We are hoping that readers of our website and of the journal will support us. You can do this by subscribing to access the journal online at our much-reduced rates for personal subscriptions. At a higher but still affordable rate you can have both an online and print version.

You can also support the journal with a regular or a one-off donation with your subscription, or by simply making a donation. We will also be offering subscribers and donors significant discounts on books or attendance at conferences that we organise, including two exiting new titles coming out next year, and anniversary events in 2024.

We shall continue to produce a high-quality peer-reviewed journal supporting the work of scholars and activists both across the African continent and around the world. In funding ROAPE through subscriptions and donations you will enable us to sustain production and open access to the rigorous, high quality and radical analysis of African political economy that has been the hallmark of this journal over the last 50 years.

Subscribe and Donate now!

Peter Lawrence is an editor of ROAPE, a leading member of ROAPE’s Editorial Working Group, and a founding editor of the journal.

Until Everyone is Free

ROAPE

December 5, 2023

In telling the story of Kenya’s struggles for independence, Wairimu Gathimba reminds us that the issue of Palestine is part of an unfinished journey of national liberation for all colonized people that began in the last century. Gathimba argues that the current war will only end with the decolonization of Palestine and a democratic state for all.

By Wairimu Gathimba

Over the last 75 years, the Israel settler colony has denied Palestinians their fundamental rights, including the right to self-determination, and subjected them to an institutionalized and systemic regime of racial domination and oppression. Palestinians have resisted this dispossession since its imposition in 1948, both through legal means, including UN-led negotiations whose resolutions Israel has repeatedly failed to respect, and armed resistance.

This is a story Kenya is all too familiar with. In our struggle for independence from the British settler colony that treated us as subhuman on our own land, our freedom fighters first pursued non-violent means, even in the face of daily settler violence. Similar to the non-Islamist, non-violent Palestinian resistance, organizers such as the Young Kikuyu Association and the East African Association were subject to the same violent repression despite pursuing non-militant means. In Kenya we rremember the massacre following the general strike of 1922 after the arrest of Harry Thuku who was himself an advocate for peaceful negotiations for independence.

As our ancestors were to find out, there is really no way to appeal to a colonizer’s sensibilities; decolonization is often a violent struggle.

Disillusioned by unforthcoming change, our ancestors took to armed resistance under the Kenya Land and Freedom Army in a fight that significantly weakened the settler colony’s hold and led to our sovereignty less than a decade later. This is common knowledge to us Kenyans, heavily featured in our history textbooks. President Ruto himself has made statements reflecting on this knowledge, even promising to build a museum in Nyandarua to honour the Mau Mau (the Kenya Land and Freedom Army) who contributed immensely to the struggle for independence.

Yet, how can the president acknowledge the role of armed resistance in freeing Kenya and then proceed to proclaim solidarity with Israel?

In an act that echoes our own Dedan Kimathi‘s sentiment of “It’s better to die on your feet than to live on your knees”, Hamas, a faction of Palestinian resistance, took the fight back to the most religious and hardline right-wing government in Israel’s history on 7 October. Since then, we have seen Hamas branded “terrorists” who seek to “kill Jews” most notably by the United States, and in the words of President Biden in his statement on the 7 October attacks.

Given the use of such language to describe Palestinian armed resistance, you would be forgiven to think that the violence in Israel began that day, but a quick social media search would suffice to convince you otherwise.

In July this year, a video of Israeli settlers pouring concrete into a Palestinian well was trending on Twitter. Just four days before the 7 October attacks, Al Jazeera featured a story on the storming of the Al-Aqsa mosque by Israeli settlers. The West does not condemn such violence, and why would they?

A quick look into the history of the Israeli state will reveal that Israel exists only because of European antisemitism. Many antisemites who believed that Jewish people did not belong in Europe supported the establishment of an ethno-state for them. So in true British imperialist spirit, Palestinian land occupied was considered empty, in the same way that “wasteland” and “unoccupied” land in the East African Protectorate “occupied by savage tribes” had been declared empty, justifying its control and occupation by the British crown two decades earlier in 1899.

Arthur Balfour, famous for the Balfour Declaration, which promised Palestine to Zionists in exchange for support during World War I himself, passed the 1905 Aliens Act to stop Jewish people fleeing attacks in Eastern Europe from getting asylum in Britain. For European countries, to confront Israel and its violence, would be to acknowledge the role of their antisemitism in its creation.

Of course, there is also the issue of Israel serving as an imperialist outpost for the interests of the United States and Europe in a sea of undependable Arab allies. In his book Orientations, the British governor for Jerusalem at the time Ronald Storrs wrote in support of the establishment of a Zionist colony, claiming it would be “forming for England a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism.”

Israel, since its inception, has been a vanguard of Western imperialism in the Middle East. Israel has served this purpose well, from its collaboration with Britain and France in attacks against Egypt to prevent the nationalization of Suez, intervening militarily in neighbouring Arab countries numerous times, and acting as a conduit for the US to sell weapons to countries it couldn’t openly be seen to support, including apartheid South Africa. In fact, Israel is so integral to the United States’ interests that Joe Biden has said not once but twice (in 1986 and in 2022) that, “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region.”

This is why the West is so quick to label Hamas’ resistance terrorism, to use a word meant to destroy empathy towards Palestinians. A free Palestine threatens the hold of the West and its interests in the Middle East.

What do the words terrorist and terrorism even mean anyway? Who is and is not a terrorist, who decides, and why does it matter? Our own forefathers were called “terrorists” in their fight for independence against British settler colonialists. Assuming a monopoly on violence and its deserving applications -to serve the interests of capital – the West is quick to label any violent actions inconsistent with its interests as terrorism.

In telling the story of Palestine and its struggles for independence alongside parallels from our country’s struggle, our podcast Until Everyone is Free seeks to reject the revisionism of a people’s history and the deradicalization of their resistance and independence struggles. Our latest episode titled Uhuru wa Palestina ni Uhuru Wetu, traces the story of Palestine from its existence as part of the Ottoman Empire and the continuous loss of its land from the UN 1947 partition and the subsequent annexation of its land till its existence today in the form of “bantustans” in West Bank and the Gaza Strip. We discuss the growth of Zionism, its attempts to acquire a Jewish ethno-state since the 19^th century, including how part of the British East Africa Protectorate was proposed as a Jewish national home in a desperate move by Joseph Chamberlain to profit from the “Lunatic Express” that was proving to be a bad investment.

We also highlight the role of Western imperialism in Kenyan and Palestinian struggles, including little-known information such as that the tactics used by the British colonizer in Operation Anvil, which was used to suppress the Mau Mau based on Operation Shark which was used to suppress Palestinian uprisings in 1946.

By invoking the story of Kenya’s struggle for independence, we hope to remind our audience that the issue of Palestine is part of an unfinished journey of national liberation for all colonized people that began in the last century. This is not a “conflict” between two sides, it is a settler colonial struggle that will only end with the decolonization of Palestine and a democratic state for all.

Solidarity with Palestine and all other oppressed people!

Wairimu Gathimba is a Kenyan writer and cultural worker with the Kenya Organic Intellectuals Network in Nairobi. Wairimu writes for The Elephant and This is Africa.

Solidarity with Palestine – ROAPE statement

ROAPE

November 30, 2023

From its inception in 1974, ROAPE has stood against all forms of colonisation and imperialism, committing itself to the liberation of colonised people. Our historical analysis of Apartheid in South Africa and the persistent post-colonial oppression in Africa enable us to recognize the tactics of the Israeli settler colonial state against Palestinians, both under occupation and within Israel itself.

Nelson Mandela once said, “we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” This statement rings true today more than ever. Israel’s response to the incursion by Hamas on 7 October, and the deaths, hostage taking and political losses that resulted, has become a genocide in the making.

The Israeli army is conducting an indiscriminate bombing campaign and invasion of Gaza, murdering thousands of Palestinians, and forcing over two million people to flee their homes. Meanwhile, it is also conducting raids, imprisoning and killing hundreds of civilians in the Occupied West Bank. These war crimes are committed with the shameful backing of the United States, the UK, and other Western governments, continuing their imperialist warmongering in the Middle East and North Africa. South Africa, well aware of Israel’s past support for the Apartheid regimes, has referred Israel to the International Criminal Court.

From its inception in 1974, ROAPE has stood against all forms of colonisation and imperialism, committing itself to the liberation of colonised people and social justice. Our historical analysis of Apartheid in South Africa and our examination of persistent post-colonial oppression in Africa enable us to recognize the tactics of intimidation, injury, and violence employed by the Israeli settler colonial state against Palestinians, both under occupation and within Israel itself. In light of this, we support the right of self-determination of the Palestinian people and their right to wage armed struggles against the Israeli settler colonial state. There will be no peace for Jewish citizens until there is freedom and justice for Palestinians.

We also stand with the extraordinary global movement of Palestine solidarity that has erupted against the siege on Gaza. In many instances, these movements have developed against the ruling class of nations allied to Israeli settler colonialism. In Western nations, we have seen governments disgracefully ban Palestine demonstrations and criminalise those protesting for freedom for Palestinians.

For years we have opposed state-led initiatives to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Opposed vociferously from the start by many international Jewish groups and currents, Zionism is an ideology that justifies the colonisation and exclusion of Palestinians under the claim that Jewish people should have a state in Palestine, which they would run as the majority people.

Criticising the state of Israel as a racist state does not amount to attacking or discriminating against Jewish people. It is unacceptable to suggest that Jewish people are a single bloc, bonded with the Zionist project which is rooted in European colonialism and social division. It is not antisemitic to oppose Israeli colonialism and support the liberation of Palestine. We consider that no institution is taking decolonisation seriously if it represses the discussion of Zionism as a colonial project.

We encourage our readers and supporters to join the growing demonstrations in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia and participate in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which mobilises for the removal of Israeli goods in stores. We hope to see an intensification of community and student mobilisation and acts of direct action, including sit-ins, occupations and blockades against Israeli interests to bolster the mass movement. We also hope to see a higher deployment of working-class weapons of struggle through work stoppages, strikes, and workplace occupation in support of Palestine.

ROAPE celebrated in 2021 when dockers in Durban, South Africa refused to offload cargo from an Israeli ship in protest at that country’s offensive against the Palestinian Unity Intifada. We hope such examples of resistance will multiply.

We join the many calls around the world for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire, for the boycott and disinvestment campaign against the Israeli settler state and its illegal settlements and for the establishment of a free Palestinian state.

ROAPE has a long history supporting Palestinian resistance and solidarity. For some of our blogposts and statements on Africa, Palestine and solidarity please click here.

Editorial Working Group

Climate Emergency in Africa – Mozambique & COP28

ROAPE

November 28, 2023

As COP28 draws near, Aisse Feldheim and Emilinah Namaganda reflect on how Mozambique – which holds the third largest natural gas reserves in Africa – negotiated its interests at COP27 in Egypt last year. There is ever-growing controversy at the COP meetings around the role of natural gas in the global energy transition. While some pre-existing alliances were fracturing, Mozambique has forged new alliances in its pursuit for continued extraction of natural gas.

By Aisse Feldheim and Emilinah Namaganda

The annual United Nations Conference of Parties on Climate Change (COP) is the leading global forum for multilateral discussion of the climate change problem and potential solutions. At the twenty-seventh COP which was held in November 2022 in Sharm el-Sheik in Egypt, the role of natural gas in the global energy transition was one of the key issues discussed. Various scholars, non-government organisations, and some governments asserted that an urgent transition from fossil fuels, like natural gas, to renewable energy sources is critical for countries to mitigate climate change and its consequences. However, gas-rich African countries like Mozambique which also grapple with energy poverty and limited industrialisation were ambivalent about a rapid transition. In this blogpost, we use the case of Mozambique to explore how these gas-rich countries are negotiating their multifaceted interests to tackle energy poverty, advance industrialisation, and respond to climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Mozambique’s complicated interest in gas

Between 2010 and 2013, massive volumes of natural gas, amounting more than 180 trillion cubic feet were discovered in Mozambique. The country, located in the south eastern part of Africa, grapples with broadscale energy poverty, low levels of industrialisation, and low national income. To illustrate, only 20 per cent of the population in Cabo Delgado, the north eastern province where the gas reserves are located, has access to electricity. Hence, both the government and the citizenry anticipated the massive gas discoveries to alleviate the limited access to clean energy in Cabo Delgado, and other existing socio-economic challenges in the province and Mozambique at large. Indeed, in the years following the discoveries in Cabo Delgado, the granting of gas extraction licenses and the implementation of capital gains taxes increased government revenue. The government announced plans to invest this income in long-term economic diversification and enhanced provision of public services. In fact, it used the Mozambique gas development project to showcase its progress towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.

**Mozambique located in south eastern Africa, and Cabo Delgado Province (specially Palma District) in the country’s northern region which host the largest natural gas reserves.**

However, Mozambique’s vision of gas-fuelled development has been complicated by the vested interests of some national elites who seek to secure private and political benefits from the gas revenue windfalls. According to José Jaime Macuane‘s analysis, the historical and current distribution of power within the country’s political system is contingent upon access to financial resources among competing ruling factions. As a result, Macuane suggests that the ruling political party FRELIMO (Mozambique Liberation Front) is inclined to prioritize short-term economic gains from gas extraction projects over long term economic development. This can be observed, for example, in the favourable contractual conditions – such as exemptions from tax payments – which are granted to the consortia of multinational corporations which are developing the gas project (including Total, ENI, and ExxonMobil).

Furthermore, in Cabo Delgado, natural gas has not yet facilitated transformative change. First, the liquefied natural gas (LNG) is principally developed for export with limited linkages to the local economy. Second, construction of onshore LNG infrastructure has been accompanied by a contested displacement process in which over 10.000 people lost their homes and livelihoods. Scholars argue that the recent insurrection in Cabo Delgado, which by October 2022 had led to approximately 4000 deaths and more than one million people displaced, was partly fuelled by population discontent over the distribution of actual and potential benefits from natural gas and other resource extraction in the province. In March 2021, a combination of the insurrection and the Covid-19 pandemic led to suspension of onshore gas development. Hence, the socio-economic and political implications of gas development complicate Mozambique’s interest to extract the resource.

Another issue which complicates gas development in the country are the impacts and the solutions to the climate emergency. In terms of fatalities and economic losses from climate change-related impacts, Mozambique is among the most severely affected countries. In 2019, the devastating cyclones Idai and Kenneth resulted in the deaths of more than 700 people and the destruction of 240,000 houses across the country. Mozambique is expected to face increased extreme weather events such as cyclones, floods, droughts, and more frequent heatwaves in the future under business-as-usual scenarios where global fossil fuel combustion continues unmitigated. For this reason, despite meagre contribution to the climate change problem, some national and foreign activists propose that the country should not contribute to continued fossil fuel development by extracting its gas resources. Such debates worldwide around an urgent energy transition may also make it challenging for the country to attract and maintain financing for its gas development projects.

In sum, the interest to tackle energy poverty, advance industrialisation, and respond to climate change mitigation and adaptation make gas development in Mozambique a complicated endeavour, a predicament shared with other gas-rich African countries such as Nigeria. Hence, during COP27, the promotion of gas-fuelled development by Mozambique and other African governments emerged as a prominent theme.

Extraction of Fossil fuels

Mozambique participated at COP27 with 115 delegates led by president Filipe Nyusi. The country’s dual interests to extract natural gas for its socio-economic and political needs, but also to adapt to the changing climate and related impacts, were evident in some of the key negotiation groups through which its interests were articulated at the conference. The Group of 77 (G77) plus China and the African Group of Negotiators (AGN) are insightful examples.

Mozambique is a member of the G77+China which now comprises 135 members and is the largest coalition in climate change negotiations. The group was founded in 1964 and includes almost all low- and middle-income countries, plus China. Member states like Mozambique and subgroups, such as the Arab nations, advocate for a different configuration of the energy transition in the developing world, which constitutes further utilisation of fossil fuels for economic development in the short to medium-term. This argument is based on the principle of “Common but Differentiated Responsibility” (CBDR) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The principle states that countries’ mitigation efforts should reflect their different responsibilities for greenhouse gas emissions and their varying economic capabilities to reduce them. It remains relevant to understanding the political position of the Mozambican government and other fossil fuel-rich African nations to continue utilising fossil fuels for their development, given their historically and currently low contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and their limited financial capacity to invest in mitigation efforts.

During the conference, at a plenary session titled “Mozambique in the Driving Seat of Southern Africa Energy Transition”, the Mozambican president and the president of the African Development Bank (AFDB) asserted the vital role of natural gas in Africa’s energy transition. The AfDB and the African Union (AU) generally supported the position of Mozambique and other fossil fuel-rich African countries to utilise their resources for economic development. Shortly before COP27, the AU published a “Common Position on Energy Access and Just Energy Transition”. The body emphasised the goal to utilise both “renewable and non-renewable energy” resources to address the persistent energy poverty and socio-economic challenges on the continent. In brief, backed by these continental African bodies, Mozambique’s position on natural gas exploitation echoed that of some G77+China sub-groups like the Arab States.

However, there were other sub-groups such as the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), specifically members like Vanuatu and Tuvalu, which argued against continued gas development through other alliances such as the “Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance“. These countries contended that continued gas development would lock many countries in a high carbon pathway, exacerbating global climate change. Therefore, the G77 did not articulate a common position on the energy transition or the extraction of natural gas. This is not surprising considering the vast and heterogenous character of the negotiation group. Even the Group of African Negotiators (AGN) did not adopt continued gas development as their negotiation stance.

Although continental African bodies such as the AfDB and the AU can contribute to the discussions at the COP, they participate as observer organisations. The shared position of African countries in climate change negotiations is articulated by the AGN, which was established in 1995, and is a sub-group of the G77+China. The AGN focused on negotiations around adaptation and climate finance as a less controversial and potentially more successful stance for COP27. This stance aligned with the more-shared interest within the G77+China to demand for financing from industrialised countries which have historically contributed the most to greenhouse gas emissions, to support low-income countries which are now most vulnerable to climate change-related hazards (see related discussions on the loss and damage fund). Considering the AGN’s position together with that of Mozambique and the AU on natural gas clarifies the predicament of fossil fuel-rich African countries to balance their development ambitions with climate change adaptation and mitigation initiatives. Indeed, although promoting the role of natural gas for development was a visible COP27 objective for Mozambique, president Nyusi also underscored the “search for funding for climate and energy innovation agendas” as a critical goal for his government at the conference. Hence, Mozambique utilised established, albeit fractured, alliances such as the G77+China and the AGN to bargain for its multifaceted interests to tackle energy poverty, pursue economic development, and adapt to climate change. The country also sought new alliances to further these interests, particularly the more contested one of continued natural gas exploitation.

Natural gas as a global bridge fuel

One of Mozambique’s new alliances to further gas extraction is the “Gas Exporting Countries Forum” (GECF), which the country joined in 2022. Founded in 2001, GECF constitutes large gas-producing countries worldwide, such as Russia and Qatar, and advocates for the continued importance of natural gas for sustainable development. Before COP27, the group postulated natural gas as the “perfect solution” for achieving the triple goals of energy security, affordability, and sustainability. The GECF is not directly involved in the COP. However, the group identifies the COP as a “great opportunity to make a case for gas in the energy transition”, and its members have voiced this position in the conference for many years. For instance, many Arab states which promote further use of fossil fuels in developing nations are also members of the GECF. What makes this alliance particularly relevant at the previous and forthcoming COP28 is the overlap between the COP presidency and its members; Egypt (COP27) and the United Arab Emirates (COP 28). This overlap makes the pro-gas position more salient, albeit with matching contestation.

Moreover, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Europe’s search for new gas suppliers, natural gas in and beyond the GECF countries has attracted broader interest from governments worldwide and less opposition at the COP. The first shipment of LNG from Mozambique’s Eni-operated offshore gas fields set course for Europe during the final discussion in Sharm el Sheikh. Furthermore, a range of bilateral and private investment agreements for natural gas extraction in African countries like Egypt and Tanzania, for export to international markets were also made during the conference. In the end, the final resolution of COP27 focused on the phase out of coal energy and did not mention other fossil fuels, like natural gas. Rather, unclearly defined “low-emission energy” was proposed as the way forward, a vagueness which is open to further utilisation of gas. Therefore, gas-rich countries like Mozambique may be able to forge new alliances to facilitate their exploitation of the resource.

Turning the gaze to COP 28

Despite the omnipresent impacts of the climate crisis and the growing opposition to continued fossil fuel extraction by environmental advocates, the need for electrification and industrialization remains critical in resource-rich African nations, setting the stage for fierce debates at the COP28 on the role of natural gas in the energy transition. The persistence of the Russia-Ukraine war and Europe’s search for alternative sources of natural gas also implies that fossil fuel-poor countries may also be torn on the question of continued natural gas extraction. Gas development in Africa remains subjugated to worldwide energy needs, hence these geopolitical dynamics significantly influence development of the resource on the continent. Among actors from gas-rich African countries like Mozambique, the contradiction between the export-oriented nature of gas extraction, led by multinational corporations and national elites, and the socio-economic realities in producing areas such as Cabo Delgado will continue to be a source of divided opinions.

Given the fact that COP28 will be held in another GECF country and will be headed by a former employee of the natural gas sector, the relevance of gas as a bridge fuel for the global energy transition will remain central to the COP discussion. Therefore, it remains important to keep track of how negotiating groups such as the G77+China will position themselves on this matter, considering the increasingly diverging positions of their member countries in this regard. A key question is: along what lines might new alliances form? And what will be the social, economic, political, and environmental implications of pre-existing and new alliances for natural gas development in fossil-fuel rich African countries like Mozambique?

Climate policy and fossil fuel-rich African nations

By examining the case of Mozambique, this blogpost reflected on the complex aspirations that surround the extraction of natural gas from Africa amid the climate crisis. On one hand, gas-rich African countries seek to utilise the resource to address persisting energy poverty, low industrialisation, and other socio-economic challenges on the continent. However, existing cases of natural gas development in Mozambique and other African countries have not contributed significantly to such aims. Gas development has rather been focused on exports, with massive benefits to the extracting multinationals and some national elites, and less benefits to national economies and the communities in the resource-rich areas like Cabo Delgado. In the backdrop of these political-economic dynamics, it is unlikely that future (or continued) development of the resource will substantially improve the socio-economic situations in the countries and especially in the resource-bearing regions. Therefore, within the gas-rich countries, governments will need to convince the civil society – some of whom are increasingly contesting gas development – that different socio-economic outcomes can be envisioned.

On the other hand, gas-rich African countries like Mozambique are especially vulnerable to climate change-related hazards and seek to contribute to climate change adaptation and mitigation. Therefore, the countries are keen to attract finance for relevant initiatives such as the construction of resilient infrastructure in the communities which are prone to cyclones. As a result, during their engagements in climate policy forums like the COPs, the countries seek to balance their multifaceted interests to pursue natural gas exploitation and to respond to the climate change problem. By reflecting on some of the pre-existing (e.g., the G77+China and the AGN) and new (e.g., the GECF) alliances through which Mozambique articulated its interests at COP27, we see the complexity facing fossil-fuel rich African countries to navigate economic development, political interests, and global decarbonization ambitions.

Aisse Feldheim is pursuing his Master’s in Sustainable Development, with a focus on International Development Studies, at Utrecht University. As a research assistant for the InFront-project, he delves into the complex interconnections between the burgeoning natural gas frontier in Cabo Delgado and global climate governance.

Emilinah Namaganda is a PhD Candidate in the International Development Studies group of the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. She researches on the socio-economic, environmental, and governance implications of an expanding frontier of energy transition-related resource extractivism in Mozambique.

Featured photograph: President Filipe Nyusi and AfDB president, Akinwumi Adesina, at COP27 on Mozambique’s role in the Southern Africa Energy Transition.

Capitalism, war and plunder in the Horn of Africa

ROAPE

November 23, 2023

Mark Duffield and Nicholas Stockton write about the spectacular growth in livestock exports from the Horn of Africa to the urbanising Gulf states, and argue that neoliberalism has transformed the former reciprocity between ‘farmers’ and ‘herders’ into a relation of permanent war. Based on their article in ROAPE – freely available to read below – they argue that the crisis in the Horn is rooted in how the wealth of its peoples is being internationally plundered.

By Mark Duffield and Nicholas Stockton

As civil war rages in Sudan, arrangements for December’s COP28 meeting in Dubai have gathered momentum. If there is a link between these events, it is not climate change. More to the point, prior to the Covid pandemic, Sudan and Somalia were together supplying 90% of the animal protein consumed in the otherwise chronically food-insecure Gulf States. While undoubtedly an underestimate, at its peak this export trade was worth $1.4 billion a year. A remarkable economic feat for two poor, war-devastated countries. Indeed, since the 1970s, Horn livestock exports, predominantly sheep, have increased in concert with the rapid urbanisation of the Gulf. These trade figures, however, belie a deepening crisis among Sudan and Somalia’s agro-pastoral communities. Concealed behind the data is the spread of what can be called ‘militarised ranching’ in these countries. Through this practice, a violent transnational extractive economy links the Horn and the Gulf States. The phantasmagorial fossil-urbanisation of the latter has been at the expense of a widening cycle of destructive immiseration in the former. A toxic embrace that looks set to deepen.

There are many reasons why the social and ecological devastation underlying the livestock trade remains hidden. In liberalism’s parallel universe there is a predilection, albeit selective, to interpret raw violence in terms of its transgression of human rights and the creation of humanitarian disasters. Violence is understood in terms of its moral and social effects. For example, as creating dilemmas and moral challenges that typically foreground practical and political issues relating to rights, humanitarian need and the responsibility to protect. This view tends to conceal that, for capitalism, war and warlike violence is an active and essential economic relation. Since the 1970s, the Horn of Africa has been gripped by end-to-end extractive civil wars. The liberal default presents this permanent war as a series of essentially ‘natural’ humanitarian disasters. The violent de-development of first Somalia, and now Sudan, are without question unalloyed tragedies. The liberal default, however, obscures the active process behind the rising livestock exports and the deepening chaos, displacement and human suffering we witness.

Primarily involving sheep, militarised ranching is a social and environmentally destructive mode of production. It is necessarily expansive, land-hungry, livelihood destroying and population displacing. Sustained violence, livestock exports have attracted little outside attention despite being at the core of the Horn’s political economy. In a region once dominated by agro-pastoral subsistence economies, changes in the ownership, rearing and export of livestock reaches down into the social bedrock. Violent land clearances, livestock theft and armed grazing have devastated life-chances over vast swathes of territory to a greater extent than any other form of commodification. These changes embody the terror of the Gulf’s expanding food frontier and the human tragedy of not only Somalia and Sudan, but conjecturally, a growing number of contiguous countries as well.

The old agro-pastoral economies of Somalia and Sudan can, at the risk of simplification, be heuristically divided into mobile ‘herders’ and sedentary ‘farmers’. Historically, the long-distance seasonal transhumance of herders was negotiated with farmers to maximise use of crop residues and allow for the barter and sale of livestock, milk, crops, handicrafts and services between these groups. While friction could develop when, for example, animals strayed into fields or livestock were stolen, there were compensatory processes to maintain a mutually beneficial system of exchange between sedentary and semi-nomadic communities. Indeed, such reciprocity lay at the heart of rural self-sufficiency.

During the last decades of the twentieth-century, the shift from subsistence to commercial modes of production among farmers and herders was intensifying conflicts over water and land as desertification drove herders further south. While often characterised as ‘Bantu versus Somali’ or ‘African versus Arab’ in the case of Sudan, these increasingly heavily armed exchanges were in reality two historically complementary modes of rural self-reliance being confronted with the emergence of fossil capitals’ inexorable demand for meat in the post-1973 urbanisation, construction and population explosions in the Gulf States. Booming economies that opened new opportunities for livestock traders and their military patrons, fixers and owners of the major ports along the Red Sea coast.

By the 1980s, the monetisation of the economy, together with the decay of collective forms of agricultural production, had propelled the agronomic practices of small farmers into a period of change and intensification. Especially, into ecologically unsustainable time and labour-saving practices. For example, shortened rotations, increased mono-cropping and water table depleting irrigation. Among herders, similar monetising pressures were compounded by the loss of rangeland and water rights due to the spread of mechanised agriculture schemes and, in places, the settlement of river banks by farmers. Similar to the intensification of subsistence farming, there was a compensatory shift from ecologically balanced livestock management towards more commercial, that is, export-oriented, forms of herd composition. That is, a growing focus on relatively fast maturing sheep.

In Somalia and Sudan, there is a long history of denying ‘Bantu’ and ‘African’ farmers respectively any civil or political rights. The deepening social civil war in both countries has thrown up competing ownership claims, exclusionary practices and even assertions of race superiority. For the winners, those being dispossessed, displaced and killed are newcomers, interlopers or apostates that have no rights anyway. The resulting de-development has created a modern living-hell where life can hardly become cheaper, more disposable or further exposed to new forms of bondage and slavery.

By the time of the NGO invasion of the Horn in the mid-1980s, a neoliberal mode of primitive accumulation had emerged. Having much wider implications, the inner secret of this hyper-destructive form of accumulation was to transform the earlier reciprocity between farmers and herders into a relation of permanent war. A social civil war which humanitarians have self-servingly normalised as an inevitable outcome of scarcity, ignorance and environmental stress.

Based on the principle of buying cheap and selling dear, there is an historical affinity between merchant capital and raw violence. Merchants extract tradable wealth at the lowest possible cost. Unchecked, this can include theft, extortion and bribery. In the Horn, military and militia violence has been the main means of inducing and shaping the social civil war between farmers and herders into a lethal extractive economy. It is no accident that, time and again, imperial powers have legitimised what are little more than armed gangsters when seeking to negotiate ‘peace’ or ‘reconstruct’ a so-called failed state. In terms of maintaining the Gulf’s violent food frontier, they are hand in glove.

Separated by a decade or so, the social civil war in Somalia and the protracted genocide in Darfur marked the consolidation of a new militarised mechanism for acquiring, herding and grazing livestock, especially sheep. Initially conducted through camel and horse mounted militias from the respective marginalised herders of both countries, this violence quickly converted profits from selling on animals stolen from politically disqualified farmers, into fleets of motorbikes and Toyota ‘technicals,’ that is, pick-ups mounted with heavy machine guns, to facilitate rapid and far-reaching land clearances. These bloody clearances have freed up the land and mechanised borehole water supplies that have facilitated the expansion of coercive sheep ranching.

Over the last three or four decades, besides helping sustain the urbanisation of the Gulf, militarised ranching has created millions of displaced and permanently dispossessed people. Apart from swelling the burgeoning ranks of the migrant-dependent international shadow and gig economies, those remaining struggle to survive through non-remunerative agricultural labour, the informal urban economy, sporadic NGO electronic-transfers of token (non-dependency creating) amounts of cash and occasional in-kind handouts during periods of officially declared ‘drought’ and ‘famine’. Many are housed in internationally financed but ill-protected IDP and refugee camps. As the respective experience of banana and gum Arabic production in Somalia and Sudan suggests, these centres of concentration are better understood as bonded-labour camps.

Rather than underdevelopment, mindless kleptocrats or climate change, the crisis in the Horn of Africa is rooted in how the wealth of its peoples is being internationally plundered. Unfortunately, this crisis looks set to deepen. As Sudan fragments, any checks on a violent transnational mercantilism that a unitary state may have afforded have disappeared. At the same time, the Gulf is embarking on a new round of fossil-urbanisation. At the end of the day, people still need to be fed.

For the authors’ full dataset please click here.

Mark Duffield works on the political philosophy of permanent emergency, including, the datafication of the current global crisis, the expansion of remote management systems and the growing antagonism between ‘connectivity’ and ‘circulation’. Nicholas Stockton describes himself as a recovering aid worker, now in semi-retirement.

Featured Photograph: Livestock export in Berbera, Somaliland (Axmed Siciid Maxamed, 8 September 2021).

Why Palestine is a feminist and an anti-colonial issue

ROAPE

November 21, 2023

Rama Salla Dieng explains that the current genocide in Palestine is a feminist and reproductive justice issue. The ultimate goal of Israel – and the Western powers that support this settler colonial and Apartheid state – is to render impossible the social and societal reproduction of Palestinians, and eventually to lead them to their physical death.

By Rama Salla Dieng

I am writing this short commentary to bear witness of the ethnic cleansing that is going on since 7 October. As I write this short text, over 13000 including 5000 children have been killed by Israel in Palestine (Gaza and the West Bank), many thousand people are missing under the rubbles and as many have been displaced from their homes. Twelve-hundred people have been reported to have been killed in Israel by Hamas, and over 200 people have been abducted by Hamas.

It is important to historicise the current genocide which many observers and Palestinians themselves have called the second Nakba. The People of Palestine have survived and continuously resisted seven decades of occupation and violations of their basic rights. Their genocide has taken many forms: occupation, waves of land and sea grabs, dispossession, expropriation, displacement, assassinations, sexual violence. The genocide we are witnessing did not start today. This violence has been going on for 41 days…and 75 years. And it has continued because of the many green lights, or lack of reactions to the countless acts of violence that the Israeli apartheid state has inflicted for decades. But most importantly, the spree of violence started with hate speeches and with the slow and insidious dehumanisation of Palestinians through the routinisation of their deaths. A social death. Countless, faceless scores of fatalities, wounded, jailed, and displaced civilians have over the decades been buried under seconds-long reporting at the radio or on TV, paragraph-long accounting of loss of lives in newspapers.

If we have learnt one thing from the genocide in Rwanda, it is that every genocide, every project of ethnic cleansing starts with the dehumanisation of the target social groups. Social death is the first step to a group’s physical annihilation. The concept of ‘social death’ was first coined by Horace Orlando Patterson in 1985, and it is no coincidence that Patterson’s book is a comparative study of Slavery and Social Death. Nine years after that book, the Rwanda genocide took place, but it did not start in 1994, it started long before, when the Belgian colonisers started measuring skulls and ethnicising them, and later when the Hutu-dominated government started by calling the target Tutsi groups ‘Inyenzi’ or ‘cockroaches’ to signify that they lacked humanity, that they believed them not to be worthy of life. Later, after reading Gilbert Gatore’s The Past Ahead, Jean Hatzfeld’s Season of Machetes, Boubacar Boris Diop’ s Murambi, the Book of Bones and Scholastique Mukasonga’s Cockroaches, we promised with the International Tribunal Court for Rwanda, and the Gacaca courts that ‘never again’, would we let such atrocities be committed, at least ‘not in our names’.

But I want us to understand that what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank of Palestine is (and always was) the next step by the Israeli state in the project of murder of Palestinians. It is but the next step of a carefully planned and executed land and sea grab by social death under the cover of the right of self-defence. When has self-defence ever meant the systematic ethnic cleansing of civilians? When has one group’s right to existence meant a death sentence for another social group?

I want us to be clear on the fact that the current militarised genocide is a political issue, is a feminist issue, is a reproductive justice issue, is an economic issue, is an environmental justice issue, is an agrarian justice issue, is an ethical issue, is a sovereignty issue.

It is a war on Palestine’s societal and social reproduction.

In a 2011 article, SOAS feminist political economist Shirin Rai and her co-authors describe such condition of loss, without any future plan for replenishment that might remedy it as Social Reproduction through Depletion. The use of forbidden and brutal weapons of mass destruction, including white phosphorus on civilianpopulations, the destruction of hospitals and vital infrastructures such as roads, water tanks, electricity, and means of transportation, the pollution of natural resources, and livestock and the poisoning of crops is a clear indication of the intent to dispossess permanently Palestinians across age, religion, and class status of their means of production.

The objective of the settler colonial state of Israel is clear: it is the depletion of those engaged in social reproduction through starving the labour force to prevent them from meeting their necessary calorie intake, through burning social infrastructures so their basic needs for food and energy, housing, health and safety, hygiene (including sanitary pads for women and girls, and care services for the sick and the pregnant), are unmet. The objective is also carried out through destroying and poisoning nature, through destroying universities and mosques and places of community assembly. Israel is attempting to kill the Palestinian spirit and hijack the reproduction of their social cultural capital – Palestinians are reputed to be the World’s most ‘educated refugees’.

The ultimate goal of Israel – and the Western powers that support this settler colonial and Apartheid state – is to render impossible the social and societal reproduction of Palestinians, and eventually to lead them to their physical death. This is but one of the many faces of fascism and racist, settler colonialist capitalism. We must neither be silent nor think it is happening in a remote faraway land. At the same time, we are calling for an absolute ceasefire, the return of Israeli hostages, we should also seek reparations for the loss of lives and damage to nature as well as a complete reform of the current international governance architecture. We cannot trust our future to powers we don’t trust as they have shown us whose interests they represent, and whose lives matter to them.

What Israel is committing in Palestine should be a wake-up call to all the countries in the Global South and across the world. What is happening to Palestine, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, will determine our common future, the fruits of our anti-colonial struggles, and our ultimate sovereignty.

Therefore, I would like to conclude by sharing this powerful message in the form of a tweet from Issa Shijvi on 1 November 2023:

Voices of the world

Say it loud

Say it clear

‘We shan’t tolerate

Another genocide on our planet

There’re no ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’

There’s no balance between genocidaires & victims

There is no equivalence between Occupiers and occupied.

Ceasefire immediately

End settler colonialism!’

Rama Salla Dieng is a Senegalese writer, academic and activist. She is currently a Lecturer in African and International Development at the Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh. Rama is also a feminist activist who has collaborated with several feminist organisations on agrarian change, gender and development, and social reproduction. Rama has written this text in a personal capacity.

Featured Photograph: Protest for the Palestinians of Gaza against the brutal attack by Israel in January 2009, Melbourne (John Englart, 18 January 2009).

Some important texts and petitions:

All Out for Palestine Toolkit

Palestinian BDS Committee Boycott list

Agrarian South Network

Collective of Agrarian Scholar Activists from the South

African Feminisms

South Feminist Futures

A Collective Statement Calling on the University of Edinburgh to Protect Speech on Palestine, Address the Intimidation on Campus, and Cut University Links to Violence.

The three-stage process through which African resource sovereignty was ceded to foreign mining corporations

ROAPE

November 16, 2023

In the 1960s, newly independent African governments asserted sovereignty over their metal and mineral resources, in a reversal of their prior colonial exploitation by European mining corporations. In this excerpt from his new book Disrupted Development in the Congo: The Fragile Foundations of the African Mining Consensus, Ben Radley shows how transnational corporations have once again become the dominant force assuming ownership and management of industrial mining projects. Radley argues this latest reversal has taken place through a three-stage process grounded in a misguided reading of African economic stagnation from the mid-1970s onwards. Recent mining code revisions in several countries have been heralded by some as marking a new era of resource nationalism. Yet the new codes remain a far cry from the earlier period of resource sovereignty. The first three chapters of the book can be downloaded for free here.

Stage one: Blame the African state

The first wave of political independence in Africa, beginning in the mid-1950s, ushered in a period of resource sovereignty, including the pursuit of African socialism in several countries. This was based on the recognition that during the colonial period, Africa’s natural resources had been exploited by European mining corporations to the benefit of the colonizing countries. For these resources to serve the interest of African countries, economies, and peoples, it was held that external control and ownership had to be reduced. Buoyed by the long commodity boom of the 1950s, and the spirit of events such as the 1955 Bandung Conference and the 1958 All African People’s Conference, there was a general commitment by newly independent African governments to wrest the control and management of their natural resource wealth back from the hands of their former colonizers.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the first step was taken under the presidency of Joseph-Désiré Mobutu with the Bakajika Law of June 1966. This law was an explicit attack on the contentious 1960 Belgian law giving colonial Congolese corporations Belgian nationality just a few weeks before Independence. It required all foreign-based companies whose main activities were in the DRC to establish their headquarters in the DRC by the end of the year.

The government failed to reach an agreement on the nationality of the largest, Belgian-owned colonial mining subsidiary, Union minière de Haut Katanga. So, on 31 December 1966, the Mobutu administration announced its decision to expropriate the firm and transfer its assets to a new company, Société générale Congolaise des minerais (Gécamines), which was to eventually become 100 per cent state-owned. The policy of increasing state participation in the productive economy continued in other sectors. By 1970, the Congolese public sector controlled 40 per cent of national value added.

Efforts elsewhere were similarly ambitious, such as Kenneth Kaunda’s Zambian-led initiative of the Intergovernmental Council of Copper Exporting Countries (CIPEC) and Julius Nyerere’s nationalist ban on extractives, ‘aimed at keeping resources in the soil until the nation could develop the productive forces to manage extractives for national development’. Early results were impressive. In the DRC and Zambia, copper production increased steadily between 1960 and 1974—across the inaugural years of CIPEC—from around 300,000 to 500,000 tonnes and 500,000 to 700,000 tonnes, respectively.

In the DRC, greater sovereign control of value added contributed to a tripling of state revenue from $190 million in 1967 to $630 million in 1970, based in part on a 50 percent profit tax in the mining sector. A national health system numbering 500,000 employees was established, seen as a model for primary health care in the global South. The education system was nationalized, achieving 92 per cent primary school enrolment and increased access to the secondary and tertiary sectors.

The period culminated in May 1974 with the United Nations adoption of a Declaration and Programme of Action on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order. This declaration and programme ‘set out principles for equality between nations, including sovereignty over natural resources and an equitable relationship between the producers and consumers of raw materials’. Rather than usher in a new international economic order, however, the period during which this declaration was signed was to prove a stark reminder of the solidity of the old order.

The declaration was inaugurated at a time when the oil price was beginning to rise and demand for African exports beginning to diminish due to recession in the global North, leading to a decrease in commodity prices. In the DRC and Zambia, the copper price crashed from $1.40 per pound in April 1974 to $0.53 per pound in early 1975 and stagnated thereafter. Around the same time, from 1973 to 1977, the cost of oil imports quadrupled. Coupled with rising inflation globally during this period, the effect of these price shifts on government revenue would have been even greater in real terms. In addition, as African government loan repayments became due, interest rates on the loans began to rise as the United States sought to control inflation through monetary policy.

Previously rising mining production levels stagnated or dropped, growth slowed, and debt grew across the continent, reducing the foreign exchange available to purchase the imports needed to further industrialization. Between 1980 and 1988, 25 African countries rescheduled their debts 105 times. In the DRC, copper and cobalt exports decreased sharply, eventually collapsing by the early 1990s.

Of course, external shocks were not the sole cause of the reversal. Internal dynamics had a critical role to play. In the DRC, external shocks unmasked the failures and limitations of Mobutu’s nation state-building project. Nationalization measures undertaken in 1973 and 1974 to provide an emerging politico-commercial class of senior state bureaucrats with access to productive capital—known as Zairianization—were poorly planned and implemented and went badly awry. Agriculture had been neglected, receiving less than 1 per cent of state expenditure from 1968 to 1972, and the Congolese manufacturing sector was in decline.

Yet, a consideration of the impact of external shocks, alongside recognition of the progress made by newly independent African governments in the short time frame up until this juncture, was largely missing from influential analyses of the 1980s seeking to understand the causes of African economic stagnation from the mid-1970s onwards.

Instead, misguided African state intervention and government corruption were put forward as primary causal explanations, to the exclusion of other factors. Championed largely by Africanists based in North American universities (such as Robert Bates and Eliot Berg, the latter the author of the World Bank’s 1981 report Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Plan for Action), this line of thinking was immediately embraced by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

The main entrance to the former social club of Société minière des Grands Lacs, a Belgian mining firm that operated in eastern DRC from 1923 to 1976. Copyright Ben Radley, 2017.

In the DRC, World Bank reports from the 1980s show how ingrained this view was at the time. In one, the Bank argued that the country’s economic decline was due to ‘a long series of inadequate economic and financial decisions. Nothing in the past decade has had a more lasting and devastating effect on the economy than the Zairianization and Nationalization measures of 1973 and 1974.’

There is no doubting that the ill-conceived nationalization policies of the 1970s held a share of the responsibility for the DRC’s economic difficulties during this period. Yet, such factors ought to be weighed in consideration with the impact of external shocks— which began for the DRC with the copper price crash in 1974—and the achievements made by the Mobutu administration up until this point. Such a weighting exercise is absent from both reports.

Offering a regional perspective, the seminal work of Mkandawire and Soludo on the causes of the mid-1970s decline in African economic performance is worth citing at length:

Our intention here is not to rationalize, let alone ignore the infamous mismanagement of economies by African governments. Rather, the point is to emphasize that successful adjustment will be elusive unless Africaʼs vulnerability to external factors is recognised. Such a recognition will serve in rethinking the form and content of Africaʼs structural transformation. Failure to account for such factors, even as one corrects for internal policy errors, can frustrate attempts at change and condemn them to involuntary reversal.

By downplaying the external and foregrounding the internal, the result is an analysis and diagnosis that lays the blame firmly on the state management and ownership structures underpinning national developmentalist ambitions in the 1960s and early 1970s, to the exclusion of external shocks and trends in the global economy.

With governments across the global South in debt distress, and with little or no access to international capital markets during this period, the IMF and the Bank grew significantly in influence, formulating a neoliberal set of now infamous policies that came to be known as the Washington Consensus. The policy doctrine of privatization, liberalization, and deregulation was implemented across Africa by World Bank and IMF-financed structural adjustment programmes (SAPs). Crucially, most SAPs had a focus on increasing primary commodity exports, but this time around—to correct for the perceived failures of the recent past—under new management.

Stage two: Liberalize and privatize

It was in this neoliberal political and ideological context that, as Hormeku-Ajei and Goetz have summarized, ‘the World Bank told African governments to abandon any notion to use mineral resources to serve social priorities or developmental priorities and give up the running and management of minerals and mineral wealth to transnational companies’. Between 1980 and 2021, the Bank provided $1.1 billion in mining sector grants and loans to fifteen of the continent’s seventeen mineral-rich, low-income countries (LICs) (Table 1).

Table 1 African LIC metal and mineral wealth

Insignificant or modest	High
Benin, Burundi, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Rwanda, Somalia, South Sudan	Burkina Faso, Central African Republic (CAR), Chad, DRC, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Guinea, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda

Sources: Author classification based on the World Bank’s fiscal year 2020 country classifications by income level, US Geological Survey country reports, and The Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining Knowledge Sharing Archive.

Prior to the rise of China as an alternative source of resource-linked finance, and with many African countries still unable to access international capital markets, the Bank was able to exert significant influence through these grants and loans to implement its strategic vision for how mining should be organized and managed, as laid out in its 1992 Strategy for African Mining report:

The private sector should take the lead. Private investors should own and operate mines…. Existing state mining companies should be privatized at the earliest opportunity to improve productivity of the operations and to give a clear signal to investors with respect to the governmentʼs intention to follow a private-sector-based strategy.

In the DRC, staff from the Bank worked in close collaboration with a Congolese committee on the drafting of the mining law. Blaming mining-sector decline on poor governance under the Mobutu administration, the eventual 2002 Mining Code moved to privatize state-owned mining enterprises and attract fresh foreign direct investment (FDI) by offering a generously liberal fiscal regime, including tax holidays and exemptions and low royalty rates. This included the eventual privatization of the country’s two largest SOEs, the copper producer Gécamines and the diamond producer Société minière de Bakwanga.

Three decades on, the underlying logic of the Bank’s African mining strategy continues to hold. In 2021, the Bank had ongoing mining reform programmes in the seven mineral-rich, African LICs of Niger ($100 million), Guinea ($65 million), Mozambique ($50 million), Mali ($40 million), Sierra Leone ($20 million), Togo ($15 million), and the Central African Republic ($10 million). Each programme was focused, in whole or in part, on institutional and regulatory change within a general framework giving overall priority to capital-intensive, foreign-owned mining.

With the regulatory framework overhauled, foreign investment was unleashed to seek out fresh opportunities. Mining exploration in Africa increased from 4 per cent of total mineral exploration expenditure worldwide in 1991 to 17.5 per cent in 1998, and overall mining investment in Africa doubled between 1990 and 1997. The start of a commodity supercycle in 1999 gave fresh impetus to this activity. In 2004, the $15 billion invested in mining in Africa represented 15 per cent of the total of mining investment worldwide, up from 5 per cent in the mid-1980s and putting the region third globally, behind Latin America and Oceania. From 2002 to 2012, a period spanning most of the supercycle, mineral exploration spending in Africa rose by more than 700 per cent, reaching $3.1 billion in 2012.

In 2007, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) noted that:

the sweeping changes in African mining policy in the 1980s and 1990s were aimed at attracting FDI and increasing exports, in which they have been successful. Total FDI inflows into African least-developed countries rose fourfold from an annual average of $1.7 billion in the 1990s to $6.8 billion in 2000 to 2005…the bulk of which was directed to mineral extractive industries.

In the DRC, FDI inflows focused almost exclusively on mining, increasing by a factor of seventeen between 2002 and 2012, from $188 million to $3.3 billion. Across the same period, FDI stocks rose from $907 million to $22.5 billion or from 10 per cent to 59 per cent of gross domestic product.

An industrial gold mine looking out over the hills of Luhwindja in South Kivu Province of the eastern DRC. Copyright Ben Radley, 2016.

Looking at the aggregate level of inward FDI flows to the group of 17 mineral-rich, African LICs from 1970 to 2019 confirms this picture. Total FDI inflows to the group were low and stable during the 1970s and 1980s, at an annual average of just $0.2 billion, increasing only slightly to $0.6 billion in the 1990s. Hereafter, they grew to an annual average of $3.9 billion in the 2000s and $13.9 billion in the 2010s.

At the country level, FDI inflows have grown significantly across all 17 countries from this group, with the sole exception of Eritrea. While countries such as Madagascar, Guinea, Mali, Sierra Leone, Malawi, Togo, and Burkina Faso received the lowest levels of foreign investment across the group, they have nonetheless experienced pronounced increases in these flows since the turn of the century, much of which has been mineral-seeking. And as highlighted earlier, it is in several of these lower-placed countries that, in 2021, the World Bank had active mining sector liberalization and privatization programmes.

The dramatic increase in FDI growth since the 1990s has altered the composition of these economies, which have become increasingly dependent upon FDI as a source of development financing, and this level of dependence is greater today relative to other country groups and regions.

Stage three: Criminalize African miners

One final stage was required before transnational mining corporations could move front and centre. This involved dealing with the on-the-ground reality that, for many incoming transnationals, their prized deposits were already occupied by African miners involved in a wide range of labour-intensive forms of mining. Most commonly associated with gold and diamonds, labour-intensive African mining is also involved in the production of silver, copper, cobalt, tin, tantalum, iron ore, aluminium, tungsten, wolframite, phosphates, precious and semi-precious stones, and rare earth minerals, among others. Globally, labour-intensive mining has been estimated to contribute up to 30 per cent of total cobalt production, 25 per cent for tin, tantalum, and diamonds, 20 per cent for gold, and 80 per cent for sapphires.

Labour-intensive African mining has grown significantly since the 1980s to directly employ millions of workers across the continent, driven by three factors. First, the crisis of African agriculture has led to an increasingly important role for off-farm employment. Second, the decline of state-led national developmentalism and the collapse of welfare provisioning under the weight of structural adjustment during the 1980s exerted significant strain on the productive and reproductive capacity of rural African households. Third, rising commodity prices, especially during the supercycle of 1999–2012, pulled people towards the sector, where there were often higher wages and profits to be made than locally available alternatives.

Despite the sector’s importance to rural employment, African miners have typically been cast by the World Bank, African governments, and parts of the scholarly literature as ‘primitive’, ‘basic’, ‘inefficient’, ‘rudimentary’, and ‘unproductive’ (in contrast to the ‘efficient’, ‘modern’, ‘complex’, and ‘productive’ mining corporation). As a result, labour-intensive African mining has been peripheral to mining development strategies on the continent. Criminalized by policy frameworks unless they submit to a set of procedurally complex, bureaucratically burdensome, and financially costly demands to formalize their activities, and cast as illegally encroaching on a concession once it has been assigned to a corporation, African miners have time and time again been forcibly displaced from their sites to make way for the construction of corporate-led industrial mines. Often financed by the incoming corporations themselves, and echoing violent colonial practices of the past, displacement has frequently taken place as government military-led ‘sweeps’.

In 2017, 70,000 miners were displaced by Ugandan military and police in Mubende to make way for a Canadian-listed mining corporation. Speaking to local media shortly after the displacement, Edwards Katto, a Director at the Ugandan Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development, said:

Those people [Ugandan miners] still joking should style up. Now, I’m not only a director [in the Ministry] but also a commander of the Minerals Protection Unit of the Uganda Police Force. So, those illegal miners still behaving like those in Mubende [who were evicted], they should pack and vacate the mines, otherwise, my police force will them help to pack.

This statement speaks well to the general regard held for African miners within the process of capital-intensive, foreign-owned mining (re)industrialization. These dynamics recall Marx’s description of primitive accumulation, or Harvey’s (2004: 74) reconceptualization of this as a continuous process of accumulation by dispossession, involving ‘the commodification and privatization of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations, conversion of various forms of property rights into exclusive private property rights, [and] suppression of rights to the commons’. Forcibly displaced and removed from the best deposits, African miners are restricted to working in less productive areas.

With the African state framed as corrupt and mismanaged, and African miners as inefficient and unproductive criminals, the path was cleared for the en masse arrival of transnational mining corporations, across a far wider group of countries than was the case during the colonial period (when most mineral deposits remained unknown to foreign capital, particularly in West Africa). From Glencore and Pengxin in the DRC and Emirates Global Aluminium in Guineau, to Cluff Minerals and Etruscan Resources in Burkina Faso and Shandong Iron in Sierra Leone, to AngloGold Ashanti and Acacia Mining in Tanzania and Rio Tinto in Madagascar – the list goes on – foreign corporations dominate today’s landscape.

Recent mining code and policy revisions led by African governments such as Tanzania, the DRC, Sierra Leone, and Malawi have begun to push back against this dominance, taking inspiration from the Africa Mining Vision, a framework developed by the African Union in 2009 to deepen the linkages between foreign-owned mining and national economies and strengthen government capacity to negotiate with and leverage developmental benefits from foreign mining corporations.

The mining industry, mainstream media, and some scholarship has been quick to herald these revisions as marking a new era of resource nationalism. As a Bloomberg article proclaimed in 2019, ‘The fight between miners and African governments is just getting started’. Changes to date are yet, however, to provide a fundamental challenge to the dominant model of capital-intensive, foreign-owned mining industrialization on the continent. They remain a far cry from the earlier period of 1960s and 1970s resource sovereignty to which the discourse on resource nationalism alludes.

Ben Radley (@RadleyBen) is a Lecturer in International Development at the University of Bath. His research interests relate to the political economy of economic transformation in Africa, with a focus on resource-based industrialisation, green transitions, and labour dynamics. He’s a member of the Editorial Working Group for ROAPE, and an affiliated member of the Centre of Mining Research at the Catholic University of Bukavu, DR Congo.

You can order Disrupted Development in the Congo here, or download the first three chapters for free here.

Featured image: Front and back cover of Disrupted Development in the Congo: The Fragile Foundations of the African Mining Consensus.

Palestine’s challenge to Africa

ROAPE

November 13, 2023

Yusuf Serunkuma writes that Israeli’s occupation and murder of Palestinians in Gaza today is the British in Kenya, India, and Zimbabwe, Germany in Namibia, the French in Algeria, and the Americans in Vietnam. The on-going slaughter of Palestinians ought to wake us up to the urgent search for a home-grown language upon which to set our dreams. Notions such a democracy, or the so-called Universal Declaration of Human Rights, have been exposed, once again, as a sham and a lie, revealing nothing but western self-interest –which captures neither our realty nor aspirations.

By Yusuf Serunkuma

There are many lessons to take from the ongoing settler colonial violence in Palestine. One of these lessons—especially for the African intelligentsia and political elite—is the reiteration that the analytical anchors and conceptual tools we often deploy in understanding our political-economic reality—and setting our aspirations—are nothing but distractions from the reality of the limitlessness of the extractive colonial machinery.

Once again, it has been profoundly demonstrated that the current frames and language games in which we negotiate our politics and economics are distractions from the raw power and violence of the superpowers: concepts such as democracy, human rights, international law, and private property. These are terms through which we have continued to discuss and imagine Africa’s postcolonial present, and aspire for a “brighter future” but each has been exposed as hollow, as Israel continues to pound Palestinians—people from whom they have slowly, steadily, violently, grabbed land for the last 75 years, and run a system of apartheid for decades.

What we are witnessing in Palestine – in both Gaza and the West Bank – is a more contemporary replay of colonialism and its manifestations: apartheid, violence, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. Indeed, Jewish economic theorist, Karl Marx was right: historical events are bound to happen twice (Maybe, more times, actually!) The first time as tragedy, and the second time as farce. But this second (and subsequent) time—as theorist Herbert Marcuse added—is often more frightening than the first.

Israel in Palestine today is the British in Kenya, India, Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia), and several parts of the colonised world. Israel is the Germans in Namibia, the Boers and British in South Africa, the French in Algeria and Haiti, the Belgians in Congo-Zaire, or the Portuguese and Spanish in Latin America. There was no social media then to relay these crimes in record time, but as scattered and censored records show, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and mass murder were the order of the day.

Even supposedly negative terms such as “fake news”, autocracy, and Africa’s “monsters” that are commonly used to describe the supposed failings of African leadership have, once again, been exposed as useful and more valuable terms to the western world, yet meaningless at the same time. Ironically, these terms—fake news, autocracy, violence, racism, dichotomies such as “us” and “them”—are on full display as the absolute ingredients of Euro-American moral locus and domination: “We are more important than them”, “Our violence against them is justified, theirs against us is just evil.”

This is the project of so-called international law. As Siba Grovogui has written, Europeans and Americans are the complete “sovereigns”, and there are some “quasi-sovereigns,” and then the lowest rung is composed of Africans. This means that the lives of the quasi sovereigns and “the Africans” are worthless. What seems like their property—their land and gas and marine resources—actually belong in the western world who are free to take them whenever we wish.

While I have written about Africa’s coup-democracy dilemma, to underscore the meaninglessness of these language games and power-plays, journalist Richard Medhurst gave us a compelling analysis about how the scramble for resources (in the form of the proposed Ben Gurion canal) is driving a ‘textbook case of genocide’ in Gaza.

As we witness raw power at an industrial scale—war crimes, genocide, clan cleansing, apartheid—unfolding on our television and smart-phone screens, I cannot imagine how useless and helpless decolonial scholars, democracy activists, and human rights enthusiasts, among others, find themselves. I know our silence is deafening. I cannot imagine the feeling of uselessness of these scholars and activists especially if one crafted an entire career imagining and pointing at the United States, or Western Europe (Germany, France, and the UK) as examples of these idealisms.

It should be an even more disturbing feeling for beneficiaries of western European “benevolence”—often in the form of project cash—to intellectualise and work to promote these idealisms. What once appeared to be true is now thrown out through the window. These idealisms are exactly and precisely, the ‘useful deception’ and liberal lullabies for Africa’s sprawling elite as their resources are quietly, methodically looted.

Our challenge

It is disappointing that years after colonialism, we have failed to reclaim the agency to define notions that capture our reality. Consider, for example, ‘Ubuntu’ among the Bantu people; ‘Xeer’ among the Somalis, or the ‘Ummah’ in the Islamic tradition. These and many other useful concepts and systems of African humanity—and equitable resource sharing and governance—remain secondary to the so-called Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a declaration, which is often shamelessly and selectively applied (and more often, completely discarded).

While these home-grown notions have attracted some scholarship (most memorably, Uganda’s Dani Nabudere, Jamaica’s Marcus Garvey), they have remained largely marginal as defining notions of Africa’s postcolonial present. We still talk about Africa’s knowledge systems, philosophical traditions, notions of governance and (herbal) medicine hypothetically—oftentimes, like beautiful museum pieces—without actually seeking to name them and integrate them into our daily political and economic ecosystems.

I often wonder why it is so absolutely necessary to change leaders periodically – the so-called hallmark of democracy – instead of developing an intellectual and political infrastructure that ensures leaderships actually work for the people. (By the way, despite being designed to benefit selfish interests, especially arms dealers and extractive capitalists, Europe and North America are run with non-changing structures. They may change presidents for the sake of public relations, but domestic and foreign policies remain unchanged). Consider this puzzle as another example: How does the Islamic tradition of ‘Ummah’ – feeling each other’s pain despite no blood connections, with people we may never meet – actually work?

What set of belief systems enable these connections and how can we harness some of them to ensure that our communities have different talking points – different from the so-called ‘democracy’-chanting chorus—about building humane futures and political systems. What does ‘Ubuntu’ mean for the economy? How does ‘Ubuntu’ translate into a justice system? How does Islam imagine economies and economics, a banking regime, insurance, etc?

Navigating conscription

As a student of David Scott—Conscripts of Modernity—I am fully aware that we are conscripts to this continuing exploitative colonial modernity, where the reach of our imagination is already circumscribed. We are products of the colonial school, which is bent on simply keeping us in bondage. And since we are in the weaker positions—militarily, financially—it might appear difficult to imagine ourselves dreaming and developing an entirely new language, and system of doing things.

While I appreciate these constraining limits, it is my sobering contention that we have even failed to exploit the limited space available to exercise our agency. Yet, there is still legroom in these small spaces. Consider for example, Rwanda’s decision to scrap all visa requirements for Africans entering Rwanda in 2018. Why haven’t all other countries followed the example? (It should be shameful that Europeans and Americans enjoy relatively free travel across the African continent, while fellow Africans are systematically hindered from journeying across their own continent).

While I understand ideas of nationalism and borders – often problematically articulated in the language of security – we ought to understand that it is our poverty (mostly, perpetrated by the western world) that makes borders appear absolutely necessary. Borders in Europe are only enforced for poor countries within and outside Europe but are generally absent in the European world. Have we not seen ‘EU Passports Only’ or ‘Europe Residents’ signposts at airports and other border crossings indicating easier entry and exit for fellow Europeans!

Dear Africans, if Iraq and Afghanistan have not opened our eyes, if the carpet bombing of Libya by Nato ‘for democracy’, Africa’s then richest and debt-free country, which effectively turned it into a slave market, has not woken us up, or if the coup against a democratically elected President of Egypt, Mohammad Morsi also didn’t open our eyes, then Palestine must now awaken us from our deep slumber.

The language of democracy, or the so-called Universal Declaration of Human Rights (without there being anything universal about them) is not only alien, but outrightly insufficient to capture our collective humanity. They use these claims explicitly and shamelessly for their interests – and we are stupidly beholden to them. Their so-called competitive democracy and multiparty politics will never answer our governance challenges unless we find a uniting thread—a common and resilient humanity that answers the question of why we need leadership in the first place. As we spend entire lifetimes building parties and competing against each other—to the point of killing each other for democracy—the coloniser is here exploiting these rifts for own benefit.

If we could learn anything from the ongoing ethnic cleansing in Palestine and the intent to commit genocide expressed by the highest-ranking Israelis officials, it is that so-called international law is simply raw financial and military power and control.

Palestine must now awaken us from our deep slumber!

A version of this blogpost appeared as “Palestine and Africa’s political-intellectual quagmire” in The Pan-African Review.

Yusuf Serunkuma is a regular contributor to roape.net and a columnist in Uganda’s newspapers, as well as a scholar and a playwright. In 2014, Fountain Publishers published his first play, The Snake Farmers and it was received with critical acclaim in Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda.

Featured Photograph: Protests in South Africa’s Durban against Israeli bombardment against Gaza (4 October, 2014).

Walter Rodney and Palestinian Liberation

ROAPE

November 10, 2023

By Chinedu Chukwudinma

During my visit to the Atlanta Archive last autumn, I noticed some scribbled notes on the back of Walter Rodney’s draft syllabus for his 1970-71 course on the Russian Revolution at the University of Dar Es Salaam. “September 12th, 1970”, read his handwriting, “Hijackings – T.W.A Boeing + Swissair DC 8 to Jordan”. The Afro-Guyanese historian was keeping up to date with a world event that became known as the Dawson’s Field hijackings. A week earlier, on the 6 September 1970, members of the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked four airliners, including a TWA flight from Frankfurt and a Swissair flight from Zurich, landing three out of the four planes in Dawson’s Field a remote airstrip in Jordan.

I soon discovered that Rodney had been gathering information for a more substantial piece when exploring the newspaper archive at the East Africana Collection at the University of Dar es Salaam in early 2023. On the page of The Standard, Tanzania’s largest English-language newspaper, I discovered two controversial articles that revealed Rodney’s full breadth of his internationalism and his uncompromising support for Palestinian liberation. On 5 and 6 November 1970, The Standard published Rodney’s article in defence of kidnappings and hijacking by guerrilla groups in Latin America and Palestinian freedom fighters in the Middle East: Revolutionary violence: An answer to oppression and Revolutionary action– way to justice.

Frene Ginwala with President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania in the newsroom of The Standard in Dar es Salaam in 1970 (Picture: Adarsh Nayar).

**The emergence of Ginwalla’s Standard as a platform for radical ideas**

It was surprising that Rodney published articles in favour of revolutionary violence. Only a year earlier, Rodney “thought he was going to be expelled from Tanzania” as his wife, Patricia told me. On 13 December 1969, he read a soul-crushing tirade against him in the government newspaper, The Nationalist, written by President Julius Nyerere himself. He did not anticipate such a reaction to the speech he delivered three days earlier at the Second Seminar of East and Central African Youth, which was published in the same paper. Speaking on the Ideology of the African Revolution, Rodney had called for the violent overthrow of African governments run by the petty-bourgeois class, which colluded with imperialism and betrayed the national liberation struggle. The African youth had listened to him with shining eyes. But Nyerere’s tirade deemed this assault on independent nations to be “completely unacceptable”. He replied with a threat to Rodney, implying that those who insist on advocating violence “will suffer the consequence of their indulgence.”

Although Rodney was chastised by Nyerere for preaching violence and overstepping his boundaries as a guest in Tanzania, he was not expelled. He remained a Marxist lecturer at the University of Dar Es Salam, where he wrote his famous How Europe Underdeveloped Africa in 1972. He retained much of his confidence in the ability of Nyerere’s socialist regime to improve the living standard of workers and peasants. Nevertheless, Nyerere’s editorial signalled to Rodney and the radical staff and students at the University of Dar es Salaam that The Nationalist would no longer figure as a platform for discussing radical ideas. However, in February 1970, Rodney and radicals around him witnessed a new platform emerge before them, through the nationalisation of The Standard.

Founded in 1930, the Tanganyika Standard thrived as a quintessential colonial newspaper. Unsurprisingly, it opposed TANU’s mobilisation against colonialism and its Africanisation policy in the wake of independence. When its ownership fell to the British Lonrho multinational in 1967, The Standard adopted a more approving tone of Nyerere’s rule. Owned and edited by European men, this colonial relic grabbed 80 per cent of its coverage from the London-based Reuters news agency and therefore imposed a pro-Western viewpoint on African Affairs.

On 5 February 1970, the president announced the nationalisation of The Standard newspaperand its sister publication The Sunday News. His decision to nationalise the paper stemmed from his desire for a newspaper that accurately represented Tanzania’s non-aligned Pan-Africanism on the global stage.At the same time, Nyerere justified the acquisition in nationalist terms, responding TANU cadre who wanted more Africanisation to promote Tanzanians. “We want Tanzanians to have control of this newspaper, and we want those Tanzanians to be responsible to the people”, he wrote in the first editorial of the nationalised newspaper. In truth, Nyerere had long delayed the nationalisation of The Standard because his underdeveloped nation lacked trained local journalists and editors to operate major newspapers. One solution for this lack of expertise was to hire African freedom fighters and left-wing visitors posted in Dar es Salaam.

The lack of experts to run the nationalised companies explained Nyerere’s astonishing decision to hire Frene Ginwalla (1932-2023), a Marxist South African Indian woman in her mid-thirties, as managing editor of The Standard. Ginwalla was both a member of the African National Congress and of the South African Communist Party. Her Indian heritage and gender coupled with her bossy self-assurance elicited hatred and jealousy from her employees. Nearly everything about her clashed with the parochialisms of Tanzanian society; where men frowned on women’s rights, Africans resented Asians as tools of colonialism, and TANU members often paid lip service to socialism. Dressed in a sari, Ginwalla ran The Standard with an iron fist, making her employees work round the clock. Turning the newspaper into a socialist platform, she replaced many conservative European editors with left-wing ones. She hired Richard Gott, a British reporter who documented Che Guevara’s visit to Africa in the mid-1960s. Then, she hired Philip Ochieng, a Kenyan radical columnist, who would remember The Standard “as the freest newspaper I had ever worked on.” Every morning, she hosted a two-hour socialist workshop where her staff read and discussed the works of Marx, Lenin, and Frantz Fanon.

With Ginwalla’s leadership, The Standard emerged as a respected socialist and anti-Western newspaper in the eyes of the Tanzanian left. It showed support for Nyerere and TANU that was “by no means servile to the government,” remarked author Martin Sturmer in his work on the Tanzanian media. “Not even Nyerere himself was entirely free of criticism”, he wrote. The Standard could afford to be critical because it had different priorities than The Nationalists, though their coverage overlapped. It projected the TANU’s non-alignment in international affairs, giving the party an air of openness to foreign observers. while The Nationalists served as a nation-building instrument. Whereas Nyerere and TANU encouraged debates in The Standard, they censured them in The Nationalist as they could jeopardise national unity behind the party.

Author photograph from the East Africana Collection at University of Dar es Salaam

In defence of left-wing terrorism and Palestinian liberation

Published on 5 and 6 November 1970, Rodney’s articles in The Standard pioneered a Marxist analysis of left-wing terrorism. He refused to look at kidnapping and hijacking in the Global South as isolated, immoral acts as the Western media did. He examined them as powerful answers to historical injustices. These methods stemmed, as he explained, from regions in which the Western bourgeoisie with their Latin-American and Arab counterparts subjected natural and human resources to crudest exploitation. He defended hijacking and kidnappings as weapons of weakness required in times of revolutionary retreat. They acted as a counterweight to anti-guerrilla warfare tactics and crackdown upheavals, frustrating Western powers.

On kidnappings, he wrote: “When we exchange our currency for money from the developed countries the rate of exchange is always unfavourable because they set the terms. But when comrades in Latin America exchange kidnapped diplomats for prisoners the rate of exchange is good.” Through his creative and witty use of the lexicon of unequal exchange theory, Rodney underlines that kidnappings can briefly overturn the power relations between the Western capitalist and the toilers of the Global South. A few lines beforehand, Rodney informs us that the abduction of the Belgian ambassador in Brazil in September 1969 led to the release of 15 political prisoners. The rate of exchange was thus favourable because the kidnappings saved the best revolutionaries.

Rodney’s comments resonate strongly today. They help us understand the rationale behind the recent actions of the Palestinian liberation movement. Hamas decided to take over two hundred Israeli military personnel and civilians’ hostage during its attack on Israeli soil on 7 October, which killed 1,400 people. Hamas offered to exchange its Israeli captives for the thousands of Palestinians in Israel among whom 160 are children and 530 have been incarcerated without trial. However, the negotiation led to nothing as Israel continued its campaign’s largest ever indiscriminate bombing of the Gaza Strip killing over 9,000 including many thousands of children.

In his second article, Rodney defended the hijackings carried out by the PFLP as “armed propaganda”. He argued hijackings raised the morale of the oppressed and ensured that a particular cause grabbed the international community’s attention. Among other things, his piece contained a praise for the young guerrilla Leila Khaled who led the several hijackings on behalf of the Front. In the manner of a dedicated feminist, Rodney described the 24-year-old “as an example of a woman liberated through struggle.” Rodney understood hijacking as a means for Palestinian guerrillas to reinstate the demand for a one-state solution which was being ignored by the West and opposed by Israel.

Presumably, a two-state solution would only create a weak Palestinian state – dependent on Israeli resources and living under the threat of a more powerful army. The hijackers, as Rodney explained, were not demanding the exclusion of Jewish immigrants. On the contrary, their solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict rested in the creation of one united secular society “based on the principle of socialism and equality”, he wrote.

Rodney was right to follow the PFLP’s opposition to a two-state solution. Thirty years after the Oslo Agreement of 1992 and in light of today’s onslaught on Gaza, it is safe to say that the emergence Palestinian state alongside an Israeli one remains an impossibility. A two-state solution would shy away from challenging the illegal existence of the Israeli settler state, which was based on the ethnic cleansing of 850,000 Palestinians in 1948. It would allow the existence of a racist colonial-settler state whose military would continue to be funded by the United States and Western imperialist interests in the Middle East. It would allow the existence of a heavily armed Israeli state that would act as a permanent threat to Palestinian sovereignty. Aside from his insistence on socialism, Rodney’s stance in favour of a one-state solution matches the words of one of the founders of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS), Omar Barghouti:

“Accepting the colonial settlers as equal citizens and full partners in building and developing a new shared society, free from all colonial subjugation and discrimination, as called for in the democratic state model, is the most magnanimous offer any indigenous population, oppressed for decades, can present to its oppressors”.

Rodney had something to get off the chest. He was annoyed that Tanzanians around him repeated the anti-terrorism propaganda in Western media. Hijackings appeared on the front pages of Newsweek and Time magazine in September 1970. His justifications for left-wing terrorism essentially intended to persuade Tanzanians not to impose conditions on their international solidarity with Palestinians. He wrote: “If we call ourselves ‘revolutionary’ in Tanzania, we cannot be out of sympathy with those who, because their objective condition is different, define their revolution differently.” His words meant that revolutionaries operating in very oppressive conditions had no choice but to use violence.

Last but not least, Rodney was aware of Nyerere and TANU’s support for the UN General Assembly resolution against hijacking in October 1970. He certainly knew Nyerere placed much of his faith in the United Nations, seeing it as a platform for mobilising support for the anti-colonial struggle in southern Africa. But this made TANU capable of sacrificing its commitment to support Palestinian Liberation and other Third World movements to appease Western powers. That’s why Rodney’s article singled out the hypocrisy of the UN alongside Britain and the United States for ignoring the boycott of arms to the Apartheid state in South Africa but finding time to conduct an emergency session on hijacking.

A thorn in Nyerere’s foreign policy

Defending the seemingly indefensible, Rodney had dropped a bombshell that reverberated throughout Tanzania and beyond. In reference to the UN resolution against hijacking by Palestinian activists, the Jamaican governmental paper, Weekly Gleaner, accused Rodney of “embarrassing yet another government” adding to his reputation as a troublemaker since his expulsion from Jamaica in 1968 for his Black Power activism. While Rodney’s controversial article went against Tanzanian foreign policy, it did not trigger a public response from TANU. Even if TANU had planned a response, it would have been eclipsed by what followed the next day. The British High Commissioner to Tanzania, Horace Philips, with the imprudence of a coloniser who forgot he was now among liberated people, wrote a long diatribe against Rodney’s article to the minister of Foreign Affairs..

“I find it disquieting that such an article compounding Dr Rodney’s support yesterday for the kidnapping of diplomats should find a place in the Government newspaper”, Philips wrote. The commissioner then pointed to Rodney’s position as a foreigner intruding in the affairs of the sovereign state. Unbeknownst to him, he was making the same mistake. Philips reminded the Minister that Rodney’s speech Ideology of the African Revolution had been “officially denounced” last year before sharing his expectation for similar repudiation. But Philips was angry at the general left-wing and Pro-Palestinian turn The Standard had taken after becoming a government newspaper. Referring to Rodney’s arguments in defence of Palestinian terrorism, he told the minister: “It is little comfort to know that the editor might dissociate herself from these.”

Unfortunately for Philips, the letter he sent to the Minister was intercepted. Now, in the hands of Tanzanians, it ignited the largest anti-British public outcry in a decade. On 8 November, the letter was ridiculed on the front page of The Sunday News. In a bout of fury, Ginwala answered Philips in her editorial, accusing Philips of “gross interference” in the internal affairs of Tanzania. “His action comes ill from a citizen of a country that has not hesitated to proclaim freedom of the press”, she wrote determined to humiliate the diplomat. Five days later, Ginwala’s editorial was followed by a flurry of letters defending Rodney and criticising Philips and British imperialism. Published under the title “U.K envoy under fire from our readers”, one of four letters read: “On Dr Rodney’s ‘foreignness’ Mr Philips should be the last to utter a word. Dr Rodney is an African whose ancestor was shot out of their homes, kidnapped and carried away with bestial brutality by members of Philip’s race.” A schoolgirl called for Philips’s kidnapping as punishment: “Take him [ Philips], to an ujamaa village, and make him dig for 48 hours nonstop before releasing him”, she wrote.

Rodney’s defence of the methods used by Palestinian freedom fighters had provoked a representative of imperialism in Tanzania and awakened a profound anti-British backlash among the people. It jeopardised the cordial relationship Nyerere’s Tanzania rebuilt with Britain when he broke diplomatic ties with the British over their support for Rhodesia’s illegal declaration of independence in 1965. Through his article in Ginwalla’s Standard in defence of activities of Palestinian Freedom Fighters, Rodney proposed an internationalism that served as a radical alternative to the opportunistic foreign policy persued by the Tanzanian state. Alas, a year after the publication of Rodney’s article, Ginwalla was dismissed by Nyerere and replaced with a Tanzanian loyal to the president. In April 1972,The Standard merged with The Nationalists to create the heavily state-controlled Daily News. Rodney was never published in the governmental newspaper again.

Rodney’s international support for Palestine nevertheless contains a valuable lesson for us: Palestinian resistance against Israeli state terror is justified irrespective of the means that are used. The violence of the oppressed Palestinians fighting against 75 years of colonial occupation cannot be compared to that of the oppressor nation, which is backed by American imperialism. His unwavering dedication to fighting on the side of the oppressed serves as a powerful inspiration for activists engaged in the struggle to Free Palestine today.

Chinedu Chukwudinma is a socialist activist and writer based in London. He writes on African politics, popular struggles, and the history of working-class resistance on the continent. Chinedu is a member of ROAPE’s editorial board, and an editor of roape.net.

Please click here to read the Chukwudinma’s A Rebel’s Guide to Walter Rodney serialised on roape.net. To order Chinedu’s book, A Rebel’s Guide to Walter Rodney from the publisher, Bookmarks, click here.

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A version of this blogpost appeared as “Palestine and Africa’s political-intellectual quagmire” in The Pan-African Review.

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